Student engagement in geographically distributed classrooms through localized solutions

Engaging students across geographically distributed teaching and learning activities can be a challenge in contemporary higher institutions. Often, technical constraints, e.g., hardware and software availability, network connectivity and support availability, affect the quality of teaching and learning activities in remote sites. Student participation in the remote sites decreases if the quality of activities is appalling. This paper reports the approaches taken by the faculty and support staff to overcome the challenges in student engagement in a joint graduate research level course on Information Systems geographically distributed in multiple sites in Hong Kong and China. A combination of Web LiveCast and local Voice over IP (VoIP) messaging tools have been deployed on existing thin client hardware to deliver the “quick and dirty” solution. The solution was proved to be effective in improving student engagement, in terms of improved quality in teaching and learning activities, minimal interruption to the students and teachers by preserving the “natural” way of conducting teaching and learning activities, in the remote site without additional resources input on existing solutions.