Executive Summary of Results

Technology is playing a key role in opening new horizons in the overall learning process. With the requisite infrastructure in place—CPU speeds that support rich graphics, availability of large storage space and high bandwidth networks—we are at opportune crossroads where we can employ the existing technological infrastructure to enhance our existing models of learning. The recent availability of technologies such as Tablet PCs and Wi-Fi networks provides opportunities for developing new pedagogical environments which were previously infeasible. While wireless and distributed computing technology is beginning to get embedded into the extant classroom environment, e.g., through the use of Wi-Fi enabled laptops, such induction has focused primarily on imitating traditional class room environments. What is needed is the development of new modes of active learning that can effectively support “student-centric” features such as hands-on learning, interactive collaboration, learning by doing, and the ability to dynamically capture the learner’s experience. The introduction of the Tablet PC with its sophisticated pen interface presents a unique opportunity that can help provide support for new modes of active learning.

The objective of this project was to develop a prototype of the next generation learner-centric collaborative pedagogical environment. The project entailed: (i) employing a scheduled course, S535 Mobile Applications Development, to develop a proof-of-concept prototype of e-learning environment; (ii) developing a next generation e-seminar system (called VConnect).

Need for the Project

As computing technology becomes faster and cheaper, and network bandwidth continues to grow, the art of presenting can harness these advancements to expand the audience beyond the physical forum. Teleconferencing and video conferencing technologies have been around for a number of years, but only recently have they included other tools pertinent to the effective delivery of information.

Our goal is not to develop yet another video conferencing application. We want to develop a program that centers itself on the very notion of how presentations run. We feel that presentations aren’t just blindly providing 2-way communication through all mechanisms possible. Instead, we want to clearly establish the roles that speakers and audience members play throughout the presentation. The speaker should be in control of the

presentation, but at the same time, the audience should not be a group of passive observers. VConnect intends to make those roles well-defined while providing all of the tools necessary for an effective presentation.

VConnect was built to be a single, unified tool that can be used in any presentation setting: a classroom, a meeting, or a lecture/presentation. The goal of VConnect is to enable the most effective delivery of information through all of the tools, readily available in a unified interface: audio/video capabilities, slide shows, ink annotations, as well as a unique interaction component that allows the presenter and the audience to communicate verbally, visually and textually in real-time.

Additionally, the intent of VConnect is to provide a powerful application that harnesses the power of modern networks as well as the portability and convenience of a Tablet PC. With mobility becoming a must in ubiquitous computing, we wanted to develop powerful presentation software without being limited to a desktop PC.

Use of Technology

• Audio/Visual Capabilities

Nowadays, no presentation software should be without the ability to provide the audience with both an audio and video feed, giving a more “local” feel to the presentation. Harnessing much of the presentation framework provided by ConferenceXP, all of the attendees are shown a video feed in the upper right hand corner of the app. The speaker also has a video feed which is initially hidden behind the other features since most speakers will not necessarily want to stare at a video feed of themselves. This video feed, however, can be brought to the foreground using the “Video” button on the left. In addition to the video, everyone will automatically tune in to the speaker’s audio feed.

• Attendees List and A/V Controls

As we’ve mentioned before, there are a number of mechanisms which allow interaction between the speaker and the remote audience. One of the key features in this area is the speaker’s ability to “grant” audio/visual control to one of the attendees. The area where attendees would usually see the video feed the instructor sees a roster which lists all of the current attendees.

Icons related to audio and video allow the instructor to turn these capabilities on/off for the attendees. The instructor can facilitate a small verbal discussion by enabling the audio feed for 1 or more attendees, allowing everyone to hear them speak. When the speaker wishes to “take the floor again”, he/she can simply turn their feeds off, so they are the only one speaking.

In addition, the instructor can transfer control of the video feed to other attendees with a video camera attached. If the instructor wishes to let someone else talk, he/she can enable the participant’s audio, but also change the active video feed so that instead of watching the speaker in your video window, you are watching the participant. Again, at any time, the speaker can take back control simply by clicking the buttons again to disable A/V for the participant.

