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Introduction
When we, as educators, step into the classroom, we are the experts for the day, but each of us also knows that there are others that usually know at least part of that day's topic better than we do. When I was asked to develop a Nutritional Genomics course for students in our Agriculture and Life Sciences College, I had taught basic Animal Genetics for 10 years at another university, and certainly used many genetic and genomic assays and approaches in my own research. However, I also appreciated the fact that there were other experts in the areas I was going to cover, and so I thought about ways to bring these experts to my students. However, the cost of bringing experts to my classroom from all over the world, each with speaking fees, hotel and airfare expenses and per diems was not feasible to propose to my department. So, I started thinking of other ways that we could bring experts to the classroom using online conferencing technologies.
There are several different conferencing platforms that can be used, each with strengths and weaknesses. Several online sites provide a ranking of online conferencing tools, including G2 Crowd [1], Online Meeting Software Review [2], and Capterra [3] among many others. PC Magazine recently reviewed 10 of the top web-based conferencing tools for price, ease of use and meeting features [4]. Our university contracts with Adobe Connect(TM), Skype, Google Hangouts(TM), and WebEx(TM) Conferencing. For this course, I decided to use WebEx(TM) Conferencing because I was already familiar with using it during my summer online course, it had tech support from both our university and the company, and it allowed me to have multiple users join the conference and share audio, video and file sharing from anywhere in the world. Also, once I had...