After reading our initial post, you may be wondering why we’ve chosen to focus on videoconferencing for our project. Afterall, it’s ‘old’ technology – haven’t we been there and done that? Well, in a sense yes, but in our context we’ve decided, the answer is to do with what can happen when a University like our own has to adapt rapidly to new campus development and academic partnerships.
Although Exeter has been involved with VC since the early 1990s, much of this activity has been fairly small-scale, VC being used to facilitate access to experts in particular research fields. In the past few years, however, use of VC has grown to support, in some cases, significant amounts of cross-campus teaching. A particularly active user of VC and also videostreaming is the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry (PCMD), a partner institution with the University of Plymouth and the NHS.
But how do these activities affect our staff and students? Well, this project is our opportunity to find out!
Through Pathfinder we will evaluate the impact of delivering by VC on the experience and practices of academic staff as well as students – in a variety of contexts and across a range of disciplines.
One of the most important outcomes of our project, we hope, will be an informed debate about appropriate use of this technology in particular academic contexts, and the collection of data to underpin staff development.
All of us in the Project Team are very excited about the prospect of working with our cluster group, and also with Betty Collis, our critical friend, which reminds me… we’ve yet to fix a date for Betty’s visit. I must get on to that!
My next report will be about where we are in the project, so watch this space!
