Attallah, Mikhail

Houstis, Elias N.

Joshi, Anupam

Weerawarana, Sanjiva

English

Purdue E-Pubs

Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Department of Computer Science Technical Reports Department of Computer Science 1995 Ideas for Telelearning: WWW, Virtual Classroom & Cyberversity Anupam Joshi Elias N. Houstis Purdue University, enh@cs.purdue.edu Sanjiva Weerawarana Mikhail Attallah Report Number: 95-023 Joshi, Anupam; Houstis, Elias N.; Weerawarana, Sanjiva; and Attallah, Mikhail, "Ideas for Telelearning: WWW, Virtual Classroom & Cyberversity" (1995). Department of Computer Science Technical Reports. Paper 1201. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cstech/1201 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact epubs@purdue.edu for additional information. IDEAS FOR TELELEARNlNG: WWW,VIRTUAL CLASSROOM & CYBERVERSITYAnupam JoshiElias N. HouslisSanjiva WeeMlwarnll3Mikhail AtallahDepartment of Computer SciencePurdue UniversityWest Lafayette, IN 47907CSD·TR-95-023March 1995Ideas for Teleleaming: WWW, Virtual Classroom & CyberversityAnupam Joshi, Elias Houstis, Sanjiva Weerawarana and Mikhail AtallahDepartment of Computer SciencesPurdue UniversityWest Lafayette, IN 47907-13981 Instructional Approaches, Strategies and MaterialsWe are witnessing the start of a revolution in information technology that has the potential to impactthe form and structure of the University beyond anything we can currently imagine. The existing GlobalInformation Infrastructure (GIl, Fig. 1), with a vast, interconnected network of networks (Internet) andsoftware(e.g. NCSA Mosaic, Netscape, Arena) that efficiently exploil.s it, has already impacted many facetsof our life. The way we disseminate information, conduct business, manage personal activities, and searchfor knowledge and information are undergoing profound changes. This technology and its future evolutionhas the potential of making tclelearning the new educational paradigm at local (within a given institution)and global(nation wide, even world wide) levels. In the future, universities will advertise and offcr telccoursesvia Lhe internet and customers (students) will choose the "best" telecourse in the educational market placewithout considering the geographic location where the course originates. Telelearning can be used to supportexisting classrooms, for cont.inuing education, retraining high school teachers and supporting the VirtualPurdue University (VPU) in the global cyberspace. The potential for VPU is enormous. We feel thatPurdue University, and School of Science in particular with its large base of service courses, should exploreseriously and immediately this coming revolution. This concept note is a step forward in this direction. Itoutlines a possible first step which will allow us to experiment with the concept of telelearning and createa prototype. However, significant resources will be needed to realize the concept fully. The following tasksseem to be logical first steps:1. Develop the software environment of the virtual classroom. This classroom will support the class-on-demand concept. The software environment will be WWW based. A related effort, which combinesubiquitous and High performance computing to create a classroom of the future, is already supportedby AT&T, Intel, School of Science, NSF, and the Depart.ment of Computer Science.2. Develop course material for a basic programming course which is language independent and supple-mented by tutorials in several imperative languages (C, C++, Pascal, FORTRAN90).3. Offer a small section of this course (up to 50 students) and measure its effectiveness. The depart.mentof CS has already committed a TA for this class.4. Experiment with the exam-an-demand concept where students are allowed to take many examinationon t.he subject until they achieve their grade goal. This can be easily done in the context of the virtualclassroom.Introductory classes in various subject areas tend to be very large (500-1000 strength). Such classes(e.g. Introduction to Programming in CS) are often reduced to didactic slide shows, with little classroomlike feeling of one on one interaction with the instructor. This is tolerated since these classes are meant toprovide basic, often straight factual knowledge of a subject area to the students. We foresee that in thefuture, such classes will be replaced by virtual classes, running on a claSS-OIl-demand server. This serverwill be accessible via the GIl, and will be a part of what has been variously described as an jllfosphere ordocuverse. The World Wide Web represents the initial phase of this phenomenon. Students, regardless oftheir geographic location, will be able to access lecture materials. These materials will be more than just1\Figure 1: A Predicted Scenario for the Global Information Infrastructureplain slides, tiley will be full multimedia presentations. Multilevel hypertext will be used to point studentsto related and reference malerial.To demonstrate