6 Ways That Video Conferencing Can Help Educators

Distance Learning Is The Future Of Education

The education world is shifting. The number of students enrolled in online courses has risen significantly in recent years with increasing total post-secondary enrollments.

For more and more students going to school online, it is important that educational institutions search for ways to incorporate opportunities for distance learning to their classrooms.

Highly versatile, interactive platforms for video conferencing have the ability to open new doors for education. Below are only a couple of reasons for invest in educational video conferencing.

Virtual Field Trips

Fieldtrips are always exciting and fun ways to get students more engaged in learning. Unfortunately due to budget, transportation, and timely preparation issues limit the number of field trips students get to experience. With video conferencing technology in the classroom all these problems are solved. Students can go to a zoo in china and talk with astronauts as they give them a tour of NASA. Video conferencing systems in classroom technology allow students to travel all over the world and make learning to come alive.

Connect With Experts & Specialists

School teachers like to invite special guest speakers into the classroom to more readily engage children and provide another level of insight into the topic being studied. Unfortunately, the traditional method of acquiring a guest speaker is often a painstaking process; it can be difficult to find the specific speaker needed within a certain mile radius, and it can be especially difficult to find a speaker with an open schedule for traveling time.

Schools that incorporate video calls as a learning tool give children the opportunity to hear from a slew of informative and engaging specialists in the area of interest, while simultaneously cutting back on teacher and speaker hassle.

Classroom collaboration

Collaborative learning activities for students are no longer limited to a single classroom or school. With video conferencing technology students can work with students across not only the United States but the world. Students can have access to fresh ideas, new thought and opinions, different cultures, and new people miles away to enrich learning and make them more well-rounded individuals.

Accessing Previously Unavailable Courses

Some schools, especially those in rural areas, aren’t able to offer advanced or detailed courses that their students might need. Even those in more populated areas often lack enough teachers in certain subject areas. Many schools could benefit from having an extra course over distance learning that they might not be able to offer otherwise. Instead of having to commute long distances between different schools, teachers would be able to instruct over video conferencing.

What’s more, “previously unavailable courses” can mean some pretty exotic content. You might have dissected squids or made model skeletons, but how many times have you seen a live knee replacement surgery in science class?

Video conferencing is a powerful medium for giving students unparalleled access to places (or procedures) they could have only dreamed of in the past.

Teacher Benefits

Many people don’t realize the endless possibilities available to teachers when video conference methods are introduced into the classroom. The use of video in the classroom is obviously a teaching aid, but many video calls provide a way for teachers to exchange information with other teachers and administrators with ease and efficiency. Teachers can even conduct parent teacher conferences via video calls, thus avoiding the inconvenience experienced by both teacher and parent during the orchestration of in-school meetings.

Most importantly, meetings can be conducted without losing the important non-verbal cues that are so imperative to face-to-face communication. Teachers can enjoy triple the flexibility without sacrificing quality communication.

Increased Revenue & Reduced Costs for Educational Institutions.

Lastly, video conferencing software can help to reduce facility costs while increasing access to courses for students. This allows more students to enroll in your courses without adding strain to existing building infrastructure.

Not only that, but studies find that instructors spend less overall time on online courses in comparison to traditional courses (112 hours compared to 107 hours, respectively) which helps to further reduce the overall cost per student without sacrificing education quality.