1. Introduction

The target group of this course are people who want to focus on a professional performance within a pedagogical setting in visual communications, i.e. teachers, course leaders, other end-users of videoconferencing and local advanced user.

In this course we give general guidelines and examples of dos and don'ts. We want to emphasize strongly that it is mainly by repeated training and constructive feedback from students and colleagues you really can achieve a comfortable feeling and become an experienced and engaged "video lecturer". It is highly recommended that you try to initiate collaboration training together with colleagues or other relevant reference groups, either at your own workplace or, perhaps even better, with distance groups.

To simplify the answer on how to become a good video lecturer, there are mainly three aspects that together will, to a certain degree, influence how successful you will be regarded as a video lecturer:

• Your own basic pedagogical properties and attitudes
• The technical quality and standard of peripherals and infrastructure in your videoconferencing studio, and
• Your usage of tools and peripherals in a balanced and pedagogical optimized way.

It is all about creating enthusiasm and engagement at the far end parts. To achieve this, it is of fundamental importance to encourage involvement and interaction.

To let you have some ideas on how involvement and interaction may be achieved in visual communication; please have a look at the following two video clips. The first video demonstrates a good way to start a course or session by letting all participants shortly introduce themselves. The second video demonstrates how easy far end parts can participate to give course inputs.

The videos should open in Windows Media Player (or in Real Player) when you click on the pictures below.

If the students or course participants are new to videoconferencing teaching, it is our experience that most people need 3 - 5 times with successful sessions before they really "accept" this way of teaching. Therefore it is a good investment to let the first lessons partly be training sessions, to get used to this kind of communication. You can't expect too much feedback during the first lessons, as many people normally will decline to speak in a microphone against a TV picture. But, if you manage to initiate some dialogue or two-way communication already during the first sessions, people will soon realise that this kind of teaching has got some interesting possibilities. As in the first video clip, a short presentation from each participant can be a useful 'ice-breaker' and lower the threshold for students to speak later on. In video no. 2 we see that a far end part can give answers to a given exercise with few tools available, simply by using an ordinary flip-over.