Audio Conferencing Guidelines
Introduction and rationale section
Acknowledgement:
As our bibliography link at the foot of this section indicates, our work here draws heavily on that of Judith George and her colleagues within the Open University (Scotland), whose long experience in the field of distance learning and, particularly, learning support provides guidelines for audio-conferencing which we saw no need to improve upon. Our field experience with her tutors and their students confirmed us in this view. The text below is a rearrangement, rather than a re-authoring, and we are very grateful to Judith and her team for their input and encouragement.
Eight Issues to Manage 1. Characteristics
of the Communication Technology Most people are familiar with the
physical manifestation of this conferencing technique - the conventional domestic
or office telephone instrument. That familiarity may make the approach generally
more easily acceptable than some other technologies which are more obviously
“computer-mediated” or novel. This should not be overstated however.
Some do not find the telephone a conducive medium. Even for those who feel
quite relaxed using the telephone under normal circumstances, the experience
of a multi-way link may be quite daunting at first. The possible group size which can
successfully be managed through an audio conference will be limited to around
6 to 8. This is partly constrained by the difficulty of maintaining the involvement
and engagement of larger groups through the medium, which will be discussed
later. The group size is also limited by the technology however, as the bridge
unit will only be able to sustain a certain finite number of simultaneous
connections. The technology will also compel
more accurate timekeeping from the group members, and more particularly on
the part of the tutor, than might be the case of a conventional meeting. While
a face-to-face meeting may be allowed to run over schedule by common consent
(and assuming the continued availability of the meeting place), the audio
conference bridge is likely to have been booked for a finite time. At the
end of that time the connections will be dropped and the bridge will be redeployed
to support the next scheduled meeting. The way in which the bridge establishes
the link (the bridge initiating the call to each member of the group) means
that the call charge is registered centrally rather than accruing to the participant’s
telephone bill. Group members should be made aware of how and whether they
are being charged for the cost of the communication, since the possible cost
of a long telephone connection may be a source of anxiety. Whilst it could
be that the student understands the charging situation, they should be advised
to make things clear to their spouse or immediate family Like the conventional tutorial
meeting, the audio conference is a synchronous event. That is, all of the
participants must be ready and available to join the meeting at a prearranged
hour. This, along with the tight constraints on time, may serve as an added
spur to preparation on the part of the students who are anxious to make the
most possible use of a valuable opportunity. It also places added onus on
the tutor to be prepared in advance, usually sending materials and a meeting
agenda to the participants well before the time of the meeting. The telephone-mediated audio conference
is, of course, subject to the vagaries of the public telephone infrastructure.
A connection may be lost midway through a meeting, so that one of the participants
“drops out”. The tutor or convenor needs to be aware of this possibility,
and students should be made aware of what to do should it happen to them.
If this is a happily infrequent occurrence for most, the participants should
still be alerted to be aware of where they will find the information they
need quickly if the event does occur. At a lesser extreme, poor line quality
can be distracting and disruptive, to the point where it will be better to
allow the bridge to drop the line and reconnect the call. Participants should
be aware of things that they can do to reduce quality problems, like using
a fixed line telephone handset rather than a cordless handset. The sound-only
nature of the audio conference means that the quality of the sound signal
at each contributing point is all important, and every effort should be made
to eliminate or reduce sources of noise. The limitations of this channel may
imply constraints on the sorts of issues which can and cannot be handled through
the medium, and also necessitate planning on the part of the tutor as to how
visually dominated topic areas are to be dealt with. Other aspects of the participants
physical environment (like the height of their chair, or the presence of a
convenient writing surface) will have an impact on their experience of participation
in the conference. 2.
Stated Purpose of the Conferencing A number of general aims may be
identified for the audio conference in the distance learning setting. First
of all, students who are working on their own and at a distance may feel some
degree of isolation which makes it difficult for them to judge their progress.
Bringing them together in some way, in a setting where issues are aired and
understanding explored gives an opportunity for the distance learner to “compare
notes” with his or her peers as a reassurance or spur to motivation.
