During the pandemic, many university classes moved from the classroom to the screen without necessarily changing their underlying logic: instructors continued to explain while students listened, only now through a videoconference. The study by Marc Fuertes-Alpiste, Núria Molas-Castells, Francesc Martínez-Olmo, Maria Jose Rubio-Hurtado, and Cristina Galván Fernández starts precisely from this issue and examines what happens when synchronous sessions are designed to promote more active participation.
The experience, carried out in the Pedagogy degree programme at the University of Barcelona, combined videoconferencing with interactive activities using Nearpod, alternating brief explanations with questions, exercises, gamified activities, and some collaborative tasks. Five instructors and 82 students took part. Rather than testing the effectiveness of a particular tool, the study seeks to understand how instructors and students perceive a form of teaching in which technology is used to strengthen interaction among students, teachers, and learning content.
The feedback collected shows a largely positive experience. Many students felt that the format suited the way they learn and highlighted how the pace of the activities helped them maintain their attention, immediately apply what had been explained, and recognise which concepts they had understood and which they needed to review. Participation also increased compared with a conventional class, because the activities enabled the whole group to contribute rather than only those who would normally speak up spontaneously. For instructors, designing these sessions does not mean starting from scratch, but it does require more careful consideration of the sequence, timing, and opportunities for interaction.
One of the most interesting elements is the use of learning analytics: students’ responses make it possible to identify, during the session itself, which concepts are causing the greatest difficulty, revisit them, and adjust the explanations accordingly. Alongside these advantages, some challenges also emerge: technical problems, an overly structured pace for some students, the need to manage several platforms, and the predominance of individual activities over more collaborative forms of learning.
The experience therefore offers some useful insights for thinking about synchronous teaching in higher education beyond the exceptional circumstances that accelerated its expansion. This is a context-specific study, conducted with a small sample in a single degree programme, so its findings are better seen as an invitation to explore these kinds of designs than as a basis for broad generalisation. The authors themselves point to the value of testing them with larger groups, in other disciplines, and through more collaborative and socio-constructivist approaches.
Yet the significance of the study goes beyond the platforms used. Students continue to assign a fundamental role to the instructor in guiding the session, expanding on explanations, and resolving questions, while technology becomes particularly valuable when it helps check understanding, encourage participation, and adapt teaching to what is happening during the class. The underlying conclusion is simple but important: digitising a session is not merely a matter of moving a lecture onto a screen. Technology can broaden opportunities for learning when the design of activities, timing, and interactions truly turns it into a pedagogical resource.
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How to Cite: Fuertes-Alpiste, M., Molas-Castells, N., Martínez-Olmo, F., Rubio-Hurtado, M. J., & Galván Fernández, C. (2023). Interactive Videoconferences in Higher Education: A Proposal to Enhance Learning and Participation. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 26(1), 265–285. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.26.1.34012
