Don’t come to the office – get a ‘Virtual’ one instead.

The benefits of webinar technology, ideas for using with students & colleagues, and how to get your own ‘Virtual Office’.

Brightspace’s ‘Virtual Classroom’ is designed for teaching and learning; ideal for tutorials, project supervision, and small group work with students. You can:

Talk, hear and see others from their home, office, lab etc.;
Share your screen, and allow others to do the same;
Draw students / anyone in from disparate locations – you could also be remote;
Record sessions, download, and make them available as you want

It’s also a great tool for meetings – an excellent way of working with colleagues across the globe.

How about a ‘Virtual Office?

A ‘Virtual Office’ is a great way to start with this technology, offering a ‘low risk’ way of building your digital skills with Brightspace’s Virtual Classroom – for reassurance you could have a telephone number handy to fall back on. Participants don’t need accounts – the system will create a link to a session that you can email to anyone – and have these scheduled in advance.
[One minute overview of the Virtual Classroom here: https://youtu.be/b83HlIRAqwY]

Suggested approach for a ‘virtual office’ with students:

Essentially, be clear about availability and intentions:

Give specific times you will be available;
Say that it’s an ‘open’ office and that others may wander in and out as they want;
Schedule private appointments with individuals if required;
Schedule sessions 15m in advance, and join a 5-10m earlier to allow for novice user ‘setup’.

Consider offering a ‘focus’ for specific sessions; e.g., AIDS, Emergency Response systems, or how to reference in a dissertation – and say you’d be happy for other topics too.

How to create a ‘Virtual Office’ session:

The steps are:

In your test area (ask tel@lstmed.ac.uk if you haven’t got one), create a folder, say Virtual Classroom
In that folder, add an existing activity – Virtual Classroom
Schedule a meeting
Fill out the forms (Name, date, etc), plus tick the box that says:
- ‘Allow External Participants’
Then ‘Save’
Open the link to the meeting to get the address for the room that you can send out to participants.

Here’s a brief video showing those steps: <forthcoming> – and our written guide summarizing all the above steps.

We’d be happy to help you with any of the above, and ‘virtually’ attend some of your sessions – let us know how we can help.

And finally …

Once you gain confidence with the webinar technology, your next steps could be to consider delivering some sessions via the Virtual Classroom, and consider drawing colleagues in from remote locations to illustrate and add to your message.

David Callaghan

Senior Educational Technologist

Technology Enhanced Learning Unit
0151 702 9385
David.Callaghan@lstmed.ac.uk