Enhancing Learning through Collaborative Technology Date:   Thursday , January 06, 2011 Education has undergone tremendous transformation over the last few years. Globalization has compelled educational institutions to examine ways in which they can integrate collaborative technologies to further enhance the learning experience and improve productivity. These tools are viewed as key assets to create intellectually vibrant and relevant campuses and attract the best students and faculty. The delivery of content has evolved dramatically, and today it is possible for teachers to post all study material, including complete audio and/or video recordings of lectures online, to help students download the course material from far away locations. Videos that contain both educational and entertainment value in podcasts, and course content posted on education channels create a more engaging learning environment. As the education process continues to evolve, Web 2.0 and social networking tools such as blogs and wikis, online video repository and delivery websites such as YouTube are facilitating collaborative learning in ways like never before. Collaborative learning: Educational institutions continuously seek ways to facilitate collaboration to enhance teaching, research, foreign exchange programs, alumni relationships, and private sector partnerships. Collaboration solutions enable students and instructors to connect anywhere they have a network and combine voice, video, graphics, and text to bring people together with information, and with each other. In learning or training environments, these tools allow instructors and students to come together over distance and time, exchange information, study together, and learn from each other. Technologies like streaming video, rich media conferencing and telepresence make live distance learning situations interactive. The content is more dynamic when the student can talk to the instructor, ask questions, and offer knowledge from his or her own experience. Voice, video, and web collaboration tools save the time, expense, and environmental impact of travel and allow earning revenue from a variety of vocational distance-learning courses. Properly planned, such technology platforms enable educational institutions of all kinds to aid next-generation learning safely, securely, and efficiently. Collaboration technologies from companies like Cisco for example, which include TelePresence, Unified Communications, Cisco Digital Media solutions and Cisco WebEx, provide a powerful audio, video and web integrated virtual classroom experience almost mimicking a face-to-face experience, over the internet. Such collaborative technology solutions expand the learning opportunities for students in remote regions around the world. Teachers are able to share knowledge either for free or for a fee. The true benefits of technology are in its application. An effective deployment of a network that enables academic information to flow to rural areas can give millions of children access to better education. A recent effort in that direction has been made by several IT majors who have come together for a District Learning Centre initiative at Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh, to provide learning opportunities and IT training to the youth of the district. Using collaborative technology, and initial mentoring on how to use it, the students connected with tutors in the nearby city, who could offer special after school tutoring services to them and those in nearby villages for a small fee. The students got extended support for English and Math while the tutors were able to reach out to new learners through this medium and the small entrepreneurial tutoring company created a profitable business model bridging the gap between the students and tutors. Such models can be scaled globally with tutoring services can be offered to students online in a group or personal setting in many different parts of the world at school and higher education level. How it works: Collaboration and communication technology tools offer numerous ways to enhance the experience and effectiveness of education. Employing rich media conferencing offers remote students an engaging, interactive learning experience and helps teachers to teach their classes from wherever they are. Rich media tools provide an efficient, highly secure environment for sharing information. Students and instructors can communicate, share documents, demonstrate software and even annotate documents together. Sessions can be recorded and stored for future use, and for students who missed the live session. Within a classroom teachers can use the Cisco WebEx ‘attention indicator’ feature to monitor whether students are giving the class their full attention. Teachers can ask students participating in the WebEx session to turn on ‘desktop sharing’ to ensure that the students are actively engaged in the class. Educators can also collaborate and share research with colleagues and institutions scattered across the globe and educational institutions can expand their research, develop professionally, and bring additional perspectives to their institutions. Schools and collges that are looking for new ways to cut costs and reduce carbon emissions can connect and share knowledge across geographies without leaving the campus. By taking advantage of web-based meetings, training, and conferencing capabilities, educators can enhance communication internally and externally to keep all members of the education community on the same page. They can also remove the burdens of support and maintenance through the WebEx Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model. Telepresence delivers real-time, face-to-face interaction using advanced visual, audio through collaboration. Distance and time differences evaporate and collaboration among remote groups can advance the learning process. This helps to scale expertise, foster more open innovation between academic and industry researchers and develop innovative distance learning programs that benefit from in-person collaboration. Educational institutions facing difficult challenges with fewer resources and increasing demands can benefit from the immersive, life-like communications experience, realistically conveying the body language and human elements that are critical to the interactive nature of a traditional classroom. Tele-presence solutions help professors address students across multiple campuses virtually as though they were sitting in the same room, collaborate with other experts on academic research, and bring classrooms together across geographies. This helps to engage in an interactive, face-to-face learning environment. TelePresence sessions can be recorded and played back for future viewing. Such solutions can underpin future changes in teaching and learning environments by merging the potential of student centered learning methodologies with interactive, rich media to create a new form of collaborative educational experience. Educational institutions can bring teachers and professors with specialized expertise to students efficiently and economically and create new educational opportunities, such as global classrooms and customized executive education programs. Virtual learning environments created using tele-presence solutions help colleges and universities embrace environmental sustainability goals through the reduction of travel, while extending the reach of university experts and attracting new students. Going forward, technologies like ‘Cloud computing’ will help to improve the learning and teaching experience in universities. Future scenario: Collaborative technologies will continue to play an increasing role in higher education in the 21st century. Innovative solutions will change the way students learn, communicate, produce, and study. On and off campus technology solutions will help improve interactions among faculty, staff, and students. The need of the hour is for powerful, reliable, expandable, and secure infrastructure with adequate bandwidth, quality of service, and storage, to disperse knowledge seamlessly. The possibilities are abound and they are here to stay.