• Slide Show/Whiteboard

PowerPoint and other presentation software has become a staple when it comes to presentations. VConnect gives you the ability to share a PowerPoint presentation with the participants. The speaker can open up any PowerPoint file and shuffle through the slides. As he/she moves from slide to slide, the attendees will automatically follow along with each slide transition. This feature also embraces the concept mentioned over and over about the roles that the participants play. Although the attendees automatically follow along with the speaker, the attendee can revisit any of the previous slides that the speaker has already presented (but not move ahead). This is beneficial to many participants who feel as though the speaker may be going through the slides too fast. However, when the speaker moves to the next slide, the attendees will automatically “catch up” so you never get “lost”, wondering where the speaker currently is.

Although the ability for a slide show allows you to present pre-planned material, the slide show feature allows for the dynamic addition of “ink annotations” on the slides themselves. This allows the instructor to draw diagrams and highlight key points. These annotations are, obviously, seen by the attendees. By selecting some of the standard color pens or by using the color chooser, you can provide annotations with multiple colors to aid in more clearly understandable markup.

Speakers are not the only ones able to add annotations to the slides. Any participant can add marks to the slides. The only difference is that markup added by anyone other  than the speaker is only seen by that particular person. This way, attendees can freely add annotations for their own purposes without affecting the view of anyone else.

Another point for dynamic content comes in the form of a built-in whiteboard. Notice in the instructor’s whiteboard, there is a “New Page” button. This will literally insert a blank slide as the next slide in the presentation. For instance, if you were on slide 4 and clicked “New Page”, slide 5 would be the blank slide, and the previous slide 5 would get “nudged” to slide 6. Now the speaker can write any notes or draw any diagrams anywhere he/she feels in the presentation. The combination of all of these features allows the speaker to present pre-made content as well as draw diagrams on blank slides or even on top of existing slides where applicable. All the while, the participants can follow the slides at their own pace and take notes directly on the presentation.

• Interactive Module for Questions and Comments

The last feature facilitates more interaction between the speaker and the audience. Along the bottom of the screen in the participant’s window, there is an area where they can type a question and send it to the speaker. The speaker’s client will queue up all of the questions that have arrived. This allows the audience to ask questions and make comments (for instance “Too fast”) to the speaker without disrupting the flow of the lecture. At any time, the speaker can address the questions as he/she sees fit.

When a question arrives in the speaker’s queue, there are 3 controls associated with each question. These allow for a number of different styles of “question management.” For instance, the delete button (the red X) simply removes the notification from the queue. More often than not, this will be the preferred action once the question/concern has been addressed (or dismissed). In addition, the speaker can keep the notification, but simply mark it as “read” by clicking the “?” which will turn into a green checkmark. This is simply a bookkeeping mechanism to help keep track of concerns you have/have not addressed.

In conjunction with the 2 controls mentioned above, queue information is embedded in the application’s status bar. The status bar provides a quick tally of the total number of outstanding questions in the queue as well as how many of them have not been marked as “read”. Depending on the speaker’s lecture style and preference, the speaker can quickly determine if he/she should deviate from the lecture material to address some of the questions or not.

The final control on the far left of the queue entry is a link to the attendee list entry for the person who asked the question. The purpose of such a link is to provide hassle-free access to the audio/visual controls for that attendee’s client. For instance, if the speaker wanted to talk back and forth with the attendee or ask for clarification, the speaker could do so with 2 quick clicks. This way, the attendees aren’t limited simply to typing in questions to the instructor over and over again.

Instructional Design Plan

Describe how the use of technology used supported your teaching approach:

• What student learning outcomes were expected?
• How did your teaching plan encourage active learning, provide feedback, address respective learning styles, and build collaboration?
• What resources were used? (campus technology support services, etc.)
• Would your project be easily understood and executed by other faculty?

VConnect is more advanced than just a standard video conferencing application. A wide array of tools, along with a more reasonable way to think about the “roles” of participants in a presentation, work to streamline communication from presenter to audience and vice versa.

