Enhancing Collaborative Learning using ConferenceXP

Enhancing Collaborative Learning using ConferenceXP Oscar Martinez Bonastre 1, Antonio Peñalver Benavent 1 and Francisco Nortes Belmonte 2 Abstract - Over last two decades, new real-time multimedia technologies have brought on many changes in pedagogical strategies through the field of e-learning applications. Today, it s well-known the emergence of devices like Tablet PC which support collaborative learning in ways never envisioned for many decades. In this paper we present our experience using Classroom Presenter as available module inside ConferenceXP research platform. Main goal dealt with exploring how to make collaborative learning a compelling and rich experience. Thus, we applied this collaborative learning framework to undergraduate students from an engineering course in order to analyze the role of pedagogical use of this module inside ConferenceXP platform. Afterwards, this educational experiment was favorably received by students and conclusions deal with (i) getting student assessment about their experiences in this experimental course, (ii) promoting use of next-generation pedagogical collaborative learning applications and (iii) offering new solutions to teach using Tablet PC as a presentation. Index Terms Collaborative Learning, Active Learning, Tablet PC, Digital Ink, Presentation Technology. INTRODUCTION Over last two decades, new real-time multimedia technologies have brought on many changes in activities, content distribution, strategies, and attitudes in the field of continuing education. These technological advances have had an enormous impact on e-learning applications. Today, it s wellknown the emergence of devices, i.e. Tablet PCs, and technology that support active and collaborative learning in ways never envisioned for many decades [1], [2]. In this new educational context, digital ink technologies have evolved over time and include touch sensitive whiteboards, PDAs, Tablet PCs, and digital pens. Then, learning systems using these technologies [3] support note taking and sharing, real-time active collaboration through classroom presentation, e.g., integrating ink with prepared slides for lecturing. As a result, we consider classroom education as a cognitive process that encompasses students, instructor, and collaborative tools [4]. In these interactive classrooms, these parties are engaged together in co-constructing knowledge through the cognitive process of teaching and learning. Therefore, pedagogical goal deals with creating a more flexible and interactive classroom environment from a teacherdominated, lecture-oriented style of instruction towards active learning. What is more, interaction is an absolute prerequisite for meaningful and constructivist learning, i.e., students who engage and interact are more likely to build the personal knowledge structures necessary for their learning [5]. In this paper we present our pedagogical experience using well-known collaborative learning framework like Microsoft Research s Conference Experience Project (ConferenceXP) [6]. Concretely, main goal dealt with exploring how to make collaborative learning a compelling and rich experience by assuming the availability of Classroom Presenter [7] inside ConferenceXP research platform. Consequently, we observed the classroom and then surveyed students who participated actively in order to learn about their experiences. Our results informed the design and deployment of new collaborative learning technologies, like ConferenceXP and Classroom Presenter, connecting students across active learning through extemporaneous teaching with a flexible presentation system. Therefore, this work reflects all this presented process. The rest of the paper continues with next section where ConferenceXP and Classroom Presenter are briefly introduced. Afterwards, educational framework is introduced. Then, experiment results are analyzed and discussed respectively. Finally, conclusions and related work are presented. CONFERENCEXP AND CLASSROOM PRESENTER AS COLLABORATIVE LEARNING TOOLS Our motivation at this point dealt with how to promote the active and collaborative learning through the ability of an instructor to present lecture material from a computer. Concretely, we took the challenges of Tablet PC [8] to support fluid discussion and flexible teaching styles as goals in developing new collaborative learning systems. Then, firstly we proposed that such collaboration and interaction is made possible by the recent introduction of Research s Conference Experience Project ConferenceXP [6]. ConferenceXP is targeted for high-bandwidth, multicastenabled network infrastructures such as Internet2. Besides, it provides a flexible and extensible infrastructure for highbandwidth interpersonal interaction between students. 1 Oscar Martinez, Antonio Peñalver, Operations Research Center, University of Miguel Hernandez, Spain, {oscar.martinez, a.penalver}@umh.es 2 Francisco Nortes, Computer Engineering Faculty, University of Miguel Hernandez, Spain, nortes@alu.umh.es T3G-20

