The arrival of high-bandwidth networking will bring opportunities to
support realtime interaction for education across both local and wide
area networks. Previous studies have shown that use and
effectiveness have been greatly constrained by the available networking
speeds and media platforms. While many organizations have focused on
live instruction delivery, we have chosen to focus our experiment on
collaborative learning within a distributed group of students.
Distributed Tutored Video Instruction (DTVI)
SunLabs' Interactive Collaborative Systems group performed a long-term
experiment with a group of over 1000 students from California State
Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo, and California State
University at Chico.
The DTVI setup made use of a "Brady Bunch" array of video windows,
including one panel for a facilitator and one panel for a video-based
lecture. The figure at right shows this array with the group facilitator
station and video lecture filling the two lower right panels. All
students (though shown in place at right) can see and hear each
other, and all students can talk to the facilitator who controls the
playing of the video lecture.
The facilitator can move across Kansas to access to a system
configuration area that allows him or her to control volumes, student
input, and video feeds. The figure at right shows this system
configuration area.
The DTVI experiment was focused on seeing if this distributed approach
to group study works as well as the real world analog (called TVI), in
which the group, with a VCR and monitor, are sitting together in the
same room. Read more about the experiment in the following sections:
Enhanced DVTI:Some of the 1000 students participated
in a trial of "Enhanced DTVI," which allows collaborative note taking and other forms of student cooperation.
(Note, the graphics on this page are clickable to reveal larger resolution screen snaps.)
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