A Remote Learning Environment - The Network is the Classroom
Books are non-interactive; people often learn better with additional 'input' -- for example a teacher's spoken word -- and with the ability to get clarifications during the learning process. Some remote-learning solutions can address this problem, but generally these solutions are costly to the average user (an in-home full-motion videoconferencing system, for instance, is very expensive.) Network tools currently available can fill the role of the book and provide the multiple 'input paths; spoken word, music, animations, video, graphics and give limited interactivity within the lesson - the student can back up, jump ahead, even leave bookmarks - and directly interact with the teacher involved.

Such a network-tool scheme can also take direct advantage of the fastest-growing reference library in the world - the net itself - by being able to access WWW, ftp, and other net-accessible services anywhere by just inserting a link into the lesson page.

What does the student need to get this?

• A Computer - The student must have access to a networked computer capable of displaying text, graphics, audio, and perhaps video (though video, as will be discussed later, is an expensive luxury in this environment.) Networking can be either by via a high-speed direct connection (e.g. ethernet, cable modem), or by one of the lower-speed network-via-serial line (e.g. PPP, SLIP - using phone lines) protocols which are freely available for most personal computers. A high-speed modem or network card is obviously required, but these can be easily obtained for most microcomputers.
• A WWW browser - Web browsers are generally available, either free or at a nominal charge. (Indeed, for educational purposes, some for-pay browsers are free of charge). This browser should have the ability to handle - either directly or via a software agent - text, graphics, animations, streaming audio (streaming audio is that which is sent over the network and played on the user's workstation as the downloading occurs, not downloaded in toto before being available, thus obviating the need for acres of disk space on the student's machine.)

So, what are we talking about, really? What does this "multimedia textbook" look like?
A lesson would be made up of a series of web pages, analogous to the slides or writing on a blackboard used in a teaching presentation in a normal classroom. Each of the pages would have text, and any or all of:

• Audio: the spoken words of the teacher, or whatever else might be required.
• Graphics: drawings, digitized pictures
• Animations: e.g. "animated gifs", java animations
• Applications: java applets, www forms (cgi)
• Video Clips, e.g. quicktime movies
• Links to references bearing on the matter at hand

A collection of these pages make up a lesson; a collection of lessons make up a course. This collection of web pages can also function as a permanent reference work for the student (and the teacher) after the lesson is complete.

What kind of equipment do we need to use to "capture" the teaching presentation?

• A tape recorder, preferably battery operated, portable (approximate cost: less than $50.)
• A reasonably good microphone, preferably a clip-on "tie-tack" type (approximate cost: less than $30.)
• A belt-pack to hold the tape player while being used by the teacher in the classroom. (approximate cost: variable.)
• Many, many batteries and tapes (approximate cost: variable; rechargeable batteries can lower overall long-term costs; a wireless microphone connected to a room-power recorder can lower battery costs significantly; one could record digitally to a disk to obviate the tape-deck, but then you need a disk-heavy machine in the classroom.)

The intention is to create a system that allows "hands free" operation for the teacher, with little or no inpact on the teacher's technique. Also, the "multimedia coordinator" (see below) need not attend and record (or worse, videotape) each teaching presentation - the recording rig is simple to operate; the teacher can just give the raw tape to the coordinator. The only alteration in the flow of the class is that the teacher must remember to turn over the tape (if the teaching presentation is longer than one tape-side can hold.)

What is to be done (on the provider side)?
There is a certain minimum set of hardware and software required for this scheme to work. The student's side has already been addressed. What about the teacher's?

• A WWW server, with a "streaming audio" (e.g. "RealAudio", or "Shockwave") server, and optionally "streaming video" (e.g. "VDO", "RealMedia") server. This machine should have lots of disk space, and a high-speed network connection.
• A multimedia input and formatting station, with video and audio digitization capability (limited editing ability is a help), a flatbed scanner (with OCR software for scanning text in), digital camera, image manipulation software (e.g. "PhotoShop", "Color It"), animation software (e.g. "clip2gif", "Director/Shockwave"). This should allow formatting the teacher's materials no matter what original form they are in.
• Professor's interaction (with the student) station - this may already be present on the teacher's desk, depending on the mechanism chosen for interaction.