Secondly, about the module included in ConferenceXP, Classroom Presenter [7] supports real-time natural handwriting in addition to prepared lecture slides. Classroom Presenter uses a pen based computer as the instructor's input device and supports writing on top of slides as well as writing on a separate whiteboard space. All actions (writing strokes, slide transitions) are transmitted to student s computers displaying the lecture presentation and even also they could send feedback to the instructor from their devices in real time. As demonstrated later, presented collaborative tools provide several improvements over traditional methods for incorporating problem solving and active learning experiences into lecture and for sharing student solutions with the class [9]. EXPERIMENT FIGURE 2 USING CLASSROOM PRESENTER We used ConferenceXP and Classroom Presenter in Computer Engineering Fundamental Database course. The local classroom was configured with laptops connected to a multicast enabled network. The room featured a large rearprojection display, which covered most of one wall. The display was configured to project the instructor computer displays. As depicted bellow at figure 1, the system setup consists of following minimum elements related to ConferenceXP framework [6]: (i) the instructor s device, (ii) student s device, (iii) multicast enabled network to connect such devices, and (iv) a projector for the classroom display. The instructor taught in front of the rear-projection display. We enlarged the size of the projection, based upon comments made by previous pilot experiments because of many students commented that the screen was too small to see instructor handwriting used for exercise resolution. Other pilot studies validated this decision since student s interaction is affected by the size of the participants. As pictured in figure 2, the projection showed the lecture slides and any writing the instructor made on his Tablet PC was transmitted through multicast to the student s devices. Besides, the instructor used microphone and speakers whenever it was necessary. The learning site used a room equipped for daily lectures. Seats were arranged in a standard lecture style and the room accommodated correctly all students who were encouraged to sit in the center of the room. Projector hung from the ceiling at the front of the room displayed lecture slides and video of the instructor. The screen was physically separated by approximately 3 meters from first line. As assumed before, the course dealt with SQL Relational Algebra exercises into a Fundamental Database course. This course was staffed by an assistant professor (instructor) who taught exclusively at the learning site using ConferenceXP and Classroom Presenter collaborative tools during all lectures. One key factor was not use the traditional blackboard as never as possible during the class. With Classroom Presenter, instructor projected Ms PowerPoint presentation slides to a projector screen as well as to student s devices. Besides, as depicted bellow in figure 3, instructor added real-time ink on his Tablet PC to highlight text, draw an illustration, or solve collaboratively any exercise with the class. FIGURE 1 SYSTEM SETUP USING CONFERENCE XP LEARNING FRAMEWORK FIGURE 3 CONFERENCE XP PRESENTATION ENABLES REAL-TIME INKING AND COLLABORATION WITH CLASSROOM PRESENTER. San Juan, PR July 23 28, 2006 9th International Conference on Engineering Education T3G-21

Students received the instructor s presentation in real time on their devices viewing the instructor s notes meanwhile they participated actively during the lecture. Classroom Presenter also includes enhanced features for interactive feedback, such as enabling student s devices to send exercise solution to the instructor s device. Approximately 45 undergraduate students from Computer Engineering attended voluntarily during this pilot learning experience. During the lectures, due to technical reasons dealing with device s availability, sets of three students minimum each were grouped in order to share a Tablet PC connected to the enabled multicast network. As a consequence, we considered this position as an additional advantage in order to promote the collaborative work between students and then active learning too. The class met twice weekly for three hours. The instructor used prepared Ms PowerPoint slides to present material each week using the Tablet PC device, i.e., writing extemporaneously text on slides, creating Relational Algebra diagrams. More to the point, to promote collaborative and active learning, Classroom Presenter also supports bidirectional sharing of information with student devices. That is, the instructor develops a slide-based lecture and includes a number of activities on the lecture slides like SQL proposed exercises to create a connection between the slide material and his oratory. Therefore, whenever an activity slide is reached, students work collaboratively (see figure 4) and write their answers on that slide with digital ink and send the slide and ink back to the instructor. Then, instructor reviews the submissions and selectively shows some on the public projector display. This invaluable pedagogical tool allows the instructor to incorporate a diversity of ideas, show novel solutions, and discuss misconceptions illustrated by student answers. The