Bridging the students' and instructor's experiences: Exploring instructional potential of videoconference in multi-campus universities

Videoconferencing was often used to distribute live or pre-recorded lectures to students at remote sites. This paper reports a recent study of videoconferencing as a form of technology-enabled learning and teaching in higher education. Videoconferencing was integrated in a blended synchronous approach to teaching remote and face-to-face students in a multi-campus Chinese university. The study focused on first-year engineering students’ learning and instructor’s teaching experiences, reflecting the instructional potential of videoconferencing. A qualitative approach to examining these experiences was adopted. The findings inform: (1) the instructional potential of videoconference on transforming instructional performance in a blended synchronous virtual environment; and (2) the learning experiences were characterized in a synchronous perceptual differences between the face-to-face and online modalities. The implications of the findings to utlilise the videoconferencing potential in the context of multi-campus university learning and teaching are also discussed. Copyright © 2014 The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology.