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Technologies Available For Use In Distance Learning?
DaScope asks: "I have been assigned a new project: setting up a distance learning facility where the teacher can simultaneously teach to different people across the country. Audio/video streaming, interactive whiteboards, photo albums and discussion boards are different options available to us. What other technologies are available for distance learning use? What are the cons/pros of the different technologies available, and are they available for Linux?"
I just finished a Master where several of the courses were taught via distance learning. I also work with a group where the focus is development of web-based educational content. My particular interest is in determining what it takes to add streaming video (synchronous and asynchronous) to on-line teaching.
Bandwidth - Modem: If the clients are on the end of a modem, then Real Audio and text chat, along with a web-board type threaded discussions is about the best you can get. Students can submit via e-mail or via a website (either a site under your control or each student on their own). An integrated package like O'Reilly's webboard can make synchronous sessions more interactive as the instructor can post urls, syllabus pages, and extra information, while the students can chat amongst themselves during class.
Bandwidth - DSL/Ethernet: Streaming lectures, both synchronous and asynchronous, become accessible when bandwidth climbs. Allowing students to have web-cams (Classpoint) can mean greater interactivity, but the result is somewhat problematic because of the 20 second delay for streaming (do not underestimate this problem). If you control both ends of the wire (i.e. satellite Corporate sites), then doing web or video-conferencing can work well. It's still a good idea to have text chat as a component as both an emergency channel and for student whispering during class (and whispering is important for building group cohesiveness).
Money: Takes a fair amount of money up-front, to get several people and sufficient equipment in place. Almost all distance learning requires significant lead times (semester or more) for technicians to ready equipment, work out procedures, and work with instructors to create content. For example, the instructor needs a full syllabus and all of the materials they intend to present in electronic forms at the start of teaching (this can be significant impediment -- don't underestimate this problem).
People: Takes people, both technicians to run the equipment, trouble-shoot problems for users, work with the instructors, and ensure the content is available for the students. It also takes people during each session (which can be a real problem sometimes).
Gotchas: People forget, then realize belatedly, that all of the administrative work they used to do in person or via mail, needs to be converted to an electronic format. This can mean setting up a secure site with .pdfs of what needs to be read, mechanisms to register and deregister people, sometimes handling money, getting certificates (or whatever) back to the student, advising (etc. -- a lot depends on the type of teaching).
Comment 1: It can be useful to have at least one "physical presence session" where everyone gets together in one room (if it's a full-semester course). A surprisingly large number of problems and gotchas can be solved by this session. This may not be feasible for many situations, but for our Masters program, it is one of the key reasons why the program works so well. Students who attend the session meet their peers, see the instructors, and "bond" with the school during these "once a semester" sessions.
Comment 2: One of the easiest way to gauge what you'll need is to try and find a distance program that does pretty much what you think you'll need. Most distance education programs are still novel enough that reports get written with ancillary web-sites that extoll the wonder and usefullness of their particular program. I've also found most developers involved with distance learning to be responsive to serious inquires about specifics (usually with too much information :-). I would spend a good two weeks to two months (or more -- depends on the scale) searching to find as many distance education sites as possible and to get a feel for what folks are using. Work through the sites, make sone tentative choices, then try to contact the principals directly for comments. Any serious use of distance education is going to cost money, often lots of money. The amount of money your group will spend on having you visit a few sites to actually see how it's done is going to be cheap compared to making even one mistake in choosing, buying, and implementing a technology plan that will likely be with you for years.
Comment 3: Good luck -- you need it. The right people and the right technology choices can mean the difference between "wasting" hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of time Vs. getting something up that works. The risks of failure are real as "you" are becoming a integral part of the teaching and learning that will go on. Most likely you're not an educator, thus not able to fully comprehend what will happen as learning gets funneled through whatever technology choices you make. The rewards won't be very great because most don't realize just how transformative your technology choices will be on the process. Your sponsors "expect" success and learning and probably don't understand how big of a duty they've pushed on to you.
