Promoting Interaction in Distance Education
August 11, 2009
The Center for Collaborative Technologies at the University of Washington is dedicated to creating software tools that encourage interaction in the classroom. These include Classroom Presenter, a Tablet PC-based presentation and interaction system, and ConferenceXP, a video conferencing application for distributed courses, co-developed with Microsoft Research. Classroom Presenter and ConferenceXP have been used in a wide range of courses at our university and at other universities around the world.
In this article, we describe the use of Classroom Presenter in a pair of international distance learning courses. Classroom Presenter was used to make the classes more interactive by lowering the bar to participation with the inclusion of a non-verbal communication channel. The two classes used different technologies: one was a synchronous class that used internet-based video conferencing and the other was an asynchronous class that used Tutored Video Instruction [1]. In both cases, the students used laptops in the classroom to interact with the instructional materials.
Classroom Presenter Classroom Presenter [2] is a system that supports the presentation and sharing of electronic slides. Generally, the instructor will use a Tablet PC so that he or she can write on the slides digitally and display annotations to the class. If students also have laptops or Tablet PCs, they receive the slides and annotations over the network, and may write or type directly on the slides, too. The students can then send their annotations back to the instructor. This allows several important things to happen.
- The instructor gets to view the student comments, which gives information about student ideas and what they understand.
- The instructor can show the student work on the public display, incorporating it into the classroom discussion.
- Student work is displayed anonymously, which often makes students more comfortable participating, especially if they aren't sure of their answers.
- Instructors have found that classes that use this type of technology can increase student engagement and generate active discussions.
All too often in distributed classes students at the remote site don't feel comfortable contributing to the class. The social dynamics of asking a question are very different in a distance class, and audio lag can compound these issues. We incorporated Classroom Presenter into a synchronous distance course by having both the local and remote students access copies of the lecture slides on their laptops or Tablet PCs. Although the most common use of Classroom Presenter has been on a local wireless network, it works just as well over the internet.
The course was a Master's level computer science course on information and communication technologies for development (ICTD) taught between University of Washington (UW), Microsoft's Redmond Campus, and Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Lahore, Pakistan [3]. With this topic, we knew that there would be a lot of value in bringing in a range of perspectives from the different sites if we could overcome the challenges of getting participation in the distance course. The class used ConferenceXP to support high quality internet based video conferencing between the three sites. Even though the bandwidth to and from LUMS was less than the bandwidth between the U.S. sites, latency was very low. Verbal interaction took place between all sites, with multiple rounds of communication occurring frequently. Having instructors present at two of the sites clearly helped the level of verbal interaction.
Classroom Presenter was also used to provide activities to the students on the lecture slides. Generally about five activities were used in a three-hour lecture. The pattern for the activity would be to present it on the slide, and have a work phase followed by a discussion phase where the instructor showed most of the student submissions.
Figure 1. Student can mark up slides while using Classroom Presenter.
The general goal of the activities was to present multiple viewpoints to the class. Examples of activities included having students draw graphs of cell phone adoption rates around the world, brainstorm on how technology could help agriculture, and critique the viability of internet based craft marketing for rural artisans. The activities enhanced interaction in a number of ways. Generally, students worked in groups, leading to discussions amongst students at each site. In addition, the collection and display of activities made it possible for all students to contribute their ideas, which was unusual in our distance courses.
We also noted that students were more willing to speak about a topic after they had had time to reflect on it and discuss it. The format of submitting answers on slides made it much easier for students to understand each others' ideas, as problems with microphones or students' accents sometimes made verbal comments difficult. Classroom Presenter allowed students to overcome the barrier to contributing in class.
Tutored Video Instruction One type of asynchronous distance education is Tutored Video Instruction (TVI) [1]. In TVI, a video of an expert teacher is shown to a group of students by a facilitator, who stops the video for questions and discussion. The facilitator often does not have the background to teach the class on his or her own, but can still be effective in helping student learn from the video materials and the classroom discussion.
The class that we offered by TVI was a senior-level computer science course on algorithms taught between University of Washington and Beihang University in Beijing, China [4].
The course materials were recorded in a live University of Washington course, and graduate teaching assistants from Beihang University served as facilitators. The model was that the TAs would show the class video, stopping for activities, student questions, or to create interaction. The videos were packaged for playback using a custom playback tool with a slide display pane in which the original Classroom Presenter presentation is displayed synchronized with the video. In addition, the facilitators had the instructor's original slide deck to show in class. The teaching assistants also received documents containing advice for facilitation, including timing information and suggested questions or comments.
