Authentic Chat with Voice-Over-Internet Voip

Authentic chat with voice-over-Internet – VoIP

Colleen Hodgins

My name is Colleen Hodgins and I am the Coordinator and Facilitator of the Diploma of E-learning here at Tropical North Queensland TAFE. This is a completely online program which is housed within a learning management system and the learning management system that we use here at Tropical North is the Janison learning management platform.

The program was developed about five years ago by a lady called Alison Gotts and it primarily is fairly unchanged from that process. The thing that I have done a little bit differently and added value to perhaps is, some of the tools—the Web 2.0 tools—that are becoming more available and are more prevalent. I’ve been using those for activities and learning processes for the group of students that I work with.

I guess the reason that I’ve looked at some other tools to use is because the current learning management system is a little static in terms of its ability to provide communication connections and collaboration opportunities, in a fairly web-based environment.So in the Janison learning management system you have to log-in and the facilities and some of the added features of that particular management system are not available to us at the Institute, so things like web-conferencing, wikis and a couple of other facilities, are sort of an added extra that the Institute has not purchased at this time. So I wanted to look at how could I use some of the Web 2.0 social software which I’m hearing lots and lots about in the various networks I belong to and seeing how students could use those and participate in some more collaborative activities, because if you are in an online environment it can be quite a lonely experience.

We basically look at all the sorts of communication tools that might be available to people.Some people are able to access some resources at work-based situations and some spend most of their study time doing it in their own time at home. We wanted to minimise cost and increase communication opportunities so we use a program called Skype which is a voice-telephone – it has a chat facility and basically people will download this program to their computer and they can then send messages to each other. You can use a head-set and there’s a conference facility within it, there’s a chat facility—and so we use that as another add-on because the normal Janison Learning Management System has only a ‘chat’ and I find, certainly with the groups I’m working with now, that the voice contact is a much more powerful tool as part of that process and it is much more efficient and quicker to talk about a concept rather than have to type it – because a) I’m not a typist and b) some of my students aren’t either—so it sort of stifles communication if you have to type everything to be part of a community.

We use Skype in a couple of ways. One is that we normally have a fortnightly discussion topic that we get together and meet and we have a concept that we are discovering or we are investigating a couple of websites and discussing a topic for example, like instructional design, and so we would all log in to Skype, I would set up a conference call with the people who were available and then we would discuss this particular topic and run basically a classroom activity through that process. The other way students connect is that they all know each other’s Skype addresses and so in Skype if you are on the internet you can actually say you are available and people can just contact you by chat or by voice by just dialing you.So, I’ve had instances where I’ve been working on some other work and students have just ‘Skyped’ me very quickly to ask a question. So, it’s sort of a bit of a just-in-time link with both students and the teacher.

I think the fact that in using Skype, that people have then looked at it and made comments that they’ve used it with other people with families and it has a transference to both their personal and their work life, is that they find it quite a simple process. It does have a draw-back in that if you are in an organisation on an intranet, that there are many protocols so you can’t download the particular program, but it allows very cheap connections and via telephone as well, that you can buy a certain amount of telephone time so you can actually make telephone calls at a cheaper rate to overseas and others. So students have found that that’s got some application for personal and study life.

I’ve had probably three intakes of students now and they will vary considerably in their skills in that particular environment, so the current multimedia student group of 18, is incredibly supportive around each other and being collaborative and being constructive in their criticism which is often sometimes very difficult to do when you don’t ever meet people face-to-face.So being able to use some of the tools, like a virtual classroom for example, means that you actually see the people and you can listen to their voice and so you get a better connection which then allows them to be more constructive when they have to make comments on assessment tasks and so on. Because most of the assessment tasks are shared with each other.