Listed below are some example scenarios you can explore to stimulate ideas for your own course. Note that while most of these describe synchronous events, you can still use web-conferencing tools in an asynchronous online course for optional sessions, meetings, and recordings.

Take Virtual Field Trips

• Bring in a guest speaker (Zoom only) or take a live tour of a remote location that may be difficult for students to visit in person.
• You will need some kind of moderator or facilitator at the remote location, but otherwise this is run the same way as any other live session.
• A relatively portable webcam at the remote location can make it handier for virtual tours. (While we loved the idea of actually moving around in the remote site during the field trip, low wifi frame rates made this impractical. Consider using Google Hangouts for this kind of application.)
• Work with your guest speaker to make sure s/he understands the capabilities of the web-conferencing tool you will be using. Plan breaks for feedback, employ the whiteboard, and so on – a simple talking head video might not be very engaging.

Hold Breakout Sessions During a Synchronous Class

• When conducting sessions with large groups, you can divide them into groups and teams to work separately in individual “breakout rooms” that are not accessible to other participants. Each breakout room operates as a fully functional web-conferencing session, where students can work on problem-solving or other collaboration and then report back to the full session. You can create separate whiteboard slides for each room in advance.
• If you use breakout rooms, it’s even more important to prepare in advance and be well-versed in the operation of your chose web-conferencing tool. You may wish to identify teaching assistants or other facilitators to help monitor the rooms and enable access to tools such as video and audio per room.
• Participants who leave the session and return may have to be reassigned to their breakout rooms in order to re-enter them.

Conduct Coaching/Tutoring/Help Sessions

• Web-conferencing can also be helpful in small group and individualized sessions when you want to jointly review a document, provide guidance regarding an online resource, or specialized instruction for computer software.
• You can even use application sharing in reverse, to demonstrate a procedure on a student’s own laptop. These sessions are akin to virtual office hours.

Deliver Asynchronous Content using Kaltura

Though you could use Zoom to record asynchronous content, you would need to download the resulting recording to your computer and then upload it into Kaltura. Zoom recordings also can't be edited. For these reasons, we recommend that you use Kaltura. You can create recordings that include webcam video, screen-sharing, presentations, and more from start to finish in Kaltura Personal Capture so that you can give your students a course site tour, give an overview of the course syllabus and calendar, previews of websites and software, and so forth. When you are ready to share your recording with your students, there are a number of Kaltura media-sharing options for you to choose from.

Best practices for creating asynchronous content:

• Try to make your narration extemporaneous (from notes, not a verbatim script). See the resource Using Instructional Video on the ODL Website for guidelines if you're not sure what to cover besides the tour itself.
• Unless it’s completely inappropriate to do so, begin and end the recording with the speaker (yourself) on the video feed to establish presence and immediacy.
• Begin and end any application sharing on the same screen to establish closure.