Designs of a Collaborative Teaching/Learning Environment

Runhe Huang and Jianhua Ma
Computer Software Department
The University of Aizu, 965-8580, Japan
email: {r-huang, jianhua}@u-aizu.ac.jp

Keywords: collaborative learning, access policy, interactive group discussion, tele-lecturing

1 Introduction

To promote the educational revolution in digital era, the project, CHEER (Computer-based Hyper-Environment for Educational Reformation) [5,6,7] which started in 1997, aims at designing and developing a networked computer based integrated teaching/learning hyper-environment. The integrated hyper-environment includes fives environments, Lecturing Environment, Exploring Environment, Collaborative Environment, Evaluation Environment, and Administration Environment, to support all teaching/learning activities. Collaborative environment aims at supporting collaborative teaching/learning in both asynchronous and synchronous modes among remote teachers and students. The asynchronous collaborations include question-answer, teacher-student forum, teacher forum, and group project. The synchronous collaborations include interactive group discussion and tele-lecturing. Although many researches have been devoted to developing groupware applications and some progress has been made over the last few years [2,8,9], synchronous groupware closely related and systematically supporting teaching and leaarning of an on-line course is still a complex task. A challenging problem is to design dynamic access control policies for different situations (or sessions) [1] in a flexible way without stifle interaction in a collaboration. This paper is focused on describing our current progresses on designing a collaborative teaching/learning environment in CHEER system to support interactive group discussion and tele-lecturing over the intranet and the internet.

2 The Configuration of CHEER System

CHEER system mainly consists of a main server and a multimedia server with the multimedia facilities. The main server and the multimedia server are connected via LANs with the maximum transmission speed of 100Mbps, and the multimedia facilities, such as VTR, digital video camera, digital still camera, and image scanner are linked to the multimedia server. The CHEER system configuration is shown in Fig.1.

3 The Collaborative Teaching/Learning Environment

A collaboration in teaching/learning context usually means a group discussion on a selected topic or a group work on a common assignment/project. The collaboration could be asynchronous or synchronous. The asynchronous collaborations [3] can be carried out relatively easy by communicating among group members via email, news group, ftp file transfer, telnet remote login, and creating and visiting WWW site, shared discussing-board, or by working on a shared workspace freely and equally. The synchronous collaborations include text-based network chatting, networked telephone, interactive group discussion, and interactive tele-lecturing, however, are challenging tasks. The collaborative environment under developing is emphasized on supporting interactive group discussion and tele-lecturing.

3.1 An Integrated Working Space for Interactive Group Discussions

The essential components for the interactive group discussion mainly include a shared whiteboard, chatspace, and channels for real-time speech and video transmissions. For sharing ephemeral information, it requires a common place, where what you see is what others see. The shared whiteboard is referred to the remote sharing of computer display workspace among participants who are in different sites. The working space has multiple windows including Topic, Message Board, Member List, Private, Function Column and the shared whiteboard as shown in Fig.2. The private window is not shared. The shared whiteboard uses multi-page mode.

Each participant has a working space on a computer display terminal in front of him/her. As soon as a group discussion starts, the discussion topic and other related requirements are displayed in the topic window. The member list is given with 3 different states, present, absent, and temporal leave, and the state is dynamically changing depending on each individual attendance. In the shared whiteboard, each participant can input multimedia content, such as, text, simple drawing, an image by clicking corresponding function icons. The shared whiteboard in a multi-page mode can go to the previous page, the next page, or a specified page from the current page upon the request of turning page. The private window enables a participate to view a file or a different page of the current discussion which are not shared with others. The message board is fast and convenient for text-based discussions and making a suggestion, an announcement or a request. The live video image of a participant is provided upon a request. Audio data is transmitted through the audio channel and its volume is controllable by drugging the volume bar in the horizontal direction.

Fig.2 shows an example of the interactive group discussion on the topic of Verification of Precision for a Bump-Mapped Phone Shading Circuit [9]. In the member list, as you can see that Suzuki is absent, Hayasaka is temporal leave, and others are present. Tsuboi's video image and Huang's video image are displayed. The shared whiteboard contains multimedia contents including texts, free drawings, images, and so on. Ma, Tsuboi and Yamamoto are communicating in the message board.

3.2 Interactive Tele-lecturing

The essential components for the interactive tele-lecturing include a shared whiteboard, video image space, private note-pad, and channel for real-time audio transmissions. The shared whiteboard for the interactive tele-lecturing is the same one for the interactive group discussion. But during the interactive tele-lecturing, a teacher uses it for presenting his lecture. During a question-answer time, the shared whiteboard is, of course, used for discussion and explanation. The video image space is designated as a place for students to review the teacher's preprepared video recorded lecture which is down loaded by the students to their local disks before the lecrture is started. The private note-pad offers text inputting and free hand drawing functions for students to make notes during the lecturing. The private note-pad is not shared. The real-time audio transmission enables students to hear alive voice of the teacher.

3.3 Access Control Policies of the shared whiteboard

Shared whiteboards emulate physical whiteboards. When two people or a group of people are working on a topic in a physical chalkboard, social rules and social protocols govern the access to the shared space, so that they do not write in the same region at the same time, nor overwrite or erase what the other is doing. Defining and implementing the policies that regulate access to the remote shared whiteboard is a general and important issue. These are called floor control policies. In CHEER, the interactive group discussion is working in the combination of two modes, free access and equal control. The interactive tele-lecturing exploits chair control.

Free access is that the system lets everyone freely access the shared whiteboard and relies on goodwill, common sense, and social behavior to avoid or resolve conflict. In CHEER, each participant in a group discussion may mark up the whiteboard freely by using sketching tools. It is believed that ``free access'' policy benefits all participants with equal right and offers them a more flexible and natural discussion style, which emulates the traditional classroom discussions.

Equal control is that each time a participant starts typing or entering information, this participant implicitly takes the floor on the specified business as a temporal chairperson. If another participant wants to take over the floor control, he/she has to send a request to the chairperson. The chairperson has to hand over the floor control to the participant who made the request within a certain time. Thus, chairperson is dynamically changed upon incoming requests. The floor control on the business of turning page is implicitly controlled by a temporal chairperson.

Chair control is that one of the participates is designated as chairperson, or moderator, for collaborative session. In the interactive tele-lecturing, the teacher is designated as chairperson and has full control of access to the shared sketch window and of tuning page. If a student wants to write/draw something in the sketch window or to tune to a specific page, the student has to make a request first and the teacher monitors the list of requests and make a decision: whether the request should be granted or not.

4 Concluding Remarks

CHEER is a project which aims at developing an effective and natural networked computer based integrated teaching/learning hyper-environment which supports all teaching/learning activities. A virtual university, called University21 , is under construction based on CHEER. The collaborative environment is one of the five integrated environments and facilitates asynchronous and synchronous collaborative teaching/learning activities. This paper is focused on presenting the collaborative environment for the interactive group discussion and the interactive tele-lecturing. The multi-page mode is designed and exploited in the shared whiteboard. The ``free access'' and ``equal control'' are designed for the interactive group discussion session and the ``chair control'' is used for the interactive tele-lecturing session. Although these access control policies are working reasonably well, especially with a small group of participants. However, with increasing applications of the collaborative environment, designs of dynamic access control policies for adaptation to different applications (sessions) in the collaborative environment is our future work on enhancing the collaborative environment in CHEER system.

Reference

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