use of a public projector display also creates a focus of attention and provides a mechanism whereby student work can be integrated into the lecture discussion one of the most powerful aspects of the student active learning process. FIGURE 4 STUDENTS WORKING COLLABORATIVELY TOWARDS ACTIVE LEARNING Next, we studied the qualitative nature of this presented experimental course through surveys given to students and observations of the class from learning site. As a result, we collected observation notes and a period of time to analyze student s feedback. The surveys asked questions to reveal student s thoughts about the interaction levels, their level of engagement with the course, their satisfaction with the learning framework, and their satisfaction with the presentation technology. Analysis of our results for this experimental course is discussed deeply through next section. ANALYSIS OF RESULTS Overall, surveyed students responded very actively to the survey so on the whole their reactions to this innovative collaborative learning system were well received. What s more, they generally thought that use of ConferenceXP and Classroom Presenter had a positive effect on their learning experience. Next, table I shows items used for student survey process during Fundamentals Database course. Concretely, students were asked about their reactions to the use of Classroom Presenter in a ConferenceXP scenario. As depicted bellow, available answers were ranked as follows: (i) Less to mark a minor grade of impact in comparison with traditional teaching method received until now, (ii) Indecisive means no changes or that student was unable to make a firm decision and (iii) More was characterized to make a positive assessment about impact on this item. TABLE I SURVEY ITEMS Item i. Which was your attention grade to the lecture? ii. Which was your grade about understanding of material? iii. Which is your grade about encouraging the use of this collaborative learning framework? iv. Would greater flexibility to annotate/highlight slides be useful? v. Would you prefer to give a whiteboard style of lecture? vi. Which is your grade about writing text on the slide? vii. Which is your grade about drawing diagrams on the slide? viii. Which is your grade about writing SQL example code on the slide? ix. Which is your grade about using this learning framework to interact with instructor in real-time? x. Which was your grade about using real-time video through this learning framework? Available answers Less / Indecisive/ More Next, figure 5 depicts results dealing with student responses. Results are showed as percentage from 0 to 100%. We checked that some results coincided with our observations of the class during the use of this learning framework although we had a number of surprises from our initial expectations. T3G-22

100 90 80 70 60 % of Responses 50 40 30 20 10 0 Survey Results 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Items FIGURE 5 STUDENTS SURVEY RESPONSES Less Indecisive Thus, about using this collaborative learning scenario, 81% of the respondents said it increased attention, 7% said it had no changes in attentions and 12% said minor. We considered that use of the tablet presentation system in this experimental course had positive effect on attention to lecture. Moreover, more than 50% of students (item 2) felt understanding material lecture was easier and effectively item 3 shows this consideration with 82% encouraging the use of this collaborative learning framework. On the other hand, 75% said it increased grade of flexibility to annotate/highlight slides, 0% said it had no changes and 25% said minor. At this point, we observed many classes where between 70 and 90 percent of the slides were real-time inked using different pen colors. However, item 6 discovered 43% and 43% said major or minor impact grade about writing text on the slide, respectively. Consequently, e.g., we observed a lower positive impact (62%) on item 8 about writing SQL example code on the slide. In this case, our conclusion was classroom lectures on Tablet PC offer interesting challenges for handwriting recognition because of perhaps slides were hastily written due to several reasons [10] like: Instructor was too concentrated on speaking. Too much time between the written and spoken word so ink didn t provide a concrete link between speech and slide content. Instructor was too excited/nervous using this innovative learning tool. Nonetheless, item 5 showed that 82% of students didn t preferred whiteboard style of traditional lecture. Finally, item 9 shows that 68% of the respondents said it increased to real-time interaction with instructor, 7% said it had no changes in attentions and 25% said minor. Once again, we considered that use of the tablet system in this experimental course had positive effect on active and collaborative learning. Moreover, item 10 shows this consideration with 93% encouraging the use of real-time video through this collaborative learning framework. As a conclusion, we considered that respondents were on the whole very encouraging of this system s future use in a distance learning course. More CONCLUSIONS AND WORK IN PROGRESS In this paper we have