Working in a virtual classroom: what you CAN do to enrich the learning experience

This paper shares an epiphany about a feeling of empowerment and reinvigoration of teaching through the use of a Virtual Classroom (VC). This is an example of “energizing your teaching” and adds to the rich variety of ways that this energizing might be achieved (Cunningham (1999), Hanno (1999) and Wilson (1999)). It reports on the use of a VC to assist in delivery and assessment of a variety of activities used in undergraduate advanced accounting courses during semester 1, 2003 at Southern Cross University. Observations, notes and limited student feedback reported in the paper indicate that the VC has been successful for a variety of reasons that mirror what happens in a face-to-face class session. Activities and assessment tasks used successfully in previous face-to-face offerings have been effectively utilized in the on-line offering. This demonstrates that the VC can be an integral educational technology component of such offerings. While it is probably necessary to explore this reasoning in a larger class group, and in a more systematic manner, the effects and procedures are readily identifiable with the traditional approaches we adopt in conducting face-to-face classes and teletutorials.