Classroom Presenter was used in the TVI class to promote interaction between the students and the facilitator. The students had Tablet PCs, so that they could do activities and send their answers to the facilitator. When an activity slide was reached in the video, the facilitator would stop the video and allow the TVI students to do the activity and submit their results. The facilitator would then view and display the results, and then resume the video. The original class used classroom activities as well, so the TVI class was duplicating classroom interaction from the original class. Activities were used to allow students to practice concepts they had learned, or to discover non-obvious ideas from examples.
Interaction is vital to the success of a TVI deployment. For this class, we were particularly concerned about our ability to create an interactive atmosphere due to the near-complete lack of interaction in the traditional Chinese university classroom. However, the class succeeded in achieving a high level of interaction. We observed that the frequency of verbal interaction in the TVI class was close to the level of interaction in the US class.
The students also participated through their responses to Classroom Presenter activities, which are both anonymous and carefully considered. The ability to refer to student work visually was particularly valuable in an algorithms class, since topics such as a path through a graph can be very difficult to express verbally. Once the students were comfortable with this level of interaction, they were more likely to contribute verbally.
In addition, the students reacted quite positively to the greater interaction levels. On a survey, when asked to directly compare the interaction in the TVI course to a traditional course, the average response corresponded to "I liked [TVI] somewhat more." This result is especially encouraging considering that the students could be expected to react negatively to not only the new format, but to being taught by graduate TAs instead of professors.
One of the factors that contributed to the course's success was the TAs' dedication. In addition to following the advice provided to them, they watched the videos together before class, discussed facilitation techniques, and even taught short sections of the class themselves, modeling the instructor in the videos. Thus, we found that with motivated TAs and high-quality support materials, TVI could be used to create an interactive learning environment even for students who were unused to such an environment.
Technology to Enhance the Learning Atmosphere International distance learning can have many barriers to interaction. In addition to the usual difficulties encountered in distance courses, issues of language and culture can make it difficult to encourage students to contribute. We have combated these issues by creating a new, less threatening channel for participation using Classroom Presenter, together with techniques for explicitly encouraging verbal interaction. This approach has met with success in two very different international distance courses.
In our experimental deployments, we have relied on software technologies that we have developed. Although commercial products support some of the functionality we needed, the ability to introduce new features and customize the software allowed us to experiment with novel styles of interaction in the classroom. We believe that non-commercial software has an important role to play as educators explore how technology can enhance education. Software that is free lowers the bar for experimentation and adoption and modification of software can be crucial to adapt to new environments, to link with additional software components, and to include new hardware into a system. Educators who are developing classroom technologies have a unique opportunity to get feedback from their own classes and their colleagues classes allowing a fast iterative design cycle.
There is a growing community of researchers working on classroom technology projects, including Ubiquitous Presenter [5], Classroom Learning Partner [6], and WriteOn [7], where academic researchers are taking technology into their own classrooms, and then making the systems available to a wider community.
Both ConferenceXP and Classroom Presenter are free to use and download.
The authors thank Microsoft Research for generous support of these projects.
Biographies Richard Anderson is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He has been on the University of Washington faculty since 1986, and has been a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Science, and a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research. His research focuses on how technology can be used to extend the reach of education.
Natalie Linnell is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research interests include educational technology, technology for the developing world, and computer science education.
References 1. Gibbons, J. F., Kincheloe, W. R., and Down, K. S. Tutored videotape instruction: A new use of electronics media in education. Science 195, 3 (1977), 1139-1146.
2. Richard Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Peter Davis, Natalie Linnell, Craig Prince, Valentin Razmov and Fred Videon, Classroom Presenter: Enhancing Interactive Education with Digital Ink, IEEE Computer, September 2007, pp. 56-61.
3. Richard Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Natalie Linnell, Mansoor Pervaiz, Umar Saif, Fred Videon. Collaborative Technologies in International Distance Education, Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, 2008.
4. Richard Anderson, Jiangfeng Chen, Luo Jie, Ning Li, Natalie Linnell, Valentin Razmov and Fred Videon. Supporting an Interactive Classroom Environment in a Cross-Cultural Course, ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education, 2007.
5. Michelle Wilkerson, William Griswold, and Beth Simon. Ubiquitous Presenter: Increasing Student Access and Control in a Digital Lecturing Environment, ACM SIGCSE 2005.
6. K. Koile, K. Chevalier, C. Low, S. Pal, A. Rogal, D. Singer, J. Sorensen, K. Tay, and K. Wu., Supporting Pen-Based Classroom Interaction: New Findings and Functionality for Classroom Learning Partner. WIPTE, 2007.
7. Joe Tront, V. Eligeti, and Jane Prey, Classroom Presentations Using Tablet PCs and WriteOn, ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education. 2006.