There may also be a feeling that a valid educational experience should provide
the opportunity for discussion among peers, such that knowledge can be constructed,
at least in part, by the exploration of a range of different points of view.
Further, the learner may be expected to have questions which need answering
which, if they can be addressed by a tutor in some group setting, will provide
useful stimulus to others. Finally, there will be a concern to address the
social needs of the learner. Those working on distance learning programmes
will face pressures and challenges which only like-minded and comparably experienced
individuals can fully understand. 3.
Stated Principles of Use A crucial concern in the management
of an audio conference will be the feeling which the participating student
have of the “presence” of the other members of the group and, related
to this, the way in which the tutor manages the interactions during the meeting
such that all participants feel involved and feel that they have had the opportunity
to make their contribution. Here again the prior circulation of a participants
list or “roll call” will be essential. It is also frequently believed
that an audio conference will work rather better where the participants have
had an opportunity to meet face-to-face beforehand. Some experienced audio
conference tutors express this in terms of having an “image in one’s
mind” of one’s colleagues in the group, or feelings that one has
a relationship with them. The recognition of who is speaking at any given
moment will be an important part of following an ongoing discussion. This
may be achieved by the tutor bringing contributors into the discussion by
name, or establishing a convention that each unsolicited input is preceded
by the contributor saying their name. This may feel quite unnatural for the
students, the practice having to be refreshed or augmented by the work of
the tutor (That’s Jane, is it?). The tutor may also use references to
earlier input (As Jim said before ...). A protocol will have to be established
to clarify turn taking, and to ensure that many contributors do not all try
to start speaking at once The extent to which genuine “discussion”
can take place in an audio conference setting with more that two or three
participants can be questioned. The absence of the visual cues to turn-taking
can make the flow of a truly interactive conversation difficult to sustain,
with much of the responsibility for the orchestration of the discussion falling
to the tutor. In its most extreme form, the tutor may offer each student in
turn the opportunity to speak, then pass on to the next. As in a conventional
face-to-face tutorial setting, students will expect to have “the floor”
to be able to make their contribution but not to be put “on the spot”
in an exposed or vulnerable way. In the absence of any visual information
about what is happening, silent pauses may feel very much longer than they
would in a classroom setting. The tutor will need to cultivate ways to ease
the pressure on a struggling participant. It may be desired that the synchronous
audio conference forms the nexus of a wider constellation of communicative
links between the students and the tutor, or indeed among the student group
as a whole. If it is intended that the students should feel enabled to contact
the tutor at times outside the group conference, then the tutor will need
to make this explicit, and will need to establish the ground rules (for example,
hours of availability) by which this can happen. Such ground rules will be
necessary to protect the tutor, but should be constructed and conveyed in
a way which encourages students to make contact. The balance between availability
and privacy for the tutor may be difficult to strike. Even where the offer
of availability is clearly made, and genuinely intended, some students may
not feel inclined to take it up because they perceive that their relationship
with the tutor does not enable it. Some students may accept and appreciate
the opportunity, but never feel that they need to make use of it. The knowledge
that they could contact the tutor in that way provides all the security and
reassurance they need. If it is intended to extend this wider communication
to the group as a whole, providing contact telephone numbers for group members
to all the group, then it will be necessary to obtain formal permission from
each group member so to do. 4.
Character of the Communications Further, the lack of visual feedback
will prevent the speaker from realising when the interest of the rest of the
group has been lost. The audio conference is thus more susceptible to disruption
than would be a face-to-face meeting by a speaker hogging the floor, or pursuing
a particular personal query or enthusiasm. The tutor must have strategies
for moving the discussion on, or interrupting monologues. Appeal to the “outside
authority” of the agenda that has to be covered may assist the tutor
in this. Students report some difficulty
in remaining fully engaged with the ongoing business of the tutorial in the
absence of visual information for the meeting. This may be related to the
physical circumstances in which they find themselves when they participate.
There may be a temptation to “parallel processing”; doing other
low level tasks at the same time as attempting to listen in to the meeting.
Or perhaps they allow themselves to become too relaxed and “drift off”.
If the tutor is being very systematic about sharing the opportunity to talk
around the group, students report that they can predict when they will be
called upon to contribute and may let their concentration wander between.
Especially in the early stages of their experience of audio conferencing,
participants report a tendency to listen to the voice rather than listening
to the content. That is, they are devoting their intellectual processing power
to the identification of the speaker and thereby may pay less attention to
what the speaker is trying to say. This is probably an inevitable overhead
of the voice-only channel, and will become less of a problem as the group
get to know one another. In that the voice is the only available
channel of information, more emphasis will be given to the tone and quality
of the voice. It will therefore be important to make a conscious effort to
communicate interest and enthusiasm through the voice. Another sense in which the technology
forces a degree of formality on the meeting is in its termination. The convenor
will have to assume that the time allocated by the bridge connection will
be rigidly restricted, and so will have to take thought to closing the meeting
with sufficient opportunity for the social niceties of “parting”
to be observed before the connections are summarily lost. 5.
Self-Perceptions As in any class group setting,
students will wish to compare their “performance” with those of
their colleagues, as a means of gauging how well they are coping with the
work. This is a valuable function for the group meeting, serving to reassure
the anxious student about their strengths, and to guide them towards areas
in which their knowledge may be lacking. Awareness of colleagues whose abilities
the student feels unable to match or emulate may be an intimidating experience
however. Further, the tutor may be in ignorance of this anxiety because of
the lack of visual feedback. Students who have a marked dialect
or accent often report anxieties about whether they will be understood clearly
via the telephone link, although tutors with whom they have discussed these
fears usually feel able to reassure them they are probably more conscious
of the issue than other members of the group. 6.
Learning and Teaching Relationships The extent to which students go
on from their contact through audio conferencing to develop stronger relationships
of their own outside the class meeting setting is extremely varied. Some report
having no desire to cultivate such relationships, being concerned only about
the academic utility of the meeting, while others will come to form additional
personal relationships through telephone contact, or meetings, outside the
formal contact of the audio conference. Between these extremes, some report
a degree of disappointment that such relationships, which they would have
valued, did not seem to emerge. Where such extended relationships do develop,
they are often used as wider support for the learning and study. 7.
Getting things done Tutors who have experience of both
face-to-face tutorial meetings, and meetings which appear to have very similar
objectives, though conducted through the medium of an audio conference, often
observe that students prepare much more thoroughly and conscientiously for
the audio conference than for the face-to-face meeting. They are therefore
inclined to value the audio conference for that reason alone. Just why this
difference should exist is unclear. At one level, one can conclude that the
students feel more in control of the face-to-face meeting, and thus believe
that they can “wing it” with a lesser degree of preparation. In
the socially less familiar and comfortable setting of the audio conference
the students feel less secure and are therefore motivated to preempt the anticipated
interpersonal difficulties by having prepared some ideas of things they might
want to say round about the topics and issues to be addressed. 8.
Continuity with Curricula The perceived relevance of an educational
activity to a learner will depend on the extent to which that activity seems
to contribute to the realisation of the learner’s goals at that time
and within that context. Much of the responsibility for establishing and maintaining
this relevance will reside with the tutor, and will be made manifest in the
agenda for the meeting. As in any tutorial setting, whether direct or mediated,
the skill of the tutor lies in challenging and motivating the students to
communicate their understanding to one another in ways that will help them
to clarify and personalise that understanding. The audio conference setting
provides opportunities for learner to do this. Audio conferencing case studies
from the LNCS fieldwork Case Fourteen Case Fifteen Text of this section by Hamish
Macleod
(c)Erica
McAteer, Charles Crook, Andy Tolmie, Hamish Macleod, Kerry Musselbrook, David
Barrowcliff, 1st May 2000
Web design and development:
Ger Malcolm; Craig Brown; Ellen McAteer: University of Glasgow Contact Erica
McAteer
So far as our own field sites were concerned, audio conferencing
links most commonly involve the use of the public telephone network to enable
a multi-way conversation to take place between participants who are physically
remote from one another. Rather than the one-to-one connection which the telephone
network most commonly affords, the additional technology of the “bridge”
is introduced which allows one central point simultaneously to link to a number
of remote points thereby permitting all of those remote points to converse
together.
