Utilizing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in Synchronous Web Conferencing Classroom By Farnaz Sharifrazi/M.S. National University/San Diego, CA Presented at SIGUCCS Conference Victoria, B.C. April, 2010

Introduction Internet has changed the way we were doing business. Web technologies has changed the way we study, learn and educate. Distance learning, or Extended Studies has evolved by web technologies. Students in distance learning are now part of the main stream of university.

History Distance students are not the thing of the past as correspondence school that educators can avoid. Technology provides real time education to students in their domain. Freedom of taking college courses from anywhere has put the online learning models on the center of education modalities.

Purpose of the Study Examine students perception of their effectiveness using VoIP for team interaction. In addition, the purpose revolves around the students effectiveness in virtual teamwork on various projects. That included analyzing peer reviewed relevant articles on team building.

Project Description Students formed groups based on an interest in a particular topic from peer reviewed literature placed in Doc Sharing course shell by faculty. Students divide the literature among themselves based on their interest in the topic and number of pages in the article.

Project Results Seven groups formed to analyze seven peer reviewed articles, re-write their findings and present their part to the class using VoIP and Power Point slides. Although all par of a team, each student presented individually and graded based on their topic, presentation skills, voice, and technology knowledge.

Question # 1 Survey contains six likert scale questions. Seventeen students from Team Building course took the survey. 77% of students strongly believed, synchronous voice chat with the instructor and their team members enhanced their learning. 6% of students did not believe synchronous chat with instructor and the team members enhanced their learning.

Survey Question # 2 82% of students believed that synchronous voice and web conferencing tools advanced their team collaborations. 11% of students did not believe that synchronous voice chat and web conferencing advanced their team collaborations.

Survey Question # 3 64% of the students strongly believed that their presentation skills and their ability to overcome public speaking fear was resulted in the practice of presenting with VoIP and Web Conferencing tools. 11% of the students did not believe that their presentation skills was enhanced nor did they overcome their fear of with VoIP and Web Conferencing tools.

Question # 4 100% of students strongly agreed that it is possible to be effective in virtual teams.

Question # 5 94% of students strongly agreed that their hands-on experience in virtual meeting was an effective way to practice team building skills using VoIP and Web Conferencing tools.

Question # 6 88% of students strongly agreed that power point slides and multimedia tools increased the learning of the course materials.

Survey Results & Questions

Implications Students practiced multimedia and optimum of web conferencing tools to present their materials. The effectiveness of using VoIP and Web Conferencing tools were evident. Students utilized other presentation such as a YouTube video on team building and presenting it to the class. This was a proven result of students learning.

Recommendation Based on the survey results VoIP and Web Conferencing tools need to be integral part of the online learning community. Based on the small sample size, the study needs to be replicated with at least 30 participants. The replication needs to be done in the business courses to obtain a minimum of participants. Once the study the replicate with a sufficient numbers of participants the objective would include introducing VoIP and Web Conferencing in various schools at the university level.