International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract

This paper describes the methodology used for training a large number of engineering college teachers using synchronous technology in India. The goal of these synchronous workshops is to improve the quality of teaching in higher education by training a large number of teachers in a short time. The paper presents the survey results of fourteen workshops conducted in synchronous distance mode from the year 2009 to 2013. From the survey, we found that a large number of young teachers, female teachers and teachers in rural colleges are benefitting from the workshops. Even though the participants attended these workshops in the distance mode, the survey results showed that the participants’ perceptions on the quality of instruction, workshop content and quality of audio-video transmission were good. On an average about 90% of the respondents rated their experience as excellent or good. We also found that after scaling up the number of participants from 1000 to 10000 teachers per workshop, there was a slight dip in the rating, but the overall level of satisfaction of the participants was not much affected due to scale up.