The convening of an audio conference is most commonly done
as an alternative to a physical, or face-to-face, meeting in circumstances
in which geographical distance, or some other restriction on mobility, makes
it impossible, or prohibitively expensive, to bring the members of a group
together. In the educational setting the term “telephone tutorial”
is often used, to indicate that the mediated link has been organised as a
substitute for the conventionally understood functions of a face-to-face tutorial,
and is a common component of distance learning programmes. In this context,
it should be noted that just what the functions of a tutorial meeting of the
face-to-face form within a conventional campus-based educational programme
may be is a matter for debate, and practices will vary widely both within
and between discipline areas.
As described above, an audio conference will take place within
a constrained window of time, which is held to be very important by a group
of learners who are likely otherwise to be isolated from the learning community
to which they belong. They will therefore be motivated to derive the maximum
benefit from the time. This will be dependent to a large extent on the planning
of the tutor or convenor, and on the way in which the tutor manages the meeting
once it is in progress. It is therefore frequently held that a previously
circulated agenda or plan for the meeting is an important preparatory step.
Such a plan will allow the participants to muster any materials or resources
which they feel they will need during the meeting, and to carry out any necessary
preparation. Along with the agenda the tutor may also need to circulate particular
materials for use in a forthcoming meeting.
The reduced social cues available through the voice-only medium
can make sustaining the flow of conversation hard, and place much more of
a burden on the tutor or convenor of the meeting to maintain the dynamic.
It may be therefore that the medium is less amenable to sustaining discussion,
and more appropriately used for more structured activities like question and
answer sessions.
A crucial concern which students participating in audio conferencing
often raise is that of the lack of manifest feedback due to the sound-only
nature of the medium. Students observe that they cannot know how their contributions
are being received because they cannot see the facial expressions of the other
members of the group. Just how participants respond to this will be a function
of their own personalities and self confidence. For some, the absence of visual
feedback is an emancipation; they are enabled to say their piece without the
inhibitions they believe they would feel if they had to speak in a classroom
setting. For others, the opposite effect is reported; when they cannot see
the nods of agreement from the rest of the group they feel sure that their
views are being regarded as foolish. Applying appropriate verbal feedback
and reassurance becomes particularly important.
Normal discussion is predicated on all sorts of assumptions
about the knowledge and perspective which one does, or does not, share with
one’s interlocutors. Where the common ground is assumed to be less, more
elaboration and explanation will be provided, while points which are assumed
to be clear will be glossed over. Under normal conditions of feedback where
the members of the group are physically present with one another and in visual
contact, assumptions about the knowledge base of the other group members will
be constantly under review such that the model can be adjusted to fit more
accurately. In the audio conferencing setting however, the absence of visual
cues of smile and gesture may make it more difficult to establish effective
rapport and relationships with other members. In addition, the group may be
slower to build up pictures of one another’s knowledge and interests
because the normal nods and frowns of group interaction are lacking. Thus
the feeling of “common ground” upon which academic discussion is
based will be slower to evolve, or less robust.
The audio conference is most frequently deployed as an opportunity
for discussion and consultation around the group’s current study concerns,
in a setting in which face-to-face meetings would be difficult or impossible.
As such, the meeting will be successful if the students’ understanding
of the topic in hand is expanded and developed, and misunderstandings are
dispelled. This seems to be best done by establishing a clear plan or agenda
for the conduct of the meeting, of which all participants have a copy, and
working through that plan. The plan serves not only to structure the discussion
during the meeting, but also to guide the preparation which participants do
beforehand. Much valuable, constructive learning will take place as a result
of the students’ motivation to prepare themselves for the meeting.
Audio conferences are frequently made available for learners
on distance programmes who want them, rather than making participation a requirement
on the course. Thus, students who take up on the opportunity are doing to
because they believe that it will be helpful to them. The meetings will therefore
be particularly valued by those who take part.
Telephone tutorials in distance learning programmes
Product Design Engineering (ICON)
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