The Students Experiences With Live Video-Streamed Teaching Classes

The Bachelor's Degree Programme of Biomedical Laboratory Science at VIA Faculty of Health Sciences offers a combination of live video-streamed and traditional teaching. It is the student’s individual choice whether to attend classes on-site or to attend classes from home via live video-stream. Our previous studies revealed that the live-streamed sessions compared to on-site teaching reduced interaction and dialogue between attendants, and that the main reasons were technological issues and the teacher’s choice of teaching methods. One of our goals therefore became to develop methods and implement technology to facilitate interaction through increased technological transparency. In this paper, we present and discuss organizational and educational designs as seen from the student’s point of view. We do so by investigation of how students experience participation, interaction and technological transparency in the live video-streamed teaching sessions during a 5-year period of continuous development of technological and pedagogical solutions for live-streamed teaching. Data describing student’s experiences were gathered in a longitudinal study of four sessions from 2012 to 2017 using a qualitative method inspired from mobile probes (Ørngreen & Jørgensen, n.d.). The research results document a continuous progress in technological transparency, as the live video-streamed classes increasingly support the student’s flexibility in ways of attending and interacting in classes. The analysis shows that the students have different needs (as a learning space for individual concentration or a space for highly focused collaboration) and that the technology can meet these different needs. It also shows that there are challenges, similar to many other classrooms. In this live-stream classroom interaction is facilitated through teacher driven support, resulting in classes where students can interact and collaborate equally with on-site students. We therefore argue for a sociocultural understanding of learning as situated, mediated and distributed, which this e-learning-solution support.