O (Big) Brother, where art thou? Exploring the capabilities of synchronous online communication while supervising experiential learning from a distance

Good teaching has been described as a 'conversation' or as an 'interactive engagement' that mandates collaboration between all the participants. The applied communication technologies, broadly classified as synchronous or asynchronous, specifically constrain the available environment for the practiced pedagogy in distance education. In the research reported here the capabilities of a commercially available classroom management tool with built-in bi-directional audio communication and a range of computer application-sharing services were explored. This software was used to supervise online students who were performing computer-based experiential learning. Post-event survey and focus groups returned a majority of favourable participant responses. While the described case study was conducted over a local-area network of computers, the on-going developments in technology ensure that the eventual porting of this concept onto a wide-area network, such as the Internet, will be equally beneficial to the distance education delivery of science-based curricula; for example course work in engineering.