Here's looking at you, kid

Video conferencing will make good teaching bad and bad teaching worse, argue Peter Cope and Sally Brown

Contrary to what we are frequently told, video-links that aim to reproduce conventional teaching at a distance are likely to make good teaching bad and bad teaching very much worse.

In the rush to open up higher education teaching to the possibilities of new technology, it is often said that the now (almost) commonplace activity of placing material on the World Wide Web can be complemented by interactive teaching using "new" methods such as video-conferencing.

We all think we know that video-conferencing will work because we see it successfully implemented every day on our televisions. On-screen discussions take place between individuals in different locations, typically a group in a studio and one or two people who appear on monitors.

There never seems to be much difficulty with this sort of thing. But it is worth remembering that many of its features will not apply to video-conferencing used for teaching purposes.

Apart from the high-tech equipment and the substantial team of experts used, a broadcast is intended to look like a genuine discussion to the audience, not to the participants, some of whom will be talking to a camera rather than to an image of any of the others involved.

Educational video-conferencing has a different problem, that of making the discussion seem authentic to the participants. It is must achieve this with considerably less sophisticated equipment, and a correspondingly lower quality of transmission.

We know what happens when quality is lowered in this way. Vital forms of non-verbal communication no longer play a part, and discussion is reduced to a highly formal type of exchange.

To train people to carry out successful video-conferencing they must be taught to use more formal and verbal means of controlling a discussion rather than rely on the panoply of social skills that they use in face-to-face contact.

This may form a distinct advantage for particular types of dialogue, such as business meetings of only a few people. It may well force participants to be better-prepared, and create a more structured environment.

But many educational experiences would be very much more difficult to achieve over a video-link. Conventional teaching relies on the lecture and the tutorial. There is little point in using video-conferencing, an interactive medium, for the least interactive type of teaching, the lecture.

If lectures are to be delivered to remote sites it would be far more sensible to video-record them, and to allow the recipients to view them at their own convenience.

In tutorials or seminars, on the other hand, a great deal of interaction takes place. Typically, a tutor, acting as a chair and an expert source of knowledge, will coordinate a discussion between a group of around a dozen students. There are many situations in which video-conferencing might be used in this sort of discussion, depending on the location of the tutor and of the students.

One of the most obvious is when a group of students is on one site and their tutor is somewhere else, a situation not uncommon on a multi-campus university.

It would seem a simple matter to connect the two by a video-link and to proceed with the tutorial in a manner similar to that of the television discussions mentioned earlier.

Such an arrangement, however, would be quite different from the tutorial or seminar as they are traditionally understood.

Television discussions may display a remote chair in the form of a talking head on a monitor. But they are more usually chaired by an invisible member of the studio team who controls the interactions between participants.

Their job is to manage their contributors, which includes shutting them up by human or technological means. The structure of the discussion is controlled largely by the chair.

In traditional tutorials and seminars, the role of the tutor is by no means the same. He or she must extert a quite different form of control, encouraging contributions from reluctant as well as eager students, being responsive to students' ideas, engaging in constructive criticism without producing alienating "put downs", and tailoring interactions to individual group members.

In order to achieve this, mechanisms such as eye contact and directed facial signals or gestures are essential. These tactics are not available to the "head on the monitor".

We have tried running seminars at a remote site. Acting as the tutor was particularly uncomfortable because of an unfamiliar feeling of total lack of control.

The reaction from students was also distinctly unenthusiastic. They did not enjoy this type of teaching. This is crucial since a seminar's success is dependent on its participants (otherwise it becomes a lecture).

A number of crucial factors had not occurred to us before we started. One is the subject matter. Control from the chair is more likely to become problematic when the issues at stake involve values and beliefs rather than factual and uncontentious material.

The second is the attitude of the students. Students (and lecturers) are far more likely to be tolerant of the inevitable drop in quality of the teaching experience this method if there is no alternative. Students in remote and inaccessible parts of the world may be glad of the chance to interact with others, even if the transmission quality is not ideal. But if students are used to face-to-face contact, and they form the impression that video-conferencing is being driven by economic rather than educational imperatives, they are likely to be less tolerant.

We are concerned that video-conferencing is being presented as an unproblematic answer to distance education, in spite of the fact that what little research there has been provides contradictory evidence for its efficacy.

The illusory effect of television will tempt people (including policy makers) to treat video-conferencing as normal communication at a distance and to underestimate the difficulties it entails.

In practice, we will have to rethink what constitutes a "good seminar" or consider other interactive strategies. We will have to look at the methods will produce effective teaching in these formats, and also at the goals of student learning which they are likely to achieve.

Peter Cope is senior lecturer in education, Sally Brown is professor of education and deputy principal, University of Stirling.