Netmeeting:desktop Video Conferencing

Sultanate of Oman Sultan Qaboos University Collage of education Department of instructional and learning technologies

NetMeeting Desktop video conferencing

)Done by: Fatma AlNaabi (66754 )Athra AlYazeedi (61542 Done for: Dr.Alaa Sadik

The definition of Net meeting: Net meeting is one product developed by Microsoft corporation that provides the interaction through enabling groups to teleconference using internet as transmission medium. It provides a platform for synchronous online communication which can be used for a Varity of purposes. It also known as " a king of the hill for client-side collaborative computing on IP networks". Objectives for using NetMeeting in Distance Education: • To support teachers in transforming their own role and helping students to become more active learners. This objective enhances the role of teachers by giving them some tools that facilitate the transmission of instruction. These tools are whiteboard which enable students and teacher to negotiate and discuss meaning together, file and application sharing in which teacher can transfer files and tracks the students' work. In addition, Net Meeting helps to conduct the rule of changing the way of instruction from teacher centered to student cantered approach by giving students chance to discuss and negotiate meaning and develop their own learning. • To support discussion between teacher-student and studentstudent. The NetMeeting achieves this objective by providing text chatting, whiteboard and video and audio capabilities which enable students and teachers to discuss and sharing information together and it's very important in distant education for supporting distance student learning. • To support sharing resources and experiences between remote teachers and learners. The NetMeeting achieves this objective by providing sharing files and application capabilities which enable remote teachers to track students' progress through application or educate students in using some application and provide them with some resources. • To enhance leaning activities for the learners. So teacher can ask their students for meaningful activities like discussing some points with various classmates using whiteboard capability in order to help students to develop their own learning. Capabilities & Features of Net Meeting: Capabilities: • Text chatting capability: Its synchronous capability which Enable us to establish conversations via text in real-time with one or more people. • Whiteboard capability: gives us the ability to cut, write, and past information and draw. In addition, it enables us to use graphic information during net meeting. • Video and audio conferencing capability: enables a person to establish real audio and video conferencing either between group of students or between teacher and students.

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Sharing application and transferring files capability: enable students and teacher to share applications like sharing some software together and allow them to share their resources.

Features: • • • •

Very easy to use and cheap: its available for free and does not require a very high expert and ability to use it. Many features that can be used at the same time: E.g. send text messages during audio-videoconferencing. Less expensive: It's cheaper than holding a phone conversation with somebody abroad. One-on-one conversations: with remote friends and family.

Limitation: • Computer has to meet many hardware requirements to work properly: This is because Net Meeting is a kind of video conferencing system and it requires one to have some hardware like: microphone, speakers, at least 4GB bandwidth, network card and others. • The connection may get lost in the middle of a conference: because of the high bandwidth required for of video and audio conferencing. • There are often temporal delays in the audio: This limitation can be seen especially when other features are used at the same time • High image quality lead to low video performance: Users must trade-off between faster video performance and better image quality. • Very limited for a large virtual classroom lecture or group meeting: because net meeting is designed mostly to provide one to one meeting or conversation. • Cannot work in different operators: it cannot work in Macintosh and Vista. How NetMeeting are used to deliver and support learning? Since learning is a social process involving the active construction of knowledge and understanding through individual learning or group and peer interaction, communication should be considered as a key issue to promote effective collaborative learning. NetMeeting with its rich capabilities provide effective communication tools, in which each of them supports distance education as follows: 1. Audio and video: Video Conferences could be held using the audio and video capability of NetMeeting. This function not only enable both learner and instructor to hear each other in real-time but also allow them to view each other's body movements, facial expressions, lip movements and hand gestures which in turn will help to build a learning community for isolated learners, as well as enabling learners to receive immediate and personalized feedback about their performance. Moreover, video conferencing capability enables learners to meet online regularly to complete various learning tasks and projects.

2. Text-Based Chat: The text chat allows the learner to conduct synchronous written conversations to discuss learning materials and works as a backup resource in case of technical problems encountered with the audio or video. That is, users can still communicate with each other through written text even if they cannot see or hear each other. 3. Electronic whiteboard: Rather than communicating via text alone, the whiteboard allow learners and instructors to visually communicate about learning topics and information; where they can view, write, edit and draw simultaneously at the time of the online meeting .The whiteboard therefore provides an ideal platform for the negotiation of meaning in task completion as well as constructive learning. 4. Application Sharing: With this function learners can share multiple programs open in the background during a NetMeeting conference which will help to present prepared documents, like a PowerPoint slide, a photo, or a web page. 5. File transfer: the teacher or learner can use the file transfer function to send video, sound or text files to the other party so that a conversation can be generated about the contents of these files. In addition students can share learning resources while working together in a class project.

Concerns raised by researchers and distance students/tutors about NetMeeting. With the increased use of NetMeeting world wide the researchers raised several concerns regarding using NetMeeting in distance education: •

Setting up NetMeeting is time-consuming and non-technical users can get frustrated easily. Which may in turn affect the public tendency to use NetMeeting in the learning process.

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A great risk to users’ data and privacy can be posed due to some security leaks showed by NetMeeting. Thus, will make many universities, schools and distance education providers think a lot before taking the initiatives to provide distance education with the assist of NetMeeting as the delivery medium of such kind of instruction; as each of them try to save their reputations among the academic institutes around the world.

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One may wonder how long will the NetMeeting product still be offered free of charge? especially with the increase use of its rich communicative tools. Because most of the profit companies provide their products free of charge for a while until they make sure that it appeals and reach a large number of customers and then they start to take fees on. Which if happened will bring into being the issue of distance learners’ access to leaning.

Examples of Using NetMeeting in Distance Education: Many schools and universities experimenting NetMeeting showed their satisfaction of using it to deliver and support effective distance education, some examples are followed: 1. San Diego State University: Dr. Ilya Zaslavsky, an assistant professor of geography taught a class remotely from San Diego, California, with Microsoft NetMeeting. From the evaluation he conducted of his students' performance he reached the fact that there is no difference between face to face instruction and distance education delivered by NetMeeting in terms of students results on lab assignments, midterms and finals. A survey at the end of the course has shown that the students were satisfied with their accomplishments. 2. Florida Atlantic University: the new concept of Virtual Office Hours has been implemented by some university authors using NetMeeting; where the one-to-one interaction typical of office hours meetings can be easily extended to distant students. 3. University of California: the university started using NetMeeting in August 1996. The objective at that time was to permit a professor at a conference in Chicago, a teaching assistant in Irvine, and a group of eight MDs in the Health Care EMBA program to go through a review session via the Internet. The students used NetMeeting's chat features to ask questions; the professor or TA answered using a combination of NetMeeting's whiteboard and chat.

:References • Marques.O, Hsu.S, Assessing the Feasibility of Using Microsoft NetMeeting in Distance Education. • http://www.eslweb.org/criticalreviews/Netmeeting.pdf •

http://e-flt.nus.edu.sg/v3sp2006/wang.htm