One of the most important aspects of VConnect is not just the tools that are available, but the way that the participants interact with the tools. The software was developed to accommodate for the implicitly defined “roles” that are evident in any presentation. In almost any setting, there is some sort of instructor or speaker while the audience takes on a more passive role. At the same time, however, good presentation style will utilize some sort of feedback/interaction between the two roles (so the audience isn’t completely passive). VConnect has these roles and interactions well defined and each feature of the application reflects this. Here are 2 images to give you a basic idea of the differences between the “speaker mode” and “audience member mode” of the software.

Potential to Impact Student Learning

Clearly define how your project improved student learning - include specific examples of how your project:

• Fostered depth of learning
• Supported efforts to improve retention
• Fostered the learning of large numbers of students
• Has broader applications that will affect learning K-12 or community environments?

This grant partly supported students who participated in a competition, which was part of a scheduled course, S535 Mobile Applications Development, a required course for students in the MSIS program. Vijay Khatri was the faculty mentor for S535 in Spring 2004.

S535 is designed as an interactive “hands-on” project-oriented course with the faculty serving as mentors as student teams develop their applications and business cases. Much like the reality of organizational work, students were assigned to teams with people they did not know. While guidelines with respect to expected deliverables were provided, the teams were left to their own creativity and innovativeness regarding what functionality they wanted to include in their prototype and present in their business cases which addressed technical, behavioral and organizational issues. In the end, the student teams needed to demonstrate not only technical functionality, but also an ability – via written and verbal presentation communication – to “sell” their solution to a panel of judges.

Specifically, the S535 project required four teams of students (of four students each) to build a learner-centric classroom using ConferenceXP and Tablet PCs. ConferenceXP provides a platform for implementing interactive collaborative technologies. Tablet PCs allowed active participation of the students in classroom, thus, helping develop a learner-centric environment. The S535 students learned how to gather and analyze requirements for a “real” problem, develop an application and evaluate the impact of the developed software artifact. Tablet PCs, wireless technology and collaborative technologies are technologies of the future. We believe that an experiential exposure to development and evaluation of such technology to solve “real” problems greatly enhanced students’ learning.

The competition was judged by executives from industry including the CEO of Toshiba-USA, Mr. Hideo Ito and a researcher from Microsoft Research, Mr. Michel Pahud. All judges were delighted by the level of commitment of the students. Mr. Hideo Ito (Chairman and CEO, Toshiba America) commented: “I fully enjoyed engaging with your students in this course and competition. They did a super job of utilizing Toshiba Tablet PCs. I was also quite impressed with the commitment and efforts by the faculty members to make this successful. It was first class indeed!” Michel Pahud (Research Senior Development Engineer, Microsoft Research) commented: “It’s the first time that I see this level of commitment and level of creativity from student’s projects. Congratulations to all the students!!! And also congratulations to you and other members of IU for the great organization of this contest and coaching of the students.”

This grant supported the Teaching Assistants for the course, purchase of some of the requisite books for the students, and some hardware (like webcams) for the students. One of the teams that won the first prize in the competition even presented their project prototype in one of the well-respected conferences in Information Systems: 14th Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS) in Washington D.C. The grant partly supported two students (Vasudha Chandrasekaran and Amanda Stephano) to present their prototype at WITS in Washington, D.C.

Assessment Plan

Briefly explain the effectiveness of your assessment plan:

• What measure of assessment was used?
• How did your approach obtain measures of performance?
• Did you feel your measurement was accurate and effective?

This application provides lots of avenues for improvements and modifications. Here is a list of some of the considerations that we would like to see pursued in the future:

• The Addition of More Jobs

With the VConnect suite, there are already jobs included in the core package that should suit the needs of most presentation styles. This does not mean that we feel this encompasses the entire spectrum of features. We would like to determine which other features that presenters would find most useful without extending the level of complexity of the system.

