Development of Webbased Collaborative Environment For Distant Learning

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Development of Web-based Collaborative
Environment For Distant Learning
Supervised by Prof. Michael Lyu Presented by Ma
Ka Po
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Outline
1. Communication Environment 2. Web-based
Education 3. MWPS 4. Proposed Enhancement 5.
Design Requirement 6. Proposed Architecture 7.
Problem Encountered 8. Future Plan 9. Conclusions
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Communication Environment

• Face-to-face meeting
• Listening to other
• Sharing opinions
• Sharing paper works
• Brainstorming

4
Web-based Education

• World Wide Web (WWW)
• Bringing a new way to learn and teach
• Allowing geographical distribution of teachers
  and students
• Efficient delivering materials (both text and
  multimedia)
• Control own learning pace
• Advantages of WBE
• Easy update course materials
• Available on demand
• Flexible presentation format

5
MWPS
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MWPS (cont)

• Construction
• Editing
• Management

HTML slides
Web-based presentation
Streaming audio and video
Synchronous
Asynchronous
Delivery of lessons
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Outlook of MWPS
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Outlook of MWPS (cont)
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Outlook of MWPS (cont)
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Inadequate Feedback
Text, audio, video
Lecture
students
Text
Teaching side
Learning side

• Insensitivity to lack of interest, understanding
• Unable to alter the pace and contents

• Unable to view others response
• Inefficient to give feedback

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Proposed Enhancement
Adding multimedia conferencing feature - allows
multimedia information (text, graphics,
animation, audio and video) generated,
transmitted, and presented in real-time on-line
environment on both lecturer and students sides
Develop collaborative environment in order to
achieve efficient communication
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Design Requirements

• Create customized collaborative environment
  (user interface) with the appropriate access
• Incorporate distributed multimedia functions
• Exploit the state-of-the-art audio, video and
  network technologies
• Enable open collaborative applications (sharing
  documents, images)
• Set of separate modules (audio, video,
  whiteboard, etc).

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Layout of Synchronous mode of MWPS
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Proposed Architecture of Collaborative
Conferencing
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Problems encountered

• Support for continuous media
• Dramatically increasing transferred materials
  over the limit of the bandwidth
• Real-time synchronization
• Difficult to maintain synchronous transmission
  manner
• Multiparty communications
• Lack of facilities to support for joining and
  leaving of groups at run-time

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Problems encountered (cont)

• Hardware supports
• Individual computing power may not support
  co-existing real-encoder and real-player in the
  same time
• Much more equipment are needed in students
  side
• Training for students
• Students with little experiences operating
  computer may find difficulties to use the system,
  as a result, losing the studying interest.

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Future Plan

• Acceptable discarding frame policy should be
  introduced to minimize the demands on bandwidths
• Corresponding facilities need to be added
• Performance of synchronous should be addressed
• Related training programs for student should be
  well specified.

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Conclusions

• Effective collaboration between the
  instructor/student and student/student are
  crucial
• Inefficient interaction exists in campus wide
  educational environment
• Factor determines the fate of future web-based
  education
• Adding the conferencing feature try to improve
  the communication flow

Lecture seems held on a virtual classroom over
the network