The "modem" on-line courses I took were from: http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/gslis/degrees/leep.html
elarson@roadkill.net
Please, support anything else, but do NOT support that bastardized "standard"! "Security" wasn't even on anyone's mind when they drew up those specs! It uses random TCP AND UDP ports established from both directions and encodes the IP address of the client into the packets making NAT'ing it a bitch. This has got to be one of the worst protocols ever devised and I want to urge everyone to avoid it so that it goes away. If you have a firewall or even a nat'ing gateway you are quite literally fucked if you need to support this.
We also use this. However, our people decided to run this on NT/Win2k. While Win2k has not been a problem itself, the WebCT product does not run too well on Win2k.
It is mainly a bunch of perl scripts and the apache server. However it seems their chat script is buggy as can be, and that most fixes involve a reboot. Their tech support isn't that great either - many times, even though they say they support NT/2k, they claim a problem is caused by us running it on there.
However, in their defense, our faculty love it and I think the students like it as well.
I remember back in around 1992, some guy from IBM demoing some program he wrote that uses a laserdisc for chemistry.
The idea was that you could select what you wanted to react (magnessium strip and fire) and it would play a pre-recorded scene of the result.
Pretty cold and inpersonal, however that may help with the "hands-on" experiments.
Personally, I like sitting in a class with a faculty member to learn, but I'm getting old.
The solution is clear: those who are writing distance-learning software should incorporate a clause into their liscenses which would forbid the use of the software for illegitimate "educational" purposes.
How can you define illegitimate education?
There are accreditation boards already in place for conventional educational facilities which would be ideal for judging the new online ones.
And if a company wanted to use it for training people around the world??? I don't think they'd be certified by any of the regional/national certification boards - so I guess that's illegit education?
Only then can we be sure that our children will be safe from the hate that looms on the horizon of the new millennium.
I believe that you'll find more hate looming in your home town with prejudice and racisim and general stupidity then you'll find in online courses.
Moderators: Tiny posting, but exactly what he wants.
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The VRVS system achieves bi-directional communication among participants who enter the same Virtual Room. This communication media can be audio, video, and whiteboard, depending on what media each participant selects.
An audio stream consumes between 9Kbit/s and 78 Kbit/s depending on the audio format that is selected in the control panel of the audio application (PCM: 78Kbit/s, DVI: 46Kbit/s, GSM; 17Kbit/s, LPC4: 9Kb/s).
A video stream can put a much higher load on the network: from 10 Kbit/s up to several Mbit/s. The maximum data rate value is defined for each source by a bandwidth limit slider in the control panel of the video application. For a video stream over the Internet the advised data rate is typically from 15 to 128 Kbit/s.
The VRVS system aims at controlling the maximum bandwidth used by videoconferences taking place in the virtual rooms.
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The University of Maryland's distance education school (UMUC) utilized Lotus Domino to build some terrific distance learning scenarios. It is really slick. I would highly recommend checking out their web site (http://www.umuc.edu).
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Ryan Wilhelm
There are far more militias and gun-nuts "out east", in any state (take your pick) than there are in Montana. Most of the ones that have made the news all started out in the militias in other states (like Michigan), then moved out west in search of some intangbile personal liberties -- and fewer minorities. The miltia folk then claim to that all they wish is to be left alone, but then engage in exactly the sort of activity that begs for government intervention. The Hutterites and the Amish want to be left alone, and they are.
As for the seeds of hate, they are most frequently passed from parent to child. If we want to control racism, we must control, or hold accountable, parents.
As for opposing a technology because it can be used for an illegitimate purpose: anything can be used for an illegitimate purpose. You can not name one thing invented for the purpose of good that has not been, or can not be, subverted for evil purposes.
Check out the UWired project at the University of Washington... we did some really interesting things with educational technology there, including some distance learning stuff. I left school two years ago, and as a student employee had to leave my job there at the same time, and haven't followed the program too closely, but at the time it was one of the premier educational technology programs in the country. The web site is UWired.
