Facilitator’s Roles in a Videoconference Learning Environment

Ulf Hedestig () and Victor Kaptelinin ()
Additional contact information
Ulf Hedestig: Umeå University
Victor Kaptelinin: Umeå University

Information Systems Frontiers, 2005, vol. 7, issue 1, No 6, 83 pages

Abstract: Abstract The paper reports a study of a videoconference-based environment in decentralized university education and factors contributing to the success of teaching and learning in the environment. The focus of the paper is on the role of a person having the formal responsibilities of a technician. An ethnographic study conducted over the course of a year revealed that the contribution of this person far exceeded the scope of formal responsibilities. The person, who was acting in the setting as a facilitator, was found to possess expertise, which was critically important for supporting interaction between remote participants at several levels, such as attention management, time management, acquisition of setting-specific skills, and coordination within a larger institutional context. The findings suggest that “supra-situational” activities can be important factors for the successful functioning and development of emerging learning environments.

Keywords: videoconferences; facilitation; distance education; decentralized education; coordination; activity theory; distributed cognition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10796-005-5339-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:infosf:v:7:y:2005:i:1:d:10.1007_s10796-005-5339-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10796

DOI: 10.1007/s10796-005-5339-6

Access Statistics for this article

Information Systems Frontiers is currently edited by Ram Ramesh and Raghav Rao

More articles in Information Systems Frontiers from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().