[glorgau]

There is great value in watching someone at a (black or white) board go through the process of solving a math problem, for example, and responding to questions along the way. That’s hard to replicate in a book or on the Internet.

Actually, it's not. There are scads of conferencing applications available.

[riverdawg]

Videoconferencing was all the rage ten years ago, and there are some applications that have had some success, especially in the corporate world. But I’ve never seen it used wisely or effectively in an educational setting. In the early days, I attributed most of the failures to technical glitches - hardware or software problems. Now that those are minimal, I have concluded that there is something more fundamentally wrong about that approach for many, if not most, educational applications.