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Session F3D Supporting an Interactive Classroom Environment in a Cross-Cultural Course
Abstract
This paper describes a novel offering of a US- based course in Computer Science at a Chinese university. A senior-level Algorithms course from the University of Washington was offered at Beihang University in Beijing, China through Tutored Video Instruction, whereby lectures recorded in class at the University of Washington were subsequently shown at Beihang and facilitated by local teaching assistants. In this mode of instruction, the Chinese teaching assistants conducted interactive classes using both the video materials and a classroom interaction system (Classroom Presenter) for electronically supported student activities. These activities were done using a system of networked Tablet PCs, which allowed the students to electronically submit their work to the instructor, and enabled the instructor to display student submissions as well as ink on the lecture slides. This work has two main contributions: it demonstrates that Tutored Video Instruction coupled with classroom interaction technology is a viable strategy for offering asynchronous distance versions of courses while maintaining the interactivity of classroom environments. It also shows how language and cultural barriers can be overcome by combining recorded materials with facilitated delivery.
... This research will investigate and develop technology to help manage the many academic tasks required of deaf and hard of hearing students. Development will parallel other educational technologies (namely Classroom Presenter [1] and ConferenceXP [2]) so that technology for deaf students will be similar to those used by all students. ...
... Collaboration Technology has been shown to enhance education in the classroom and these " digital " environments open up new possibilities for leveling the academic playing field. The University of Washington's Classroom Presenter uses a system of networked Tablet PCs allowing students to electronically submit their work and/or questions to the instructor who can then choose to display submissions and digital ink on lecture slides [1]. ConferenceXP, developed at Microsoft Research, provides the infrastructure for networking the Tablet PCs, and is also used for audio and video distance learning and classroom capture [2]. ...
Educational technology has the potential to better include deaf and hard of hearing students in the academic mainstream. This research involves development and testing of a classroom platform for deaf and hard of hearing students to access remote interpreters and captioners, avoid visual dispersion, and facilitate interaction in the classroom. Introduction Entering mainstream universities (at all levels) involves extra challenges for people who are deaf and hard of hearing: skilled sign language interpreters and captioners with advanced domain knowledge can be difficult to find; multiple visual channels of information in the classroom can be difficult to juggle; and collaboration inside and outside the classroom is often strained due to language barriers. Classroom technology research is currently improving educational experiences for all students and this creates opportunities to better include deaf and hard of hearing students. Wireless networks, data projectors, and portable computing devices can allow remote interpreters, support sharing and capture of instructional materials, and provide additional communication channels for all. A more digital academic environment creates an opportunity for customization to better suit the needs of individual students. This research will investigate and develop technology to help manage the many academic tasks required of deaf and hard of hearing students. Development will parallel other educational technologies (namely Classroom Presenter [1] and ConferenceXP [2]) so that technology for deaf students will be similar to those used by all students.
... In particular, we discuss issues of language, relationship building, and promoting classroom interaction. For a broader discussion of the course, please see [6]. ...
In this paper we discuss cultural issues encountered while offering an Algorithms course from a US university at a Chinese university using Tutored Video Instruction (TVI). TVI is a distance learning methodology where lectures are recorded at one site and then shown to a group of students at a remote site by Teaching Assistants (TAs) who stop the video periodically for questions and discussion. In conducting this cross-cultural class, we were interested in determining if we could overcome the issues of using English language materials for Chinese students, achieve a sense of local ownership of the course, and create an interactive classroom environment. We were generally successful in achieving these goals by providing supporting materials and working closely with the Teaching Assistants who served as facilitators.
In this paper we discuss cultural issues encountered while offering an Algorithms course from a US university at a Chinese university using Tutored Video Instruction (TVI). TVI is a distance learning methodology where lectures are recorded at one site and then shown to a group of students at a remote site by Teaching Assistants (TAs) who stop the video periodically for questions and discussion. In conducting this cross-cultural class, we were interested in determining if we could overcome the issues of using English language materials for Chinese students, achieve a sense of local ownership of the course, and create an interactive classroom environment. We were generally successful in achieving these goals by providing supporting materials and working closely with the Teaching Assistants who served as facilitators.
Resumo Este trabalho apresenta uma proposta de desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta educacional baseada no uso de dispositivos móveis com caneta eletrônica, com o intuito de permitir a construção de um ambiente educacional colaborativo, fundamentado no modelo do aprendizado ativo. Experimentos foram realizados com o intuito de medir a interação dos alunos e professor e a integração e organi-zação de exercícios feitos pelos alunos. Os resultados permitiram identificar os benefícios e vanta-gens que a aplicação desse tipo de ferramenta pode ter em sala de aula, como o aumento da motiva-ção e participação dos alunos e a possibilidade de feedback em tempo real do professor. Abstract This work shows the development of an educational tool, supported by pen based mobile devices, that has the goal to support the creation of a collaborative educational environment, based on the Active Learning model. A prototype was developed and validated by experiments which objectives were measuring the interaction between the students and teacher, and the possibility of insertion, analysis and comparison of the student's content in the classroom. The results show the benefits and vantages that the use of such interactive tools have in the classroom, like the increase of motivation and participation of the students and the teacher´s possibility to receive, in real time, the students feedback about the content and concepts they learned during the class.
