Building Bridges - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 245

Another said: voice interaction. Another student mentioned that

she liked typing her questions because it reduced her
concerns about how her accent would be understood
by others, and she said it felt very comfortable:
“It's just like I was on MSN or something. So it
was really very familiar” (SS3).
At the same time, however, remote student
experience was not universally positive. One
student indicated that he missed out on informal
interaction with his classmates when logged in
remotely:

If you ever have a nice question you should defi-
nitely ask it. I would ask it, but I'd much rather
ask the professor in person than over a mic and
through videoconferencing (LS1).

Another satellite campus student indicated that
she regretted not being able to informally talk to
the professor during breaks and after class, as local
students could: “He's right there so you can ask
a question right after the lecture, as opposed to
us. We can't really do it unless we use email or
some other form” (SS2).
At the same time, though, students in face-to-
face lectures may also be anxious about speaking
in front of their peers, but many do so successfully.
As this student at the satellite campus indicated
later in the term, he was able to adjust:

Often during a lecture, somebody will ask a
question, or you can nudge them and ask “what
did he say?” or “what did he mean?” and that's
something I would have lost (LS4).

Student Awareness

By student awareness we refer to all students'
ability to tell who was speaking at any given time,
and who was present at the other locations. Our
awareness displays were intended to provide basic
awareness of these activities. Table 1 shows that
there were few perceived differences between the
campuses in students' ability to hear and see others
who were speaking. This likely reflects that both
the system and teaching style were geared primar-
ily for presentation by a single presenter from the
local site. In this regard, our data suggest that it
performed well. When we break these measures
down, though, some differences emerge.
First, students at the satellite campus were
more likely, by a statistically significant margin,
to agree with the statement that “The video im-
age of the other site was useful” ( M Local = 4.16,
SD = 1.73; M Satellite = 5.25, SD = 1.17, t = -2.13, p
<.05). On the one hand, this is not surprising in
that most of the content originated from the lo-
cal site. It may also reflect issues with the image
quality from the satellite campus, and that, as was
evident in our qualitative data, the students at the
two campuses generally did not know each other
or want to interact.

It's okay, it's not like it's unbearable. In the end,
I'm getting used to it. It's just that sometimes I'm
afraid my questions, like the audio voice wasn't
delivered properly there, so the professor couldn't
really grasp my questions…but it's not exactly a
major problem (SS3).

This same student participated remotely when
he was unable to attend a lecture at the satellite
campus, and appreciated being able to ask the guest
speaker a question: “I really like his [software]
company so I got interested and I really wanted to
ask questions and … I can actually ask questions
even though I wasn't able to attend the lecture
physically” (SS3).
Seven students signed in from remote locations
during the term. We interviewed three of them, and
also draw on our observations at the main campus in
describing their experience. They generally reported
positive experiences with remote participation. One
liked the ability to ask questions via text displayed
in the lecture room. In some ways, since this student
expressed concern about the intelligibility of his
voice questions, this was actually better than live