November 2003 — Features
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
On-Demand Lectures Create an Effective Distributed Education Experience
Tablet PCs Help Georgia Institute of Technology Professor Focus More Time on Students' Needs and Less Time on 'Chalking and Talking'
I began teaching senior-level structural engineering courses at the Georgia Institute of Technology's Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program two years ago. The program is a unique partnership of four universities - Georgia Tech, Savannah State University, Armstrong Atlantic State University and Georgia Southern University - with classes taught live at one of the partner universities. Currently, students in remote classrooms at the other universities receive the live class through various room-to-room audio and video network setups; thus, most classes are of the distributed education (DE) type.
When I began teaching, I tried to make sure that students would receive the best possible educational experience in my classes by trying various standard DE teaching techniques. I noticed the typical student profile and expectations had changed over the years, with today's students demanding a great deal of quality and convenience in their educational offerings. Naturally, the institution will benefit if its students, who are located in and around Atlanta, can get a Georgia Tech degree without always having to travel to the Atlanta campus. However, I felt that the standard DE techniques were not fully reaching all of the students. This is especially true with the methods currently available, because they lacked a way to efficiently record live teaching sessions and make them available for on-demand access.
I quickly found the standard production-based methods for creating and delivering engaging e-learning content were not sufficient, and surmised there must be a better way to do it. I needed something that would not overburden me or my support staff; would not consume tremendous monetary resources; could adapt to my personal teaching style; and could provide anytime, anywhere convenience for the instructor as well as a valid learning experience for the student.
I spent the better part of six months doing intense research into the tools and software for developing DE courses with one of my graduate students. We evaluated partial solutions such as electronic whiteboards, desktop authoring and video-editing software, but nothing provided a complete, integrated solution that would meet our needs. We even looked at experimental open source software, but it could not deliver the quality and ease of use that we required.
Creating Lecture 'Shells'
In our research, we discovered the Tegrity WebLearner solution (www.tegrity.com) for on-demand and live e-learning, which seemed to provide everything that was needed to achieve our goals. We purchased the Tegrity solution using a major portion of my start-up funds. This solution offered a unique approach that combined do-it-yourself e-learning software with a tablet PC, which enabled me to create effective Web lectures that went far beyond typical slide-show presentations with "talking head" video or audio. The key difference was in its ability to interact with my content - writing and drawing in multiple colors, pointing and highlighting on diagrams - all while explaining concepts at my natural speed. The resulting video modules were actually more powerful than what I could have taught with a blackboard in a traditional classroom.