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WebCT was started by my Operating Systems prof, Murray Goldberg. He's a pretty cool guy, although he has to travel a lot to run the company.
As for WebCT itself, it's pretty good, but the discussion boards aren't well-suited for extremely active discussion (when it gets over 500 messages, it becomes hard to find things).
Live video is probably unnecessary. It's a rare teacher who can accomplish more though a video connection than could be done through well-designed online notes.
DETA - http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/deta/
There are many tools out there for doing DL. Ive had experince with them from a developer end, oppesed to the student end. Heres a few that I am familair with:
... ).
... used net meeting as a basis for a whiteboard (obvisouly very platform specific) ... but you could do polling and give voice to a person at a time ... It seemed ok ... only did evaluate it.
... not familar with it ... just know it exists and i belive its supposed to be could. Hey, you can get the source ;)
...the server comes with Win2kServer ( u can dl it for NT) and the encoder is free. It also has the best quality I have seen for streaming media.
... Of course you could always implement your own web-based system, but that carries a lot of issues...
Blackboard: Its basicly $20k+ of perl scripts that are constantly broken and cant do what you want. DONT USE IT!
FirstClass: A very nice email/conference system. It has Mac and Windows clients and a Web Client( Which does not have all features). This is a very nice product that provides many features ( ie drop boxes, chat, email
LearnSys (?) Something like that
Prometheius - A cold fusion appilcation
Other technologies ive used in conjunction with DL are RealVideo, IRC, Video Tapes ( Taped lectures sent to the students), CDs with content (much like the Video Tapes).
On the cheap end of things (as all of these listed here cost $$ )... i dont know of much.
Video streaming wise ive had many experinces (Real, Quicktime, Windows Media ). Basicly Real has the most support, but is VERY expensive. Quicktime a bit cheaper (get server softwear for free!). Still need the encoder, but u can mahe multirate streams like you can with Real and Windows Media. Window Media is the cheapest
Those are what i can recall right now
Dave
/* Lobster Stick To Magnet!*/
I'm not a moderator this week, but it'd be nice if somebody moderates Flynn's article appropriately.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One program is speakfreely. I believe the website is on freshmeat. It sends voice messages compressed over any net connection (not quite like a phone convo, more like IM). Works nicely on my 56k, if you have a little T line than it would be great.
I am !amused.
My biggest problem with distance education is my lack of motivation/attention. Maybe we could make some sort of Nun emulator (E-Nun). I can see the possibilities now. "E-Nun has detected that you are not progressing with your course work." "E-Nun would like to inform the student that pr0n may lead to blindness, and will surely lead to the burning pits of hell." "E-Nun advises the student to refrain from using the internet for devils work, and continue with the course work." If E-Nun detects this sort of behavior again, E-Nun will contact the students mother." kill -9 e-nun2k
I would certainly not trust any accreditation boards; they are as susceptible to political correctness as any other group, and thus teaching Shakespear might wind up verboten, and teaching that ALL consentual sex is rape might not. One of those should seem innocous, and the other should not, to pretty much everyone.
This problem has been around for as long as there has been communication: someone might lead someone else astray. It's old enough that the ancient Greeks had a word for it: someone who led a lot of folks astray was a demagog.
See what I've been reading.
The University of Phoenix online is an accredited degree program including masters degrees. They have more online students than many large universities (>10,000). You might find it interesting that they use means for running their classes: Internet Explorer and a web equivalent interface. Since in fact, they use newsgroups and email along with electronic books, there is nothing that isn't available for the open source users. Note, that this is run of the few IPOs of the last quarter, and it has gone up (2.5 x!), so they must be doing someing right! They specifically arrange their classes so that students and teachers do not have to be online at the same time. A friend's experience has been quite good, individual attention to assistments and problems from the teachers, several give out their home phone numbers if you get really stuck. I can't see that watching a video is better than optimizing for asynchronous conversations and getting professors that are willing to talk to students, not at the lecture, but when the help is needed. This does not seem to be a technlogy issue, but having an administration that expects responsiveness from teachers. Asynchonous availablity is really important for distant learning, otherwise you have a scheduling nightmare depending on the time zone you happen to be in -- unless you are a full-time student.
