The fine line between face-to-face and virtual teaching

On October 20 IE Business School launched a project we’ve been working on for some time: a classroom we call The WoW Room (Window on the World), conceptualized and created with the help of SyncRTC and designed to create a fully immersive educational experience that pushes the boundary between online education and the classroom learning experience (see references to the presentation in Times Higher Education or Le Monde, among others).

Since 2000, I have been watching how online education has become much more than simply a replacement resource, more than just a way to provide education to those who, for whatever reason, cannot commit to being in a classroom in a particular place.

The formula we decided to use leveraged our teaching staff’s work, with no assistants, tutors or substitutes of any kind, based on relatively small groups (despite the clear economic benefits that teaching to tens of thousands students at a time could offer), and direct, constant interaction through forums and other participation schemes.

We soon appreciated the superiority of this approach: the best discussions were no longer taking place in classrooms, but online. As a professor, using a case study in an online session was the best way to feel fully prepared for a classroom session.