• Usability Studies to Determine More Effective Techniques

Aside from simply adding more features to the program, we’d like to improve on what we’ve already provided. VConnect contains what we feel are sufficient tools to hold an effective presentation, but usage and experience might prove otherwise. Should that be the case, we’d like to see better ways to handle the capabilities we have already established.

• Protocol Independent A/V

Although all communication data is filtered through the post office, the audio/visual feeds that VConnect provides are actually provided directly through CXP. The application has mechanisms for manipulating the CXP feeds without an issue, but we would like to see an implementation of A/V that would work independently of the content provider.

• Quality of Service With Less Overhead

One of the key concerns that will haunt this field for a while to come is network bandwidth. Although it’s slowly becoming less of a concern, we still have a lot of data that we want to channel through this limited resource. We’ve suggested and provided some mechanisms to help decrease network usage, but there is still work to be done to minimize the amount of data that actually needs to be sent around while still providing the same level of content.

Plan for Colleague Development

Describe your role and activities as a mentor:

• What mentoring activities were implemented to assist colleagues?
• How did you help to develop colleague's instructional technology skills?
• How do you think your contributions to the Knowledge Base will help colleagues planning similar projects?
• Is your project approach potentially applicable to other contexts or disciplines?
• What tips would you offer?

Throughout the development of the application, we discovered many things about the nature of presentation software. Despite the fact that technology enables software developers to do incredible things and create elaborate programs, in applications for our target domain, we quickly understood sort of a golden rule: keep it simple, stupid. It was quite easy to lose track of the number of drastic interface and feature changes that took place without adding or removing any “power” from the application. For instance, the slide show used to be a completely separate job (hence different window) from the blank slide/whiteboard feature. It quickly became evident that there was just too much going on. It was tedious to switch between both windows despite their very similar purposes. Things got too complex, and we had to simplify the process.

A similar idea fueled the question job feature that allows you to click one button and jump directly to the attendee’s roster entry in another window for easy access to their A/V controls. Again, manually finding the name of the roster gets tedious and unnecessary, so we could achieve a more effective application by taking the hassle out. In many applications in other areas, customization, pages of options, loads of features are all very useful. Given the real-time nature of the use of presentation software and extremely limited time-tables for single-session usage, we learned quickly that you must make everything as hassle free and simple as possible.

On a more technical level, the biggest concept we were able to pull from this was insight into the effectiveness of different networking protocols for applications in this domain. As we mentioned previously, CXP relied on a multicast, non-persistent connection to enhance scalability and lower latency. Although this is a wonderful idea, we learned that such a protocol is not without tradeoffs. By foregoing persistent TCP connections, we lost certain quality of services guarantees and the guarantee that all of the information will reach its destination. By implementing the packet loss daemon, we found a seemingly happy medium which gives a little bit of the best from both worlds. Perhaps there is still more to be seen from such an implementation, but we found that non-persistent data transfers can still provide relatively fast service while providing a high degree of data integrity.

Final Comments on Project Results

• Do you think you met the goals of your project?
• What, if anything,would you do differently?
• Did you have any unexpected outcomes? (positive or negative)
• Would you recommend this teaching approach to colleagues?
• What other comments or suggestions would you offer to complete this report?

VConnect set out to better define the mechanics of presentation software.  We didn’t intend to throw a video camera and microphone to the users and send them on their way.  Instead we wanted the software to help users interact with each other in the same way that they would in a face-to-face setting.  By having two different behavior modes, one for the speaker and one for the audience member, we enabled the speaker to control the flow of the presentation while still giving the audience members the freedom to interact with the speaker as well as take notes and store the data for themselves for later use.

Along with the definition of roles, we provided a myriad of features to help facilitate not only the delivery of the speaker’s content, but also the interaction between the speaker and the audience.  All of this was accomplished with very little complexity for the end user.

Although there are certain aspects that we would have liked to explore and develop further, we’ve accomplished all of the main goals of the project.  The software, which we feel exhibits all of the properties we desired, is ready for formal testing, which afterwards would allow us to release the software to the public.

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Last updated: 18 May, 2007

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