the virtual classroom concept, we should develop such material for an introductoryprogramming course. Rather than teach a particular language, we should design the course to teach studentsthe basics of structured programming in imperative languages. In parallel, we should develop examples,tutorial materials, exam questions and projects in several imperative languages. Thus a student will be ableto customize the course content she gets. In other words, while Joe would be registered for the class to learnFortran 90, Jill would be learning C in the same class.While it may appear that we are seeking to replace the instructor, that is not really the case. We merelyfree the instructor from the drudgery of regurgitating introductory material in front of a large class withlimited or no interaction. This will leave her free to have greater one on one contact wit.h the studentsoutside the class.Another innovation of this virtual classroom would be the exam on demand concept. The idea of mostintroductory courses is to allow students to acquire basic proficiency in the course material. Yet in aconventional class, we judge the students on his performance at prespecified exam times. We feel that forsuch introductory classes, the instructors should prepare a large question bank. An exam can be composedwhen desired by automatically and appropriately selecting questions in this bank. Students should be allowedas many exams as they want (within a given time-frame, say a semester) to demonstrate proficiency in thematerial and be judged accordingly.Besides developing the courseware for a specific class, we would aim to develop the software environmentwhich will be used to run the virtual classroom over the internet and link it to the web. The software forthis application will be based on the electronic notebook concept. This concept is an attempt to emulate thephysical notebook that we use ubiquitously. The pen-and-paper physical notebook allows us to write downrelated or unrelated information in any form we like and to use auxiliary tools (for example, calculators)to augment its usability. The electronic version of this provides an unrestricted editing environment whereusers can record their activities including problem and solution specifications, computed solutions, results ofvarious analyses, commentary text, graphics and (handwritten) annotations. The notebook interface ideallyis multimodal and synergetic; it integrates text, handwriting, graphics, audio and video in its input andoutput modes. It functions not only as a central recording mechanism, it also acts as the access mechanismfor all tile tools that support the user's problem solving activities. The electronic version of the notebook is2Figure 2: The Virtual Classroomtherefore a "super notebook" when compared to the physical one. It can be viewed as a unifying interfacefor a collection of software (or other) tools that are needed to define, solve and analyze some problem.Given this background, we think that the student's software environment should have the followingproperties:• Integrated view of information access and computation• Multimediajmultimodal:• Ability to access different tools:• Ability to share information between disparate systems:• Inputjoutput reuse:• Customizability:A preliminary design of such a notebook has been done by Joshi & Weerawarana, and a NCSA Mosaicbased preliminary implementation has been put together by Weerawarana as a proof of concept. We willbuild an augmented version of NCSA Mosaic that supports the functionality listed above and also build aspecific WWW service that offers telecourses over the web. We will also use the software infrastructure thatis already available as a pad of the World Wide Web, as well as other software that is hound to come outfrom the Commercial world2 Expected OutcomesThis project will allow us to demonstrate the effective use of this new technology in learning, and prepare aprototype implementation. It will also serve to make the administration, both at the school of science anduniversity levels, see the impact this technology will have and better prepare for it. Specifically, we c.x--pectthat the virtual classroom will result in1. Improved learning: The programmed educational modules that will have to be built for this project willhave many other advantages, including the following:3(a) They will make possible an educational approach based on a finer granularity than the usual"course-based" traditional one: Customized knowledge, the kind of knowledge "a la carte" thatmight appeal to busy executives or engineers who might want to come to Purdue with the specificgoal of promptly acquiring what one could call a nugget oC very specific knowledge (say, on X).The avai.lability of programmed modules to both help impart and certify the specific knowledgeon X, can act as an attraction for many working professionals who are otherwise too busy toleave their job for too long, and are really only interested in learning about X or in certifyingtheir present expertise in X. An individual who is already an expert on X without having formaltraining in X could be attracted by the availability of a certification process.