Audience Awareness Assignment

The article, Attention by Proxy? Issues in Audience Awareness for Webcasts to Distributed Groups, primarily focuses on the interaction between student and instructor within the live and distributed lectures. In particular, the article addresses the problems that arise for the instructors as they strive to be aware of and naturally interact with remote students that view lectures as a webcast. The article’s main claim is that a “brute-force” method, using video to imitate the face-to-face environment will most probably miss some vital and subtle facets of classroom audience awareness. However, the authors suggest an alternative approach that utilizes the conveniences of the e-learning environment. In addition, the solution will provide numerous displays and levels of privacy. They indicate a way in which instructors can design their webast systems that will help their interaction with their remote students, which would be through private information exchanged. Ultimately, the interaction between instructor and student in e-learning environments can have a positive impact, but it is difficult to maintain satisfactory results because instructors lack basic awareness of their audience. Therefore, an exploratory study was conducted to understand the kinds of information instructors need to be aware of to interact effectively with their students in elearning environments. The article explains the results to entail that instructors should privately be provided with an overview and detailed data about their students in order to have a better awareness of their audience. Thus, the article suggests that if instructors had a better awareness of their audience e-learning environments would work more effectively.