5.1 Immediate Feedback During Online Lectures

In the previous chapters I have discussed computer-supported education, hypermedia, and how hypermedia can enrich education. I showed that the World Wide Web provides a good means for online education since students can access hypermedia course material at any time from anywhere in the World just by using a Web client. Combined with email and newsgroups it is also a means for asynchronous group discussion. I also discussed how the functionality of Hyperwave can enhance the quality of Web-based online education.

In the practical part of my thesis I want to focus on synchronous collaboration. By using additional computer conferencing software or just a telephone, the Web can be used for delivering coursematerial synchronously. How students can give immediate feedback to their teacher during such a lecture, which is broadcasted synchronously via the World Wide Web, is the topic of my practical work.

In the traditional classroom the teacher can always watch students to find out whether they are paying attention or becoming increasingly confused. There is always some kind of interaction between students and teacher, often just via eye contact, and students can ask the teacher to slow down, speak up, or to give another example. Of course, they can also ask questions.

Unfortunately, during online lectures there is no possibility for teachers to visually monitor their students due to the minimal bandwidth currently available. In fact, even if bandwidth was sufficient, there would not be enough space on the teacher's screen to display all the students' faces.

What I wanted to achieve was a graphical user interface on the students' Web pages which enables them to give immediate feedback quickly and anonymously. The current implementation allows a student to give feedback about the audio and video transmission quality, the teacher's pace, and to request another example (see Figure 5.1). It is also hoped that this increased anonymity will provide more honest feedback than in normal classrooms. Additionally, students are able to send short questions, not only to the teacher, but also to colleagues.

**Figure 5.1:** The Teleteaching Applet showing the student's GUI.
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The teacher's GUI contains some indicators which change their colour based on student feedback (see Figure 5.2). Indicators are green when there is no feedback, change to yellow and then to red depending on the number of students who agree on a particular point. When there is a question coming from a student, the teacher can answer this student privately, tell the answer and the question to the whole class, or inform the student that the question will be answered later by email.

I also implemented a follow me mode. When the follow me mode is activated, the students will be automatically taken to the same URL as the teacher. Both the teacher and the students can switch the follow me mode on and off. Teachers will turn this mode off when looking up additional URLs which are not needed by the students. Students will turn it off to stay at one page longer, and not get pulled to another page by the teacher. At the end of one lecture the teacher can insert the list of visited URLs into the Hyperwave database.

The program should meet certain properties. It should

be embedded in the Web client,
be as small as possible and always visible on the Web client,
only be available for identified users,
automatically show the appropriate GUI for teachers and students,
provide an easy way to communicate with the teacher and colleagues,
store the URLs visited during the online lecture.