HAS THE TIME COME FOR USING VIDEO-BASED LECTURES OVER

THE INTERNET? A TEST-CASE

Marco RonchettiDipartim. Informatica e Telecomunicazioni

Università di TrentoItaly

Traditional lecturing through the Web

Traditional lecturing is dead.

The lecture model is under attack by people proposing learner centered learning

E-learning is an opportunity for a change

However…

Traditional lecturing through the Web

… what is going on in your classroom?

At our place, we use a blended approach, much stuff is available through the net,

but the classroom is still there…

Can we make it any better, while the old paradigm still survives?

Breaking the space-temporal unit

Can we free the student from spatial and temporal constraints?

Classical solutions: Paper-based learning material VHS cassettes (and TV or satellite broadcasting)

Video distribution through the Internet was not feasible (at least in Europe) until recently

Today…

Connections available to our students: 77% standard 56K analog modem 22% some kind of fast connection

7% ISDN (128:256 K) 15% ADSL (256K) (growing very FAST!)

1% no connection at all.

(but some of the students with slow connection have friends with ADSL)

Our requirements the system should support both

synchronous and asynchronous modes through the web;

synchronous mode should allow at least some degree of interaction;

the lectures should be easily browsed, with some form of indexing and a direct access to any time-location in the lecture;

Our requirements

lectures should be available (in some form) also to students who do not have a large band Internet connection;

lectures should be visible on all major platforms (Windows/Linux/Macintosh)

production costs should be minimal, so as to allow scaling the approach to most courses.

The solution: e-Presence

The system you’re seeing now:

e-Presence, a system originally designed for webcasting seminars,

developed by Prof. Ron.Baecker and Dr. Gale Moore’s group at the

Knowledge Media Design Institute University of Toronto

(http://epresence.kmdi.toronto.edu,refs. in the paper)

Logical Architecture

Synchronous (webcast)

Asynchronous (On line, or download)

Asynchronous(CD)

e-Presence cognitive interface

The main focus is on the projected slide,

a clear voice is very important, the video carries additional

information like gestures, and can show the environment just enough

Navigation is possible Interaction is possible

e-Presence: look and feelVideo Slide

projected in classroom

List ofslides(titles)

Buttonsfor

navigating the slides

Time axis for the navigationThe “Webcast” version has a

chatline to put questions

Title

Our experiment

We used e-presence on a whole first-year course (48 hours, Object Oriented Programming for Computer Science)

through the Internet (webcasting) through the Internet (asynchronous) through the Internet (download) offline (through a set of CDs).

Objectives to evaluate the organizational costs of the

initiative, and find out what the ratio costs/benefits is;

to evaluate on the field the use of multimedia in general, and of the e-presence technology in particular;

to measure the student’s satisfaction level; to gather experience that can be precious in a

possible extensive use of this technology; to get new ideas about possible extensions of

the technology or of its use.

Student feedback

Enthusiastic. We were “forced” to extend the experiment to a second

course!

75% anticipated using the system often or very often

At examination time: 50% of the regular students had used the

system to review at least one lecture. 5% of the students had followed the course

completely off-line (working students)

Student feedbackEnthusiastic. We were “forced” to extend the experiment

to a second course!

students who… 1st exam 2nd exam total

…used the system to review at least one lecture

50% 90% 66%

…followed the course completely off-line

5% 5% 5%

75% anticipated using the system

often or very often

Advantages from student’s perspective

Better time management: ability to recover lectures lost due to forced

absence (illness, work or other time-frame incompatibility);

ability to better organize their time, deciding not to be present at some lecture (elective absence);

Better understanding review some critical point (cases of poor

understanding of a section due to concentration drop, excessive speed in an explanation or intrinsic difficulty);

ability to check the correctness of notes taken during a lecture;

Other advantages

Miscellaneous perception by the student of a better

service provided by the university; support foreign students who might

have difficulties with the (Italian) language;

enrichment of the e-learning portfolio; possibility for the teacher to view

himself; possibility to reuse lectures (across

time, or in different contexts!)

Assessing costs: initial costs <$10.000

Software acquisition e-presence (contact KMDI) Quick time professional ($ 60) Real (Helix) Server ($ 2000)

Hardware acquisition 3 fast PC’s ($2000 each)

1 Web & Real Server machine 1 Acquisition Machine (with video acquisition

card) 1 Webcast Machine (with video acquisition

card), optional 1 (or more) Digital Camera ($500) Optional video mixer

Assessing costs: running costs setting up the system before lectures (10 min.) running the system during the lecture (2 hours) removing the system after lectures (10 minutes) starting the post-processing: half an hour. The post

processing would than go by itself for approx. 3 hours for producing 3 streams of 2 hours each

ending the post-processing (uploading the video on the web site, producing the master CD): half an hour.

=> 1.65 hour work per 1 hour lectureThe total work for a 45-hour course was

approximately 80 hours.

Conclusion: the past

We have explored the possibility of breaking the space-time constraints of the traditional classroom, using a software produced by the University of Toronto.

Student feedback was enthusiastic, Costs are sustainable and scale well

Conclusion: the future Extensive use:

We plan using the system systematically on courses attended by a large number of students (100)

We are having many requests by other people

Further developments We have some suggestions to KMDI to

improve their excellent system KMDI plans of putting e-presence in the

open-source/public-domain