A Literacy Practitioner's Guide to Audiographic Teleconferencing
The idea to pursue Literacy Training Through Audiographic Teleconferencing as a literacy project began in the fall of 1992. The Business Studies Department at Lakeland College in Vermilion, Alberta had begun distance delivery using this technology. My husband, Barton, was the instructor for the course being delivered. His involvement in the project initiated many discussions about using this and other types of technologies to provide training opportunities to a greater number of individuals located at some distance from the instruction site.
My experience as a literacy coordinator led me to believe that audiographic teleconferencing had great potential for volunteer tutor training, especially in rural literacy programs. Providing training opportunities on restricted budgets, being separated by great distances and not having access to resources is a great concern for rural literacy programs. It seemed reasonable to expect that literacy coordinators would benefit from sharing the responsibility for and the expense of training with other program coordinators. Creating partnerships to explore current distance delivery methods was an imperative.
Audiographic teleconferencing sites had been established in Alberta through community consortia and colleges, as well as universities. This permitted the project to be undertaken with no capital having to be spent on equipment. Audiographic teleconferencing met the criteria for providing adult learning opportunities as identified in Alberta Advanced Education & Career Development's document, New Directions for Adult Learning in Alberta (1994). It was both available and accessible at all Lakeland College and Community Learning Centre sites, as well as AVC Slave Lake and its satellite campuses. The University of Manitoba Distance Education Division of Continuing Education provided the studio and equipment for the Manitoba instructor, Robin Millar, to instruct from the Winnipeg campus.
The audiographic teleconferencing system had the advantage of acting as both a sending and receiving site. This flexibility allowed me to arrange instruction from a variety of Alberta sites including Slave Lake, Lloyd minster, and Vermilion, as well as from Winnipeg.
During this project, several outcomes were anticipated. The training had to be responsive to the needs of rural literacy coordinators and their volunteer tutors. Exploring an existing technology and determining its usefulness were central to this project. Approaching audiographic teleconferencing from the perspective of the literacy practitioner was of utmost importance.
When the project started, several of the participating literacy coordinators either did not use a computer or considered themselves novice computer users. None had prior experience with audiographic teleconferencing. Being accountable to the literacy coordinators. by providing adequate exposure to this technology and requesting on going feedback, was a top priority. It was equally important to be accountable to the volunteer tutors by producing resources that supported their learning goals, augmented the audiographic teleconference and were useful tutoring tools.