CopyCat is an America Sign Language (ASL) game, which uses gesture recognition technology to help young Deaf children practice ASL skills. Our database of signing samples was collected from user studies of Deaf children playing a Wizard of Oz version of the game at the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf. We have created an automatic sign language recognition system for the game. We believe that we can improve the accuracy of this system by characterizing and modeling disfluencies found in the children's signing.
Purpose
Within the last few years, a couple of presentation systems have been developed for assisting higher education. This article aims to provides an overview of available systems and highlight differences regarding their individual intention and technical approaches.
Design/methodology/approach
The article consists of a comprehensive system and literature review and provides a taxonomy. Famous systems are categorized and discussed including their individual approaches.
Findings
The advantages and disadvantages of different approaches are presented. The discussion provides readers also with information relevant for rating systems according their personal needs.
Research limitations/implications
The categorization for presentation systems can be extended and applied for the categorization of audience response systems.
Practical implications
A source of information that assists users while they choose an appropriate existing presentation system and developers while they design new ones.
Originality/value
This article presents a workflow‐oriented taxonomy for educational presentation systems which is used to analyze several systems. In addition, the different underlying conceptual and technical approaches of different systems are discussed in this work. The provided information is useful for users and developers of such systems.
Participation in classroom settings decreases with class size and di-versity, thus creating passive modes of learning, due to feelings of shyness, peer pressure, and the like. Computing technology can help by creating a "safe haven" for student participation, but the successful introduction of tools into the class-room, already a dynamic and tool-rich setting, presents challenges. We describe the design of ActiveClass, an application for encouraging in-class participation. This system has been used in two sections of a second course in computer pro-gramming, providing a rich source of insight into technology-mediated learning and how technology molds student life.
The Learning Experience Project is an initiative of Microsoft Research's Learning Sciences and Technology group. The goal of this project is to explore how to make collaborative learning a compelling and rich experience by assuming the availability of emerging and enabling technologies, such as high-bandwidth networks, wireless devices, Tablet PCs, and the advanced features in Microsoft ® Windows ® XP. The foundation of the Learning Experience Project is the ConferenceXP research platform. ConferenceXP enables universities to build less infrastructure and concentrate on researching and developing collaborative applications that enhance the learning experience in and out of the classroom. By delivering high-quality, low-latency audio and video over broadband connections, as well as providing a flexible com-mon framework, ConferenceXP supports the development of real-time collaboration and videoconferencing applications.
TRADITIONAL METHODS for teaching science courses at the post-secondary level employ a lecture format of instruction in which
the majority of students are passively listening to the instructor and jotting down notes. Current views of learning and instruction
challenge the wisdom of this traditional pedagogic practice by stressing the need for the learner to play an active role in
constructing knowledge. The emerging technology of classroom communication systems offers a promising tool for helping instructors
create a more interactive, student-centered classroom, especially when teaching large courses. In this paper we describe our
experiences teaching physics with a classroom communication system calledClasstalk. Classtalk facilitated the presentation of questions for small group work as well as the collection of student answers and the display
of histograms showing how the class answered, all of which fed into a class-wide discussion of students’ reasoning. We foundClasstalk to be a useful tool not only for engaging students in active learning during the lecture hour but also for enhancing the
overall communication within the classroom. Equally important, students were very positive aboutClasstalk-facilitated instruction and believed that they learned more during class than they would have during a traditional lecture.
In this paper, we describe a distance learning system that would allow resource-starved village schools in rural India to benefit from the better human and con- tent resources available in the urban environments. The e-learning landscape is littered with misguided and expensive "wire-the-schools" projects that have little to show for in the end. To avoid retracing these missteps, we must follow at least two important prin- ciples in our solution: (1) cost realism, which is essen- tial if we were to scale up the system to encompass a large number of villages, schools, and students in the long run; and (2) building systems that solve end-to- end education problems, instead of narrowly focusing on just providing connectivity. The proposed Digital StudyHall system has the fol- lowing novel key components. The first is a generic digital communication mechanism that places bits on storage media transported by the postal sys- tem instead of wires. This mechanism, the Post- manet, provides pervasive, high-bandwidth, and low- cost asynchronous connectivity to just about any place. When combined with a low-latency channel, such as a packet radio connection, we may combine the latency and bandwidth advantages of both chan- nels. Robotic arm-based automation in our head- quarters site further enhances transparency and effi- ciency. The second is a mechanism that turns regu- lar TV screens into "networked thin client displays."
