So Luck and Laurence arranged videoconference lectures for students in New Zealand and Canada.

Advantages they identified are:
• provides students with different perspectives and new ideas
• enhances student knowledge
• enables collaborative learning
• saves time and money
• opportunity to try out new educational technologies
• followed good educational practice in many respects
• provided students with excitement in learning
• students were able to encounter and question experts in the field
• Multi-institution collaboration is possible
• New communities are built
• Discussion is promoted
• Students saw it as a high point of their course
• Provided a change of pace for the course
• Students wanted to do this more in the future.

Sounds really good, doesn’t it? Students are happy, funders are happy. I don’t think staff are quite so happy.

What does this say about ‘the innovative nature of elearning’ (is elearning really innovative by nature? Will it always be innovative, or is it just innovative at a time when there is an explosion in new technologies?)

Well, I was going to say that it provides opportunities to do things that you couldn’t do before. But is that true? Most of the advantages listed above were available in the past.

I guess students do have more time to meet and question experts in the field. This case study prhaps doesn’t show that as well as it could do. I assume tourism experts from New Zealand are fairly mobile. Some experts are presumably unable to travel because age, disability, lack of money, family commitments. Videoconfrencing could make their expertise more accessible.

Teaching methods that excite and inspire students are probably a good thing – though there was no evaluation of their learning. If they’re focused on the expert lectures and not paying much attention to the rest of their course, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Is this an innovative use of the technology? I’m not sure. Presumably videoconferencing was developed to do exactly this. On the other hand, they appear to have altered and developed the technology, so I suppose that was innovative.