Education talks?

I teach large undergraduate lecture courses in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. I have been using a range of “voice over IP” technologies for the past decade to extend my teaching to reach more students, to enrich the experience of those students, and expand the types and modalities of teaching. This post has my notes to a recent presentation on the topic.

Elluminate

Currently, I use a product called “eLive” from Elluminate, based in Calgary. My university, for now, has a license that lets me have up to 50 simultaneous participants in the lecture, and it provides live text “chat”, screen sharing, and video streaming along with the audio. Everything is done via IP networks and it works on a variety of platforms. It does not require pre-installation of client software - I merely give the students a URL to click on (the client is Java based, and depending on whether or not and how recently the student has last used the tool, the components will be downloaded and updated when the student logs in).

I would like to tell you why I do this, how I do it, and what the result is.

I started doing this, to be honest, out of curiosity. I have been teaching this course on information technology as new media for more than ten years and in all that time I have both tried to keep it fresh and also “walk the talk” in terms of using information technology as part of the teaching process. I adopted email supplements to lectures, class forums, web pages, blogs, and online digital video projects. So, live streaming over the internet was a natural addition to the course. I thought that live streaming to the internet, along with an archive for time-shifting and study purposes, would be of interest to a few of my students who had exigencies (ahem) that kept them from attending in person. This proved more popular than I anticipated, with up to 20% of the students attending from home on any given morning.

Another motivation was to increase capacity. A lecture course is limited by the size of the room, and since I like to teach downtown, there aren’t a lot of large rooms available. In the past few years, however, I have noticed that although my course is usually “full” and students cannot get registered, the seats are not actually all full on any given day. I started to think about ways to actually “overbook” my course without causing undue hardship. I settled on a plan, once I had seen how many students were willing to use the eLive version, of providing students with the option of booking into the course but not have a guaranteed seat in the lecture hall. And, they would have a separate tutorial, on a different day, so that we could also serve those who were unable to register for my course because of conflicts with other classes.

Here is how I do this. First of all, eLive is part of an online “ecology” that includes several other electronic components: there is a course wiki with lecture notes (in PDF format), web links, assignment details, and students small assignments. We use the mediawiki software, in part because it is a global standard - being the basis for wikipedia - and because it is supported by SFU and I don’t have to manage my own server or go with a hosted solution outside the country, which gets into a lot of privacy legislation issues. In the classroom, I lecture using a laptop and “slides” (Apple’s Keynote, which is similar to powerpoint).

At the beginning of the semester I arrange for a booking of two hours on each of the lecture mornings for the entire semester. This is accomplished with an email. I ensure that recording is set “on” by default (since I have learned the hard way that sometimes I forget to turn it on), and that there is some “bracket” time before and after the lectures. I post the links to these sessions on the class wiki and send them out by email each week.

I then prepare my lectures in Keynote and arrive at the classroom a bit early to get set up. In order that students at home be able to hear me and my laptop, I make use of the university’s audio visual staff quite extensively. I have a wireless microphone that is connected to the “house” sound system, and also audio from my laptop (for videos and sound clips) is also connected to the house via a small mixer. We even have a microphone on a long cord (should be wireless, I guess) for students in the audience to use for asking questions. All of that audio is mixed together and part of it goes to the speakers in the lecture hall and a copy is fed back to my laptop and wired into the “line in” connection there. This means that I am able to use my laptop as the origination point for the eLive sessions and use it as a lecture aid during the lecture.

When I get to the classroom I plug my laptop into this system (line out to the mixer, line in from the mixer, VGA out to the projector) and then log in to eLive. As I go there every week, eLive has most of its program in a java cache and it launches quickly. I chat with any students who have arrived early - elive has a group text chat - and can also speak with them. Although eLive has the ability to have voice chat with the students, I rarely if ever use this. Students are happy enough to have a text “back channel” and don’t really want to put their microphone on and ask questions.

Once the lecture is about to start, I say goodbye to any students I have been chatting with online, and start “screen sharing” (see screen snap) and put my lecture notes up on the projector full screen. The students locally see a full screen version of the slides, and remote students see my slides in a window, which they can maximize so it looks close to full screen. They also hear my voice and they can chat amongst themselves in the text chat room.  This ability to chat in the chat room has proved to be surprisingly successful. Perhaps it is the amount of text chatting that students do anyway, but for whatever reason, this is a very popular thing to do, even for students who are sitting in the lecture hall! A small number of them also log in via their laptops, and participate with their remote friends in the same chat system.

My experience, and the students experience seems to be overwhelmingly positive. I am used to the setup now, and it doesn’t take much extra time. I have had some trouble with the audio from time to time, but a combination of a new mixer and keeping thing set the same way each time seems to have sorted that out. The students almost always have a reasonable experience and report that although they would rather be in lecture (most of them, some actually prefer the remote experience, for a variety of reasons, ranging from not being distracted by other students to being able to attend class without traveling to being able to fit things into a busy schedule) it is a good substitute for the real thing. Remarkably, I receive virtually no technical questions or “issues” relating to launching and running a web-based multimedia java application. It seems that the latest versions of max os X and windows are more or less seamless in their ability to launch and run these programs, and of course computers, network connections, are all faster now that even just a few years ago.

The entire lecture is archived to disk by the Elluminate folks as part of their service, and I navigate to those archives, locate the direct link, and then post that to the class wiki for students to use for study purposes. Many report that they use it, and appreciate it as a way to catch up on missed classed and review for exams.

The informal “chat” sessions before class and during the break is also highly valued by the students. I usually leave my microphone turned on, flip the slides off the screen, and respond verbally to text questions in the chat room before class and during the break. Students seem to enjoy that.

When things have gone “off the rails” it is almost always human error, and usually mine. I have instituted a couple of procedures to cope with that. One is that I try to have someone in the classroom on the elive session so that they can check on what is going on and let me know if the sound drops out some other technical problem occurs. The local “correspondent” can also raise questions and provide the “hand up” feature that is missing because I have my screen covering the elive stuff. Elive actually provides for a bell, and hands up, but I have found that those things are too distracting for an effective lecture and tend to ignore them. I have thought about having a second computer and watching it myself, or even projecting it in the classroom, but I haven’t figured out if that is worth the trouble. In one instance, when I inadvertently turned off my microphone, the remote students used text messaging on their cell phones (or perhaps MSN, it wasn’t clear) to reach into the classroom and ping one of their colleagues, who alerted me.

Although I thought that video wouldn’t be a big addition to the experience, I found that students actually did like to have it, and lately I have been adding that to the mix although it means carrying a video camera around with me (the built in camera on a laptop isn’t really good for that sort of thing).

Other voice over IP applications for teaching include: podcasts, skype and other voice protocols for “office hours” and for graduate supervision.