In an online environment, communication and keeping learners engaged, may be more challenging than in a physical face-to-face environment. To be successful, educators need to use innovative and collaborative conferencing tools and strategies to keep their learners engaged. By doing so, educators can provide learners with valuable and meaningful learning.
Best practices that faculty use to enhance collaboration and engagement in an online learning environment with their learners may include a variety of conferencing tools. The purpose of this session will be to share and discuss successful innovative and collaborative conferencing tool strategies with participants from our research findings. Our findings indicated that a variety of conferencing tools were used to strengthen the engagement and collaboration by faculty with thier learners and that these conferencing tools enhanced the value of teaching, mentoring, and learning with their learners.
Our research method included a mixed method from a variety of data collected from a faculty survey, student interviews, and documentation review. The population in our study included doctoral faculty that facilitate courses and mentor doctoral learners with their research studies. The ability to enrich the learner and instructor experience and collect data from these reseach techniques about conferencing tools and strategies used by adult educators provided findings that can be used to improve communication and autonomy in a variety of ways. Some of these ways include: one-on-one meetings when mentoring learners, small group meetings, and for oral defense presentations.
The collaboration leader action model (CLAM) in congruence with data collected from a survey and interviews, provided findings and results about online conferencing tools when teaching, mentoring, and learning from learners in a doctoral business program. This session will include discussion about innovative and collaborative conferencing tools in the online learning environment, as well as share survey results from faculty about conferencing tools, which conferencing tools are being used, and how they are being used to enhance one-on-one meetings, mentoring collaborations, small group meetings, and oral defense presentations. The purpose of this session is to share and discuss best practices about innovative and collaborative conferencing tools and strategies used by faculty to engage their students in the online learning environment. We look forward to having a thought provoking session!