11 Support of Distance Education

The Support of Distance Education activity is related to the Infrastructure and Technology for On-Line Education project running between 2002 and 2003, and to the Virtual Collaborative Environments present activity.

The main goal is a qualitative shift in electronic support of education at university level, maximally utilizing current features offered by advanced network and local digital technologies, such as systems and tools for recording, processing, storing and presentation of multimedia data and tools for remote collaboration.

This activity develops methodology, pilot projects and case studies on using the said technologies in education, so that they can be reproduced within the framework of the CESNET Association. The activity also targets the broad student community at the Czech universities in the areas of technical and natural sciences.

11.1 Maintenance and Extension of the eLearning.cesnet.cz Portal

The eLearning.cesnet.cz portal was put into operation during previous activities related to support of distance education. The main objective of the recent period was revitalizing the portal and defining the course for its further development.

The revitalization brought a new structure, design and contents. Selected news have been published continuously. The current state of the portal may be observed at eLearning.cesnet.cz.

The portal structure has been divided into several basic sections, the key ones being: Events (current news from the eLearning community), e-zine (prepared for future implementation of an electronic journal intended for publishing various articles), Discussion forum, and Theory (overview of basic knowledge concerning eLearning, including detailed descriptions).

At present time we have formulated the basic concept of the portal for the coming year. Its first foundation will be current news about various events in the eLearning community. We have already prepared a system allowing the registered correspondents to publish short news (e.g., about coming conferences, meetings or seminars) on the portal. An extensive network of such correspondents does not exist so far; thus, we believe it is necessary to use relatively good contacts within the narrow eLearning community as well as within the wide academic community. The involvement of correspondents will also have a secondary impact besides their direct contribution to the content, i.e., promotion of the portal. The second foundation is bringing the discussion forum to a new level of utilization. We do not intend to moderate it in the beginning; we assume that the optimum form of the forum will be a result of its evolution after getting some feedback from its users. The strongest innovation should be the e-zine - a casual journal intended for publishing of reviewed valuable articles from the eLearning field.

11.2 Standards in the Electronic Education Support

For each electronic education support, preparing electronic educational materials and distributing them to students is necessary. If the plan offers more than just simply publishing the materials on web pages, using a system created for this purpose - a Learning Management System (LMS) - is advisable. At present, there are dozens of LMS products, both commercial and freely distributable, coming from various companies and organizations (e.g., ClassServer, WebCT, eDoceo, Moodle). An LMS is a local or web-based application managing all educational activities within an organization. The main functions that should be supported by a LMS are as follows:

Administration: This function comprises, e.g., user administration, assigning user roles (administrator, teacher, student, content supplier, etc.), creating and erasing classrooms, assigning students and teachers to classrooms.
Communication between LMS and organization information system (IS): If this communication is set up, lots of work related to user administration are avoided, since any change in the IS is reflected in the LMS (making the same change twice is not necessary). However, this communication is complicated as it must respect not only the structure and function of the particular LMS, but also those of the IS used.
Examinations: Every LMS should have its own tools for preparing tests (not only for examining the students but also for obtaining feedback using course evaluation), as well as appropriate tools for evaluating the tests and, possibly, their statistical result processing.
Online tools: The purpose of these tools is communication between teacher and students or among the students. The said communication may be a real-time one (chat, videoconferencing) or an off-line one (e-mail, discussion forum).
Support for off-line education: This function allows publishing course materials even without an Internet access (e.g., on a CD).
Support of standards: An LMS allows storaging and distributing courses, so it is advisable that it should support specifications for interchange of educational materials, thus allowing insertion of materials prepared in another LMS (the SCORM may serve as an example of such standard). Support for other standards related to eLearning is an advantage, of course. An LMS may also provide other supplementary functions, such as a diary with tasks for every user, team cooperation in projects (e.g., shared file storage, shared workspace), distribution of notices to students (e.g., if their task is currently pending), etc.

If an organization decides to use the LMS functions and chooses an LMS that meets its requirements (not just in the terms of functions, but also with respect to licensing policy, maximum number of requests served at a time, hardware recommendations, scalability, etc.), implementing the system is necessary. If the LMS is planned as a standalone system, integration with an IS is not necessary. However, the LMS is usually built as a part of a complex IS, thus introducing the problem of data interchange between the IS and LMS, ensuring synchronization, integrity, transmission security, etc.

An extensive Technical report number 25/2004 has been prepared that describes this area of interest; is has been published on the CESNET web.

11.3 Overall Support of a Sample Course using Online Materials - A Pilot Project

The universities - members of the Association - prepare and operate a wide variety of electronic support tools for various courses at present. Our aim was preparing a detailed methodic example of an overall support of studies "by all available means".

Overall support of education in a selected course is focused on a specific group of students, the 9th semester of the Master study branch of the Telecommunication Engineering, accredited at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, the Czech Technical University in Prague. From the wide variety of obligatory courses we have chosen one to be supported by prepared comprehensive on-line materials and other supplementary materials within our pilot project. The concept of the project allows most of other courses to join this approach in the future.

With the lecturer's help, on-line materials have been prepared and appropriate links placed on the educational portal www.comtel.cz within a section belonging to the pilot course, using some logical structure. The multitude of new streamed lecture recordings (12 basic and 5 special ones) should be pointed out.

This activity was presented to the students as an experimental introduction of distance education. Since the educational materials are available on-line, lectures in the 32PSY course are organized also in a distance form. The evaluation is planned as a survey after the semester terminates, i.e., in Q1/2005.

Technical report number 20/2004 has been prepared on this subject.

During 2005, similar complex support will be completed also in the eLearning support environment at the Masaryk University in Brno where most of LMS functions are provided by the university information system. Complete (video)records of lectures for the course Programming in the Java Language have been prepared, and there are also complex educational materials including problems to be solved individually, examples of tests, rich discussion archives, etc.

In November 2004, an experimental "shared lecture" was presented: the lecturer spoke at the Technical University in Ostrava to the students both in Ostrava and in Prague (Czech Technical University). Transmission of audio and video signals used full duplex over IP. The topic was quite specific and finding an adequately qualified lecturer at both universities would be difficult.

11.4 Audiorecords

The fundamental idea - introduction of audio records as another tool for improvement of education - followed from remarks of students who could not observe live video broadcast or streamed video records because of technological limitations - mainly because of insufficient throughput of their Internet connection; this is a specific situation of those students who do not have direct access to academic network (which is available at school or at the dormitories), thus being forced to use slow narrowband connections in host networks, mainly through the PSTN.

As an answer to this challenge we have developed and implemented a system that enables broadcasting and recording of the lecturer's speech only. The digitized audio signal may be used for real-time transmission even over slow channels; complemented with materials such as electronic presentations, it becomes a comprehensive educational tool.

The workplace for audio streaming and recording contains an external sound card, two wireless microphone sets used to process the audio/video stream, sound mixing device (for our purposes: 4×stereo input) and a coder - a PC with appropriate software (Windows Media Encoder) supporting the audio signal transmission and recording. The properties of the audio signal may be set for several output qualities: transmission speed, sampling frequency, mono or stereo can be selected. Since the beginning of the 2004/2005 winter semester, simultaneous audio/video broadcasts have been provided and students can choose one of the streams according to their connection speed - audio/video stream or just an audio stream.

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