Here at Marietta College we use WebCT for our "course management system." It doesn't do the live video, but it does do online lessons, chats, quizzes, and grades. If you need to, you can replace their apache with your own custom compile so you can add php, ssl, or what not. Perhaps live video support can be added this way? However, a simple link on the course page to a realvideo server might be simpler.
It can run on Linux, and people connect to it with a normal web browser.
The downside is that it is commercial, but usually the institution wants something commercial anyway. Check it out at http://www.webct.com.
To suplement those courses we are also using a system by Tegrity which allows you to stream live audio and video over the Internet. It works together with powerpoint and it supports a whiteboard for the teacher.
You can also use the interactive whiteboard in blackboard together with tegrity if students don't mind having both windows open.
You may also want to look into Rotor which is a very nice system that is used for anything from distance learning to presentations for/by the entertainment industry.
I've had a good experience with this technology. I had an economics professor at MSU who held regular office hours via AOL messenger and Yahoo! messenger. It was very helpful not having to walk across campus to ask a quick question. Surprisingly, the pure text notation was not too clumsy for meaningful conversation.
IRC is not bandwidth efficient...it just doesn't use much bandwidth.
Take a look at the Authenticated User Community (AUC) package. It is a GPLed intranet system for providing online classrooms. While it will not handle the streaming audio/video parts of your problem, it is a nice tool for coordinating the class. There is a live demo at the web site where you can discover the following features and more:
Available at real.com. If you have a V4Lin compatible device, the encoder can do live on-the-fly encoding for delivery to the free realserver. The free server can only stream to 25 clients simultaniously, however. You must pay for more clients.
Alternatively, you could just use the realencoder to save to a file, and as many people as you want could download that via plain old http.
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
I used to work on a project called Remote TA. The project is run by Professor Walters of the UC Davis Computer Science Department. It includes all of the features that you are looking for. Drop Dr. Walters a line and let him know that you are interested.
Avid Technology has been putting together an application called ePublisher. The intent of the program is to allow someone who knows almost nothing about either video or html to create a self-contained web page with streaming video synchronized to html events. A completed project looks somewhat like a powerpoint presentation with video.
The relevance is that you can film a class lecture with whatever equipment you have, import the video into the ePublisher program, import all the class handout materials or slides into the program, create a table of contents that allows a user to jump around to different stages of the lecture, and upload it to a server so that anyone can visit the URL and see the entire lecture.
Although it may sound like it, this isn't a plug for the company or even the program. My university was asked to beta-test the program, and I've since become way too familiar with all the dirty little details. It's in release 1.0 and so has its share of problems and bugs, but definitely has potential for distance learning.
Pros: you can record a lecture/presentation with all the original materials (slides, etc). Anyone in the world who can visit the webpage can view the entire lecture. A user can jump around in the lecture's timeline non-linearly. If something went by too quickly in the lecture, a user can jump back to that section/chapter. If the lecture goes too slow, a user can jump ahead to important sections. Also, Avid provides a USB video capture device with the product, so all you need to import video is svideo-out or composite-out.
Cons: It takes time to complete a project in this way. You need to have some kind of recording equipment to capture the video (although you can also make an audio-only project), and the process of synchronizing events (slides, handouts, etc) to the audio or video within the application is time-consuming. Also, I am fairly sure that there is no Linux version - the release is for 98 right now (In fact, I think they're still working on NT/2000). And on top of all that, the current release is still 1.0. I think that speaks for itself.
Experts agree: everything is fine.