(b) They will make possible, at little extra cost, a certificates program for our students, whose ra-tionale we develop next. A Master's degree, together with a listing of the courses and gradesof a student, provides valuable information to a prospective employer, but that might not beenough in the following sense: A student might have achieved extensive proficiency outside ofthe formal framework of courses and degrees (by individually studying a topic, or learning aboutit through involvement in a particular project, or perhaps by gaining the experience during thestudent's previous industrial employment). It would be desirable for us to have a way of certi-fying the proficiency of a student in such a specialized topic as networking, or software testing,or comput.er security. However, the human resources needed for administering such a CertificatesProgram would be exorbitant. The answer is to automate the process by using programmedmodules for doing the job, through the use of the proposed interactive technology. In fact, oureducational modules would probably be "exportable" to other educational institutions, since thisneed certainly exists on a national scale.(c) They will be much better than traditional approaches at accommodating special educational needs(learning disabilities, etc). We noted above that the typc of knowledge acquired or certifiedbecomes more customized with the availability of the programmed educational modules. Equallyimportantly, the Jlace at which the knowledge is acquired or tested becomes also customized, animportant advantage in view of the wide disparity in learning styles and abilities found amongthe students of a t.ypical classroom.2. Improved teaching: The techniques developed here will facilitate the use of state-of-the-art multimediaand hypermedia resources for teaching. Subjects like programming language involve using dynamicobjects like programs for examples. Our software environment will allow instructors to embed programswithin the presentation. Moreover, by allowing courses to be tailored, they will remove the need tooffer multiple specialized courses dealing with the same subject matter. Currently, for instance, theCS departments offers 8 courses (nO, nop, 110M, nON, 145, 150, 180, 190A) to teach introductorycourses to students with different majors and in different imperative languages. With our approach,this could be combined into one (or perhaps two) courses, which students could customize based onwhat requirements are imposed by their major and/or personal interests. This would free up facultymembers to have greater one on one interaction with the students in the time they would have otherwisespent in front of multiple sections repeating material that was quite similar.3. Exam-on-demand: This concept will go a long way in removing the dependence of grade on examtaking skills of a student, and potentially provide a truer measure of accomplishment. It will alsomotivate the students to continuously strive to improve, knowing that they can always retake anyexam they have not done well on. Students often tend to loose interest in a course if they don't dowell in one of the early exams, our approach will avoid that. Moreover, it will provide students withthe ability to test ont if they can go through and learn the material Caster than their classmates.3 Evaluation of the approachWe propose to evaluate this approach on one of the introductory programming courses offered by the CSdepartment. We can run one section of this course via the virtual classroom. This section will have adedicated Teaching assistant. to answer student questions and grade exams etc. Other section(s) of the coursewill continue to follow the conventional approach. Two strategies can be used to measure the effectivenessof this technique:4• Student responses: During various points in the semester, students will be asked to give their commentsand suggestions. This (subjective) qualitative feedback will be used to judge the student response, aswell as iteratively improve the courseware and software environment.• Comparative study: We will compare the performance of the students using the virtual classroom (testset) with those studying in the conventional manner (control set). The grades obtained by the students(overall and on specific exams/projects), the change in GPA and other similar indicators will be usedas quantitative measures. Careful design will be required to chose appropriate indices, and two(multi)factor analysis will be needed to appropriately judge the result.5

Ideas for Telelearning: WWW, Virtual Classroom & Cyberversity

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Ideas for Telelearning: WWW, Virtual Classroom & Cyberversity

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