What does the teacher need to do? A lot. Any teacher who has taught a class knows that there is lot of planning that goes into creating a course. An overall plan of the course evolves into individual lesson plans. But through it all, a teacher can know during the actual teaching presentation that he/she can look into the eyes of the students and get immediate feedback as to how things are going, and vary things to suit. (Teaching is really improvisational theater, after all.) Translating this into a useful online presentation is a complex, but not impossible, proposition. First, the lesson to be taught has to be presented as completely as possible. Then all the various media must be collected and integrated to present the lesson (either by the teacher him/her self, or by the "multimedia coordinator" (see below), who assists the teacher.) Then the lesson is made available via the network to students, with appropriate 'hooks' for whatever interaction between the students and the teacher and/or testing included.

Then you wait. With remote learning, the teacher's job is done once, and then it's up to the students to access it. This might appear to be a change in roles for teacher and student, but it's just another facet of the change already brought by audiotape or videotape for teaching.

What does the "multimedia coordinator" need to do?
There is no need for a teacher, who is a specialist in a vital field (teaching) to have to do everything by his/her self. I suggest an analogy to recording music, where a "producer", knowledgable in recording techniques, assists the artist in presenting their work via a recording media. A person well-versed in the various media available can assist the teacher in matching existing media with electronic presentation techniques, and will do, or supervise, the work of digitizing all these various media. I call this person the "multimedia coordinator".

Once all this material is made ready, it must be made available via the world-wide web. The multimedia coordinator needs to be conversant in web presentation mechanisms, cgi scripts, streaming audio delivery, and so on.

The multimedia coordinator's responsibility is fidelity to the teacher's vision of the lesson, what needs to be taught, and how. The MC must also collect all the software tools that the student will need and make it easily installable on the machines the students will use (including at home.) This is a complex proposition. (While some integrated tool might seem to be desirable - if it existed - the solution I'm proposing has a significant advantage: it's free!)

Direct Interactivity: Waiting by the Phone
So this is all wonderful, but what if the student has a question? In class, one can just raise one's hand, and get immediate feedback. Or, one may visit the teacher during 'office hours', during which one may get true one-on-one interactivity. This could be emulated most obviously via electronic mail, but also by using one of a number of the existing "network chat" systems. "Internet Relay Chat", for instance, is well-supported on many platforms; Cornell's "CU-SeeMe" allows one to interact eyeball-to-eyeball with one's teacher. The teacher and one or more students could easily interact via either method, or several others. Another possibility is to record and index questions asked during the original, live teaching presentation by students as an adjunct to the on-line lesson to be presented textually and aurally. It is very possible that a 'match' between the on-line student's questions and the 'live' student's questions may be found. (This is analogous to 'live' teaching presentation experiences: the brave one who asks a question speaks for the not-so-brave ones who don't.)

Who owns it? Copyrights in remote learning environments
Since a teacher's lecture is copyrighted by him/her; the teacher should be aware of the ramifications of making it available via the web. The copyright issues are really no different than if a teacher hands out annotated slides to the students, but the inclusion of multiple additional media means the teacher's lecture is more thoroughly available - and to a much wider audience - than might seem comfortable. Net-available presentations should include copyright notices to preserve the teacher's rights. Note that most web servers can restrict access to pages if it is desired.

Some Possible improvements
CD ROMS - It might seem that a simple alternative to net-presentation is to place lessons on CD-ROMs. I argue that net-available presentations have a significant advantage in that there is exactly one 'edition' (that available from the web server), so updates/corrections don't require pressing and distributing of new CD-ROMs. Yes, videoclips will be easy with a CD-ROM, but see below for some thoughts on the necessity of lots of video, and too much video will eat up space on the CD-ROM very quickly.

Personal Notes - It would be nice to allow the student to make notes of their own directly on presentation materials, for their own reference (as many students do now). Some browsers make this feature available as "annotations", but a smoother mechanism might be nice: that would allow seamless interleaving of notes with the original lesson materials into a student's own personal class textbook.

