With many choosing to continue working remotely, video conferencing remains a useful tool to help your institution or organization run efficiently.
With many choosing to continue working remotely, video conferencing remains a useful tool to help your institution or organization run efficiently. Whether for educational needs, business purposes, or to simply communicate from a distance, the advent of video conferencing tools allow individuals to easily connect with each other worldwide, at any time.
Here are some suggestions for effectively and collaboratively using video conferencing in a remote environment.
- Take advantage of group chat, which enables a dynamic conversation alongside the video presentation.
- Place participants in breakout rooms to help boost interactivity among smaller groups. Hosts can choose how to group participants of the meeting into separate sessions, either automatically or manually, at any time.
- Use desktop sharing, which enables students or other meeting participants to see what is being presented on your desktop. Follow your on-screen actions through to participant’s own screens, whether you are designing a 3-D model, sharing slides, or editing a document.
- Encourage collaboration through actions like a virtual hand raise within a meeting. This can be used to make a request, ask a question, or indicate any confusion without the participant un-muting their microphone. Additionally, a Real-Time Whiteboard enables participants to draw and annotate within a live video conference session.
- Record your meeting for later on-demand viewing. Video editing, publishing, and sharing tools make post-production and auto-captioning simple for meeting hosts.
Best Practices Help Maximize Productivity
1. Invest in (or secure) proper equipment for video conferencing, which includes a microphone, a TV or large monitor display, a strong internet connection, a webcam, and even lighting, all of which help make a video conference easy to see, hear, and use.
2. Be Professional. Regardless of whether you are working remotely, professionalism still applies. The host and participants should try to remove any visual or auditory distractions within the workspace, or make use of the mute button and virtual backgrounds.
3. Organize your materials. Video conferencing in some instances is quite similar to delivering a presentation, and having an agenda prior to your conference can help streamline the meeting. Prepare a clear agenda and materials in advance and provide handouts as downloads after the conference.
