Web Conferences - Pros and Cons

In taking part in the required web conference for this course I learned both positives and negatives of their use.
Web conferences offer student in asynchronous online courses or in other groups the opportunity to converse with each other. The ability to have both video and audio feed as well as live chat can allow for a more natural flow of conversation and collaboration than in a discussion post, blog or wiki setting. The issues come, though, when the number of participants exceeds the capabilities of the system.
In our web conference we logged in hours early, as we were informed that numbers would be restricted and many people wouldn’t get in. As we are in China we actually had to do our web conference at 1 am local time as the others would have been during our work hours. Even after logging on incredibly early we still almost didn’t get in because after we had been put in the queue we apparently were bumped and had to refresh after the appointed start time in order to get in. Luckily we were able to however it was somewhat of a madhouse. My screen view kept changing over and over again and the facilitator, Dr. Abernathy was quite upset with the participants. Apparently individuals were “pushing buttons” and that was changing the view. Honestly, however, while I wasn’t the one pushing any buttons I could see how there would be no way of knowing if one were doing something right or wrong. Supposedly we were supposed to be able to have audio and video feed but the only audio ever allowed was that if the facilitator. Perhaps others were trying to get their audio to go, and that may be what was causing the issues. There were so many participants t5hat the chat log sped by at tremendous speed. While I tried to take part and did communicate several ideas I know without a doubt that there is a significant amount of discussion that I missed. Many questions asked by participants went unanswered as, quite frankly, there was simply no time for anyone to even read them. We resorted to repeating others questions over in the chat in the hopes of finding answers. While looking at the log of the session is somewhat helpful, I would certainly never use this feature in the future without it being limited to one class and without doing a walkthrough with screen shots for all participants first. While the technology has many applications I do not feel that I got out of it what was intended because there were simply too many participants and I was not able to do anything other than attempt to keep up with the chat log.