Telepresence Support for Synchronous Distance Education

This paper describes a telepresence application that combines bi-directional video, audio and a shared virtual environment as means to support synchronous distance education sessions. In order to validate the effectiveness of the tool, it was used in several courses at our University. Students were divided into an experimental group – using the tool in a simulated distance learning environment – and a control group – receiving traditional face-to-face lectures –. The results show that the use of the telepresence application, hand in hand with an appropriate pedagogical framework, lead the students in the distance education sessions to reach at least the same levels of understanding, and sometimes even better, than those attained by students in the face-to-face sessions. We are offering the telepresence application to other education institutions in our country, with the hope that it will allow students in regions isolated by the war or by the lack of infrastructure to have access to better education, both at school and university levels.