I had the chance of having a remote desktop session with somebody by assisting her to configure a ASP website that also using database and indexing services on Microsoft Windows platform. I was here in Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa and she at University of Namibia in Windhoek, Namibia. Both of us are connected on the university LANs with a firewall and proxy server up front.
The experience was however agonising to work on TeamViewer as the application response was very bad, about a second waiting time between mouse click and seeing a change on the screen. This may be due to the network latency which would be about 350ms RTT from me to the TeamViewer relay server and another 350ms RTT from TeamViewer relay server to Namibia totalling 700ms Round Trip Time (RTT with ping). The use of TCP tuning to adjust TCP window size may improve performance. We used google chat to communicate and had no voice communication and this seemed to respond in realtime. Wich I had voice with Skype as to see if realtime voice would perform different with the network latency.
Due to the slow response time of the screen update, I had to send request to the other person to perform task on the other machine until I can see the desired screen and maybe do some task myself or ask the task to be done via google chat. Voice would make it much easier as typing takes time and the conversation may get out of sync sometimes.
What I have learned or gathered from this experience if applied in an online teaching and learning situation is:
- because most task has to be performed by the other participant, maybe learner, it improves on the learning experience as the person would do the task themself and remember more easily rather than if they would have had to observer. I have practiced when teaching people computer literacy not to touch the mouse and keyboard of somebody I am explaining something and they do it themself. It would raise their confidence in doing the task and they remember easier can repeat the task many of the times.
How the experience would be if the roles were reverse, that is if the shared screen was that of the teacher, I am not sure. Also how it would be in a session with more than 2 people, maybe 10.