described a learning scenario that facilitates active and collaborative learning activities using a well-known collaborative tool like ConferenceXP with Classroom Presenter module. In this collaborative framework, students and instructors have been equipped with devices connected to an enabled multicast network. During the lecture the instructor adds real time ink to the slides, and at various points students are asked to solve collaboratively problems or answer questions by writing on their tablet. Students then submit their responses to the instructor, who can selectively display them to the class. To conclude, this educational experiment has promoted use of next-generation pedagogical collaborative learning applications and even also offered new solutions to teach using Tablet PC as a presentation. More to the point, we have achieved specific pedagogical goals like following: (i) increased student engagement during the lecture, (ii) real-time feedback provided to the instructor on student understanding, (iii) achievement of classroom discussions to promote active and collaborative learning with students. Finally, as depicts figure 6, our currently collaboration with ConferenceXP technology continues to deliver prototype learning environments applied to undergraduate students from several distant campuses inside our university. Then, we re studying pedagogical use of multicast video streaming [11] and configuring how to connect different multicast islands through Internet using reflector services [6], [12], [13]. Thus, we re looking forward to enhancing ConferenceXP, including adding support for wired and wireless classrooms within distance learning environments. Besides, currently we re studying more complex ConferenceXP capabilities in order to develop novelty HCI-based interfaces [14], i.e., using new wireless communications interface methods like smart phones or PocketPCs. FIGURE 6 WORK IN PROGRESS TOWARDS COLLABORATIVE LEARNING T3G-23

ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work has been supported in part from Operational Research Center, University of Miguel Hernández and another part by the Government of Spain, FEDER through MTM2005-09184-C02-02, Generalitat Valenciana through GV05/189 and ACOMP06/040. In addition, we want to thank all undergraduate students from Computer Engineering faculty who actively participated through experiments, without them it should be impossible to achieve main results presented in this paper. REFERENCES [1] Winer L. and Jeremy C., The Intelligent Classroom: changing teaching and learning with an evolving technological environment, Computers & Education Journal, Vol 38, No 3, 2002, pp. 253 266. [2] Berque D., Johnson D. and Jovanovic L., Teaching Theory of Computation using pen-based computers and an electronic whiteboard, proceedings of the 6 th annual conference on Innovation and technology in compute science education ITiCSE, 2001, pp 169 172. [3] Wolfman Steven A., Understanding and Promoting Interaction in the Classroom through Computer-Mediated Communication in the Classroom Presenter System, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, USA, 2004 [4] Gustafson K. and Kors K., A Vision of the Future: Remodeling the Knowledge Architecture of the University of Washington, Technical Report PETTT-03-PT-01, Program for Educational Transformation through Technology, University of Washington. Seattle, WA, USA, 2003. [5] Moon Jennifer A., Reflection in learning some fundamentals of learning, Reflection in Learning and Professional Development, Theory and Practice, chapter 9, Kogan Page, Sterling, VA, USA, new edition, 2001, pp. 103 119. [6] Microsoft ConferenceXP Research project. Available on line at http://www.conferencexp.com/community/default.aspx [7] Classroom Presenter. Available on line at www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/presenter/ [8] Anderson, R., et al., Experiences with a Tablet PC Based Lecture Presentation System in Computer Science Courses, proceedings of the 9 th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, SIGCSE, 2004, pp. 56-60. [9] Anderson, R., Wolfman, S., et al., Promoting Interaction in Large Classes with Computer-Mediated Feedback, proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning CSCL, 2003, pp. 119-123. [10] Anderson R., Hoyer C., Prince C. et al., Speech, ink, and slides: the interaction of content channels, proceedings of the International Conference ACM Multimedia, 2004, pp. 796-803. [11] Martinez O., Peñalver A., López J., WIP: Pedagogical use of video streaming, proceedings of 35 th IEEE/ASEE Frontiers in Education Conference FIE, 2005, pp. 51 52. [12] Anderson R., Beavers J., et al., Videoconferencing and Presentation Support for Synchronous Distance Learning, proceedings of 33 th IEEE/ASEE Frontiers in Education Conference FIE, 2003, pp. 13 18. [13] Eetemadi S., inter-partition networking for overlay multicast, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, USA, 2005. [14] Peñalver A., Martinez O., A mobile phone based ubiquitous system for capturing and sending images automatically in professional environments, proceedings of IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering, 2006, pp53-58. T3G-24