Group Learning - There is nothing to stop students from interacting via the network with other students in ways similar to those described for interacting with the teacher. Informal 'classrooms' may be built and disbanded by groups of like-minded students all through the class, for instance by using an IRC channel, or a CUSeeMe conference for group interactions. The advantage of being able to consult with other students can help those having trouble with the lesson, and the mechanisms for this would already be in place as part of the method of interacting with the teacher.

Why not video?
Just about every currently proposed incarnation of a "remote learning" system makes extensive use of video clips and/or video feeds, on the presumption that the moving pictures keep people's attention better. But the price to pay in bandwidth is very high, as is the amount of disk space required on the server. I wonder if it's worth it. Ever watched a video of a class? A teacher stands there and talks, and writes things on the board that are very hard to read on a video screen - not exactly an episode of "The X-Files" in terms of visual stimulation. There are two possible solutions:

Traditional: Do extensive editing of the video before digitizing to intercut other video and images to make it less boring (an excellent example of this done well is the PBS teaching presentation series "The Western Tradition" featuring Dr. Eugen Joseph Weber - though it interesting to note that almost all the historical images presented are not moving; they are simple images. For many episodes of this show, the only "moving image" are the occasional shots of the mostly-unmoving Dr. Weber standing at a podium!)

Videoreduced: Skip the video, and tie the audio into images (including animations), for instance via a cgi script, or using animation tools like Macromind's "Director", for which the "Shockwave" dropin is generally available for most major microcomputer architectures and browsers.

In any case, I argue that it is the audio that matters, not the video. (Test yourself: if the audio goes out when watching a sporting event on TV, is it anywhere near as interesting? On the other hand, if the video goes out - and the audio remains - you can still follow the game, yes?)

Shouldn't we just wait a while? I mean, full motion video bandwidth is only a few years away (so they tell me). If we wait, we can do it all.
Not exactly. No generally-available home-connection system will give anywhere near the bandwidth required; directly-connnected-to-the-network machines still have to contend with network congestion; even the much-touted cable modems may not do the job - they're optimized for heavy traffic in one direction only. The high-bandwidth, low cost solution we'd need is not on the horizon yet.

Besides, full motion video of a teaching presentation is not the answer. What we need is something better than than, something richer -- an augmented teaching presentation, using only the portions of the media of the teaching presentation that actually matter. If you design an online teaching presentation with the minimum media necessary to fully teach the subject, you can always add flashier media later (when bandwidth becomes available) without affecting the presentation's "learning potential." (This might be summed up as "video makes you lazy.") Besides, the logistical problems of this sort of 'minimum necessary' scheme are trivial compared to those of storing, much less sending on demand, long presentations in full-motion video.

Is it all worth it?
Yes. Presuming the course is being taught anyway, collecting the various media together can be simple. Overhead slides can be digitized with a flatbed scanner (writing on the blackboard can be replicated in the teacher's own hand and digitized, or rendered in an actually readable form.) Handouts can be replicated (often easily, since more and more teachers are using a computerized presentation tool to author their slides.) Audio or video recordings can be made for later digitization. All the raw material is there, to be recorded on relatively low-cost hardware for later integration. Making the on-line lessons is straighforward. The value to the students, in making course information directly available in a well-segmented format very like class teaching presentations at the student's convenience, should be obvious. The value to students who cannot, for whatever reason, attend teaching presentations in person, should be equally obvious.

Sounds cool. When can I see a sample?
Right away! Have a look at http://info.rutgers.edu/~mcgrew/Murdocca/ - this is a work in progress to as an adjunct to Dr. Miles Murdocca's CS442 class. My profuse thanks, by the way, to Dr. Murdocca for volunteering to 'guinea pig' these techniques, and in helping to rationalize the web pages associated with it.

Also, in a less "classroom" vein, try: http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/Open-House/ -- a presentation of the speeches and presentations at the 1996 Department of Computer Science Open House. (There are links in each presentation to allow one to download the RealAudio client for the local machine.)

I selected "RealAudio" as the mechanism for delivering streaming audio, since client programs (available free-of-charge from the RealAudio client/server creators) are available for just about every architecture. Also, Sony has recently announced their "WebTV" product will support RealAudio delivery (in the November 1996 issue of "Video" magazine.)

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