Today we discussed using Video Conferencing in the classroom to promote face-to-face experiences while working with student preference of modality and accessibility. Video conferencing comes with a lot of benefits, such as accessibility (for example, students with anxiety disorders, students who are unable to move to get a university degree, students with illness etc.), and efficiency (for example, avoiding travel time for international company conferences, faster than email, can include dozens of people at once etc.) While allowing flexibility of modality has a lot of positives, there are also implications associated with it, such as enabling some people to avoid face-to-face in-person communication, as well as the possibility of limiting jobs available for some professions (for example, a university professor might only be able to teach 100 students in person, but could teach 1000+ students through video conferencing). Overall, video conferencing can be a great way to engage ALL learners by promoting accessibility and including a variety of pedagogies.
