Web Conferencing in Education

Possibly the most important aspect of Talking Communities when discussing online education is accessibility. Reaching disabled users is a cornerstone of our company and we consistently work directly with the disabled community to improve the usability of our software. No additional knowledge or installations are needed to make our virtual classrooms extremely easy to use by blind, low vision and hearing impaired participants, going way beyond the Title 9 requirements. Built-in text-to-speech, color settings, and audible cues are just a few of the things we have done. Co-founder George Buys, a totally blind businessman, has driven the accessibility side of our business since it began and continues to set our personal standards for accessibility light-years in front of our competition.

Web conferencing is used in a variety of areas within the education arena. The most obvious is teaching online. The ability to gather students to a virtual classroom, speak to them and interact using text, audio, video and desktop displaying, provides a learning experience comparable to a live classroom.

For many cases, a single conference room is sufficient to meet the needs of an online classroom. The same conference room can be used to schedule any number of online classes. If however, you need to have multiple classes at the same time, or wish to have each classroom with its own configuration and settings, then the Virtual Server service is ideal.

In some cases, it may be advantageous to set up an entire server for the education institution, which can be hosted within the network of the college or university, or hosted and managed with us. This would provide the ability to create an unlimited number of Virtual Servers, each with their own set of virtual classrooms.

Another common use of web-conferencing for education is “virtual office hours”. This allows teachers to provide assistance to students from their office without the student leaving their home. In most cases, a Virtual Server is needed to set up separate rooms for each teacher, who simply provide a link to their students for online assistance.

Integration is another major aspect of virtual classrooms in education. The ability to easily “hook” into LMS like Moodle, Atutor, Joomla, D2L, and Blackboard makes Talking Communities a perfect choice for “least impact” on the existing structure. Educators and students alike are often resistant to change, and thus “adding” to existing technology is always adapted much quicker and easily than bringing in something “entirely new”.
 

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