The article asks about asychronous techologies, which are pretty widely available and you'll have alot of choice with both 'free' and commerical solutions. Problems will arise when you want to move to synchronous technologies. I'm involved in delivering this kind of material (albiet in an enforced windows environment), and the largest problem for synchronous learning technologies is the bandwidth not anything else. There are packages out their that allow multi-point audio and video crossplatform. eg Collaborative Virtual Workspace - http://cvw.sourceforge.net/ (but there are others) Unfortunately, this requires your students all to have access to a pretty speedy connection for it to work. Also when you get into the sharing of applications with 2+ people to work on (in terms of assignments) the networking just can't handle it. Hope is at hand, if you are part of the academic world then the Internet 2 project is being build precisely to facilitate this kind of DL.
The web based discussion forum can be done with a news-server (e.g., inn). I set up different private news-groups in the past (for discussions while doing group-homeworks and group-projects). I made very good experience with it and my class-mates liked it.
If the students have a low bandwidth connection, the connections to some of the associated course files do not work well.
Finally, the course ID setup works well for students who take multiple courses, but the learning curve for WebCT itself is very high for students taking their first course.
Courses which were correspondence courses still have about the same drop out rate as WebCT courses - it all depends on student maturity and motivation.
Caveat lector; It is a commercial publication.
Based on my experience, I would say one of the most important things you could setup would be a web based discussion forum. The need to easily interact with the rest of the class during non-class hours is something I have really missed. An important thing to allow (I think) would be anonymous posting. Since the distance students are kind of "disconnected" from the rest of the class (if there is a live class at all) it can be hard to get a feel as to where the rest of the class is at in comprehending the material. It would be good to allow people to post questions without their names on them to avoid looking like a complete dumbass. This may sound stupid, but its a lot more common than you may think.
The next most important thing I would say you should think about is applicable to live classes only. (A lot of NTU feeds are on taped delay.) This would be some way for the distance learning people to interrupt the teacher in real-time. There have been several times when I would have really liked to have been able to ask a question. I would say it would be OK not to have a AV feed from the student back to the teacher (Umm, can you say OVERKILL!), but SOMETHING (like ICQ maybe) is needed to allow the distance people to break in.
My final advice would be to train the hell out of the camera operators. It is ANNOYING to have some schmuck on the camera that thinks panning and zooming around all of the time is cool. Just leave the thing in one spot for crying out loud! Make sure the instructors are up to speed on the equipment as well. It can be annoying to watch them spend 5 minutes trying to figure out how to get their PC screen to go out on the feed.
Just my 2 cents. dv
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
SameTime 2.0 from Lotus. http://www.lotus.com/sametime. Java video and audio conferencing, NNTP-style discussions, authentication, restrictions (on who can do what), h.323 compatibility, etc. etc. Also includes encrypted instant messaging, online awareness, and a heckuva lot more functionality than I feel like typing in. Also scales well for really big implimentations.
A couple semesters ago, I co-authored a journalism project about distance learning that can be found here. The most important thing that I learned from my sources is that teaching classes online requires two learning curves: one for the subject matter and one for the technology. It's all good if you're teaching a class to Slashdot readers, but elsewhere, you'll find lots of people will be confounded by simple computerized tasks. To steal a famous quote, "The medium is the message."
Don't focus too much on live video and audio at first. What you need is a good discussion forum that not only keeps messages from the current class but from past classes as well, it is really helpfull to read past disscussions especially when doing a difficult assignment.
Have a section where people can (optionally) post thier email addresses ICQ, AIM etc. If you go the IRC/chat room route make sure you publish the logs (see above) and make them searchable.
Ineractive quizzes. Just do some cgi/php/whatever scripting to randomly select questions and mark them right or wrong when the form is submitted. This allows students to know if they are understanding the curriculum and I can't emphasise enough how important that is. Your students don't have any face time to see if they understand things, quizzes give those who understand it the confidence to move on and tells those that are struggling where to put in extra work. I can't emphasis enough how important that is, after disccussion boards it should be your next priority (ie. before shiny video streams).
