International Teacher Education Conference 2014 1

International Teacher Education Conference 2014
All students were tutored and interviewed by the researchers on two occasions, for between 50 and 60
minutes. All the tutorials and interviews were recorded, with the permission of the subject students. After the
tutorials and interviews, the recordings were transcribed by the researchers carefully to assure the respondents
that they and the place of them would not be identifiable in any subsequent report. Once the final research report
was written, the recordings of the tutorials and interviews were archived by the researchers.
Data Analysis
Inductive content analysis was implemented for this study. Data were systematically and thoroughly
analyzed; all of the transcripts were read by the researchers and put into a table. The answers were coded in the
style of a grounded theory approach to data analysis (Altheide, 1996; Atkinson, 1992; Ezzy, 2002; Feldman,
1994; Phillips & Hardy, 2002) to label each condensed meaning and analyzed for words or phrases with the
same meaning in order to categorize the responses under the same emerging themes. In other words, the answers
were analyzed for words or phrases with the same meaning in order to determine meaning units. Codes were
used to label each condensed meaning unit, and categories were grouped into patterns with the final
development of themes (Graneheim & Lundman, 2004).
The tutorial and interview texts were sorted into five areas; experiences of having lessons via synchronous
videoconferencing in terms of technical, learning issues and teaching issues; and ideas related to improve this
course and taking the following course via synchronous videoconferencing. The texts were read through several
times to obtain a sense of the whole. Three theme headings related to technology, pedagogy, and administration,
were generated from the data and all of the data that were coded took part under these themes. Two independent
researchers were asked to verify the accuracy of the categorization and after that it was finalized.
FINDINGS and DISCUSSION
Three themes were identified at the end of the data analysis that reflects the participant’s reflections related to
their synchronous videoconferencing experience: technology, pedagogy and administration.
Technological Reflections
Students’ expressed their experiences related to synchronous videoconferencing classroom as being a virtual
classroom with communication quality in understanding, satisfaction, and communication breakdown. This was
a consideration related to the overall communication quality between the instructor and participants’ location.
But, as synchronous videoconferencing and face-to-face instruction are not exactly the same, there is always a
room for new technological experiences for students that may go beyond what exists in traditional classroom
settings.
Communication
There is no control of the students over tardiness and attendance when there are technical challenges.
Students reflected that they had experienced almost no communication breakdowns during the lessons. One
student reported, “I think it was a good experience; it was a little bit difficult at the beginning of the semester as
it was not easy to follow the lesson because the connection was not so good. But after a while I think it was
really nice to have lessons.”
Quality
Students all agreed on that the quality of the sound and tablet —an electronic screen showing the entire
course related documents and the page the instructor was writing on while teaching— was good and had no
problems in understanding the instructor. Students felt comfortable with watching the instructor and following
the lesson on the screen via synchronous videoconferencing, as they were familiar with computers and
technology from their educational background. They noted that this was not the first online course taken, but this
experience was a better one compared to the videos that they had watched before in their previous courses in
terms of understanding and satisfaction resulted from the mutual communication quality. They reported that the
instructor’s voice and the image was high-quality. One student reported a problem with the clarity of the voices
of the students in Istanbul and stated that the voices of the students in Istanbul were flat and what they said could
not be heard exactly from Berlin, but the AV technicians fixed the problem.
Improvement
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