Seminars

Live

The fastest way to move a planned campus seminar online is to use Zoom. A seminar with a limited number of participants often works quite well in Zoom, much in the same way as it does in an actual classroom environment. Most importantly, the teacher should have already become familiar with Zoom ahead of time, and the teacher and students should all be ready to use a videocamera and headset. It is also important that all participants enter the Zoom room ahead of the scheduled start time so that any technical difficulties can be resolved without using the seminar time.

Discussion in written format

To conduct seminar discussions in a discussion forum usually requires extending the time so that participants do other things when not contributing to the discussion orally. In this type of discussion, participants are not as focused on the actual conversation; on the other hand, they have more time for reflection between their own contributions to the discussion. This different kind of discussion structure means that discussion forums are not suitable for all kinds of learning that a teacher hopes will occur in a seminar.

Many teachers experience the other alternative for distance seminars in written form, the chat forum, as being difficult to work with. However, this can work well contexts where each contribution to the discussion is expected to be brief, or when participants do not have a good Internet connection.