Supporting Awareness and Attention with Flip-Board Based Presentations in Videoconferencing for Distance Education

Despite convenient functions supporting videoconferencing, it is often difficult to maintain awareness and attention during remote lectures. One possible approach for addressing such difficulties is to present using a flip board held by a presenter, instead of presentation slides usually displayed on a different screen away from the presenter's face. This flip-board-based presentation style makes it easy for the viewers to see the presenter's face and presentation materials simultaneously, facilitating eye contact. We performed experimental lectures to investigate the properties of flip-board and conventional presentation styles. The subjective evaluation showed that the participants scored the flip-board-based presentation higher in terms of eye contact than the traditional presentation style, which they felt was somewhat ill-suited to them.