As far as video/audio does go I'd put up some mp3's of lectures, nothing fancy just pure audio that will allow people to record them to cassette and listen to them on the way to work etc. I'd do some kind of flash presentation before going the video route, ask yourself what a video feed will get you that a slide show and audio won't, remember that many of your students will be on 56k or less.
Notes to the curriculum designers;
- Optional material. In my experience you will have some distance students who have large ammounts of prior knowledge, optional material will allow you to challenge these students without placing extra pressure on those that are struggling.
- Be very prompt when answering student questions. Solo study is very isolating and having to wait more than one working day for a response just unacceptable.
- Allocate enough tutors (see above). Make sure assesment marks are back promptly. (This is where my course falls down.) It is exceedingly frustrating to not have your first assignment back when your doing your third or fourth.
Best of luck
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I recently participated in a Latin I course over a video distance learning setup. The teacher was located in a town about 15 miles away, but could have just as easily been 1500 miles away, and taught very effectively.
Each classroom on the system was setup with a camera for the instructor and a camera for the students, microphones for everyone desk in the room, a chalkboard which was situated so that it could be seen on the instructor camera, and a small setup that served as an overhead projector. The teachers most often use this for notes and such as it is more convenient than traditional chalkboard use.
We also had a full audio-visual setup so that the teacher could play video onto the system for all participant to see, or so students could record class periods for viewing. The entire setup was controlled by a fairly simple piece of software on a touch-screen interfaced PC. No one had trouble using the system.
We only had two incidents where we lost connection with the host and these were either intentional, or quickly remedied. It was no different than a teacher calling in sick.
I would suggest you do something similar, if you really want distance-learning. It is very effective.
Pax Digitalia
HTH
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
Usually administrators see distance learning as a way of making money. They get the same tuition or fees, but don't have to pay for heating a classroom, janitors, etc. What they don't realize is that doing distance learning right is very expensive, not least because it's a huge amount of work for the instructor to set up the first time, and they can't do it without release time.
There are also some real problems associated with distance learning. Students don't form the same kind of social bonds they normally would. In the science classes I teach, I like to have the students do little hands-on experiments, which they wouldn't be able to do at home. And of course, how do you teach labs? There's also the issue of students pulling scams, like getting help on exams. (At my school, we recently had a person take an entire course for someone else.) Students in these courses also tend to lack the necessary commitment. Of course, all these problems were problems back when distance learning meant TV telecourses. Distance learning has usually been a failure, and probably will be until technology changes drastically (like really fast broadband access in all the students' homes).
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IMHO, the best compromise solution is audio streaming (teacher -> student) with a discussion board/photo album. The way it works is that the teacher lectures along to the photo album. The discussion baord is used for the studnets to post questions and offer solutions to examples.
The only drawback is that the use of a discussion board requires students with a bit of restraint and sometimes that's more of an issue that people think (even with adults).
My $0.02, having done just what I described
-dave
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Frequently there were equipment problems, network problems, and the latency was ridiculous. The lag and audio quality was so bad the students in Hawaii hardly ever asked questions. How would you like to come to class to see a message written on the board by the TA saying "Sorry, we can't get NetMeeting working today."
A better approach would be to send the audio portion using POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). If you figure how much each student pays in tuition and divide it by the number of lectures he or she attends, the price of the phone call is nothing. Even if you were paying a dollar a minute you still come out a head, keep in mind 30 or so students were attending remotely. One lecture missed due to technical issues means hundreds of dollars in wasted tuition.
I work for an elearning software company, and I can say from experience that if your distance learning initiatives are dependent on video/audio feeds, you're most likely going to run into problems.
One of the main problems is end-user bandwidth. We have a completely web-based elearning product that requires nothing beyond a 4.0 browser and a 28.8 connection, and still end users run into problems...
For elearning today, you're best off using something with forums, threaded messaage boards and text chat. This makes it easier for the teacher to control the situation, and easier for the students to ask questions without completely interrupting. These methods actually fit the model better, and you don't have to worry about as many issues with getting the information out to the student.