Abstract

Virtual educational institutions have been developing rapidly during the last years. New technologies enable new forms of communication and cooperation. In this context, videoconferencing plays an increasingly important role. The findings of evaluation studies on distance learning with videoconferencing as well as studies on video-mediated interaction are mostly encouraging. However, very little is known about how the conditions of interaction in videoconferencing influence processes of collaborative knowledge construction and learning outcomes. In this paper we present findings of recent studies on dyadic videoconferencing. They suggest that whatever differences were supposed at a theoretical level, empirical findings hardly show any differences: In videoconferencing, processes of collaborative knowledge construction were similar and resulted in learning outcomes which were comparable to a face-to-face setting. However, videoconferencing might have some negative effects on the collaborative knowledge construction when the learners are inexperienced in using network technologies and only short periods of collaboration time are regarded