Skype is a powerful tool. It could be used by educators on US campuses to answer individual questions and to talk to students from abroad. Skype is key to helping the internal workings of various colleges and universities in video conferencing. The University of Michigan's College of Engineering currently runs a joint engineering program with a university in Shanghai. The various faculty in Ann Arbor and Shanghai communicate extensively using Skype. They do not use it for teaching.
However, Skype while useful in the inner workings of the business side of teaching, it simply cannot teach our lectures. Our own experience yesterday showed us that when the teacher tried the novelty of teaching through Skype, the result was a failure. What was the general response to being taught from a distance? We laughed at it. It was a joke and because the teacher was unable to actually be present and had only a limited view of what was going on, she lost the focus of her class. Then while being unable to fully see what was happening in her class, we could not effectively understand what tasks she was assigning.. How many times did we have to ask her to re-pronounce the words she wanted searched. Communicating over Skype was simply too accident prone to effectively use in teaching a class.
The idea of remote teaching has been bounced around for a long time now. The premise is a good one for the lazy. Why should I have to go to the classroom when I could stay home and teach from there? This was what inspired a Japanese company to try and create remote controlled "teacher" bots. But so far it is nothing more than a glorified version of the Skype lesson we experienced yesterday. How many teachers does it take to use Skype? It may take two teachers to control the classroom than just one: a teacher on the scene to make sure everything does not explode into anarchy and another to teach the lesson. Our teacher, meanwhile, was not even 50 feet away.
Skype is a wonderful tool and I use it everyday to talk to friends and collaborate on matters. But I cannot see the benefit from using Skype to teach from a distant position to a group of students who could use a actual authority in the classroom.
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I agree that Skype is a great tool when communicating with people from different countries. One of the great things about the internet is that it can let someone from China be "in" the same room as someone in America. However, I also agree that Skype limits a teacher's ability to maintain control over a classroom, as was evident in our class on Thursday. Since the teacher is not actually in the room, she can't actually do anything but watch.
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