Abstract:

The Virtual Classroom (VC) has managed to eliminate time and space obstacles between the lecturer, the students and the materials and activities. Most recent alternatives offer the possibility to connect the whole classroom at the same time, across devices and offering an immersive learning experience. Since VC command is challenging for all members involved in education, including lecturers, students and institutions, this study aims to analyze its impact through the whole learning process.

This paper intends to make three theoretical contributions in the VC field. First, since traditional approaches to learning with mixed methodology have focused on the binomial objectivism-constructivism, we include a new approach focused on the integration of three different learning theories: objectivism, collectivism and connectivism. These perspectives explain the role of the lecturer as a provider of knowledge and establisher of rules, as a facilitator of students' critical contributions and group discussions, and the impact of new technologies on learning processes and course development, respectively. Second, we provide specific guidelines for higher education lecturers to design, implement and evaluate a VC for blended learning purposes at an academic context. These guidelines include recommendations and actual examples about the use of the VC tools and functionalities, presented in an interactive and engaging manner. Third, we focus on conferencing software for a synchronous communication style, which holds differential features with respect to traditional VC software. The particularities of these platforms are highlighted, along with the required previous skills to master all their functionalities.

Grounding on literature review, several conclusions have been obtained with regards to lecturer-student relationship, computer-mediated communication and course design and implementation in virtual environments. This study is part of the Erasmus + KA2 project “Future-proof your classroom: teaching skills 2030”, funded by the European Commission, which intends to outline the challenges that university lecturers will face in the next decade when it comes to organizing courses and communicating with students through new technologies.

Future lines of research are also outlined. Among them, two can be highlighted: first, the undertaking of an experiment with university lecturers using screenshots from WebEx and Adobe Connect as stimuli of the VC software to study its effectiveness in the different steps of course preparation and displaying different learning styles. Second, an empirical study centered on students' opinions about these guidelines, as they are the main beneficiaries of this learning approach.

Keywords:

Virtual Classroom, Virtual Learning Environments, Blended Learning, Multilearning Approach, Synchronous Communication.