One potentially useful feature of future computing environments will be the ability to capture the live experiences of the occupants and to provide that record to users for later access and review. Over the last three years, a group at the Georgia Institute of Technology has designed and extensively used a particular instrumented environment: a classroom that captures the traditional lecture experience. This paper describes the history of the Classroom 2000 project and provides results of extended evaluations of the effect of automated capture on the teaching and learning experience. There are many important lessons to take away from this long-term, large-scale experiment with a living, ubiquitous computing environment. The environment should address issues of scale and extensibility, it should continuously be evaluated for effectiveness, and the ways in which the environment both improves and hinders the activity that it aims to support—in our case, education—need to be understood and acted upon. In d escribing our experiences and lessons learned, we hope to motivate other researchers to take more seriously the challenge of ubiquitous computing—the creation and exploration of the everyday use of computationally rich environments.
This paper describes an application of classroom technology in support of teaching through the use of examples and active learn- ing techniques. Here we report on using Classroom Presenter, a Tablet PC based classroom interaction system, in a senior level course in Algorithms - a domain for which the instructor believes working on sample problems is critical to student learning in the classroom. The role of the technology was to integrate activities into the lecture so that students have the opportunity to work with concrete examples in class, while the instructor can collect and review student work in real time, incorporating selected student answers into the discussion. In this paper, we describe the peda- gogical goals of the instructor, the types of activities used to achieve those goals, and the role that technology played in sup- porting those goals and activities. The contributions of the paper are in showing how classroom technology can be used to support pedagogical choices, as well as in emphasizing the value of hav- ing clear pedagogical goals when incorporating a new technology in the classroom. We believe the application of technology as illustrated in this work could bring similar benefits to the instruc- tion in other disciplines.
Digital inking systems are becoming increasingly popular across a variety of domains. In particular, many systems now allow instructors to write on digital surfaces in the classroom. Yet, our understanding of how people actually use writing in these systems is limited. In this paper, we report on classroom use of writing in one such system, in which the instructor annotates projected slides using a Tablet PC. Through a detailed analysis of lecture archives, we identify key use patterns. In particular, we categorize a major use of ink as analogous to physical gestures and present a framework for analyzing this ink; we explore the relationship between the ephemeral meaning of many annotations and their persistent representation; and we observe that instructors make conservative use of the system's features. Finally, we discuss implications of our study to the design of future digital inking systems.
In this article the authors describe a new technique for using videotaped educational materials. The method makes use of unrehearsed, unedited videotapes of regular classroom courses, which can be produced at very low cost. The videotapes are used for the instruction of small groups of students (typically 3 to 10) who are assisted by paraprofessional tutors as they watch the tape. For this reason, the method is called Tutored Videotape Instruction (TVI).
Tutored Video Instruction (TVI) is a collaborative learning methodology in which a small group of students studies a videotape of a lecture. We constructed a fully virtual version of TVI called Distributed Tutored Video Instruction (DTVI), in which each student has a networked computer with audio microphone-headset and video camera to support communication within the group. In this report, we compare survey questionnaires, observations of student interactions, and grade outcomes for students in the face-to-face TVI condition with those of students in the DTVI condition. Our analysis also includes comparisons with students in the original lecture. This two and a half year study involved approximately 700 students at two universities. Despite finding a few statistically significant process differences between TVI and DTVI, the interactions were for the most part quite similar. Course grade outcomes for TVI and DTVI were indistinguishable, and these collaborative conditions proved better than lecture. We conclude that this kind of highly interactive virtual collaboration can be an effective way to learn. *Sun Microsystems Laboratories = SERA Learning Technologies 2570 West El Camino Real, Suite 300 Mountain View, CA 94040 email addresses: sipusic@socrates.berkeley.edu pannoni@sera.com randall.smith@sun.com john.dutra@sun.com gibbons@ee.stanford.edu bert.sutherland@sun.com 1999 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. The SML Technical Report Series is published by Sun Microsystems Laboratories, of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Printed in U.S.A. Unlimited copying without fee is permitted provided that the copies are not made nor distributed for direct commercial advantage, and credit to the source is given. Otherwise, no part of this work covered b...
In this paper we describe our experiences of exporting our introductory programming courses to community colleges. We used Tutored Video Instruction (TVI) as the mode of instruction where recorded versions of our lectures were shown to groups of students with local instructors periodically stopping the lecture for questions and discussion. We have offered a total of 16 sections of TVI courses, 11 were of our first quarter programming course (CSE142), and 5 were of our second quarter programming course (CSE 143). The courses were offered at seven institutions. Approximately 180 students completed the courses. We identify factors which contributed positively and negatively to the use of TVI for introductory programming courses. The two most important changes to our TVI program based on these experiences will the use of studio produced lectures and the abandonment of centralized course administration.