Copyright 2001:YNSE-education1 Internet applications in Education Yatindra Nath Singh Electrical Engineering Department IIT Kanpur Email: [email protected]@ieee.org.

Copyright 2001:YNS E-education 1

Internet applications in Education

Yatindra Nath SinghElectrical Engineering Department

IIT KanpurEmail: [email protected]

http://home.iitk.ac.in/~ynsingh


Internet• Cheap information transmission medium

• Provides efficient, Low cost communication infrastructure.

• Packet switched network

• Problems of delay variation

• Provides reliable byte stream transport (TCP), unreliable datagram transport (UDP).

• Bandwidth is used when you transmit, else available for others

• better capacity sharing (compared to telephony or dedicated bandwidth transponders)


Student

Study material/presentations

Teacher

Learning System


Component of Conventional Presentation

• written notes and description.

• Oral description and classroom interaction.

Includes

• Evolving descriptions on board.

• Evolving diagrams

• Student feedback

• Very important - Immediate interaction in class


• lecture can be tuned according to student feedback.

• Things can be repeated if needed.

• Student forced to be in synch with teacher. (Time

deadlines can be achieved.)


Second kind of learning system - Distance

education

• Specialized material (video recording, audio recording, written material) - made and put in repository.

• A student can find it very difficult or very easy.

• Based on feedback, the material can be tuned over the time for various levels of students.

• Tuning time is very large.


• Tools to identify the level of student are required.

• While in conventional interactive learning teacher judges the level and continuously adjust

• In non teacher based system, continuous tuning - not possible.


ASYNCHRONUS

learning and interaction is on demand.

Allows learners to participate according to their schedules independent of their instructors.

interaction can be through technologies likes email, mailing lists and newsgroups.

SYNCHRONUS (imitation of classroom)

interaction happens live.

require that learners and instructors attend class at scheduled time.

Could be held in a traditional classrooms widely apart, delivered via e-learning technologies.


Education System

• Evaluation system added to learning/ teaching

system.

• Certification on the basis of evaluation


Essence of education system

Teacher - devises new ways of effective communication for knowledge transfer while taking continuous feed back from student

Basic Assumptions• Student as well as teacher have access to terminals

attached to internet.

Tools at student ends– Can be specialized client software– Can be some other generalized interface (e.g., web

browser). In general web browser with plugin


Tool at teacher ends

Can be specialized client for teacher (Instructor).

Can be some general interface (e.g. Web browser)

In gerenal web browser with plugin

Services Manager

Has much less interference between teacher - student

interaction.

Does technical management

Should be able to manage more than one instructor -

students groups.


In the beginning - Desirable at student end.

• Public domain set of tools. Commonly available on a system e.g., Real player,Web browser.

• Same is desirable at instructors end


Courses Content Authoring tool - For asynchronous course materialaudio - video files (lecture)document format (pdf, doc, postscript, html, xml)

Streamed

Video

camera Capture card

Real Producer

.rm format archive file

Real server

{ Hardware}

{Software}


Additionally required for video

• Suitable place for Recording (Recording studio)

Document authoring Software

• Acrobat writer, MS-Office, LaTeX, HTML and XML authoring tool.

• Final desired format - pdf, postscript, HTML, XML

Course Material presentation Tools

• Web browser and plugins

• Media player (audio, video, animation) e.g., Realplayer, windows mediaplayer, flash plugin.

• White board (implemented through applets)


Course Serving tool

• Server side counterparts of presentation tools

Course management tools

• Goal - to manage the instructors, tutors and students. (FCAPS)

• Access

• Configuration

• Performance

• Accounting

• Failures

• Same as defined for OSI-SM set of standards by ISO.

• Using above more sophisticated business logic can be build.


Sub System Architectures (example structures needed in ETS system of IIT Kanpur)


Two video formats - evolving slides or blackboard capture can be streamed


Interfaces for scilab - including interactive maths in course material


XML server system - to handle mathmatics (mathml)


Another architecture (live lecture)

Lecture material, slides demos downloaded beforehand after registering at lectures manager

Time of live lecture is received from lecture manager server (LMS).

Server sides streams live lecture, presentation material puts up from preloaded lecture-material

Client and server can have multicast, synch protocol

Client and server can have whiteboard for live interaction


Student can interrupt the teacher, based on teacher’s

decision, control passed to student for question.

Every body (student as well as lecher can see and listen

to what is happening)

whiteboard can be used for discussion between students

and teacher.

Network Group, IIT Kanpur - implemented such a tool “REMOTE TUTOR”


Problems• scalability? Due to multicast there is no technical problem.

• Participants in discussion are more with more no. of students.

• Tool need to be modified by introducing Hierarchy (Instructor-Tutor-Students).

• Commonly used paradigm for large class of 300 or more.

Scalability problem

• Interaction among students can solve the problem.• Very few problem - will come for elaboration to teacher.


A lecture recorded with a group of limited number of students.

Archived lecture can be viewed by large number of students

Student discusses the problem on a discussion group (newsgroup) or mailing lists. For live discussion, chat rooms and whiteboard can be used.

Over the times, most of the problems will be solved .

Left over can be taken care of by instructor in the discussion Group or through revised course material.

This feed back will also help in revising the material.


Issues involved with such systems

Infrastructure Issues

Bandwidth of network. (specially access network part) - ordinary good quality telephone line gives upto 56 kbps.

Availability of tools

Reach of Internet

Power situation (quality and availability) at user end. (Villages and small cities)

Cost incurred by user, service provider, educational organization

Examination and certification mechanisms.


Psychological issues

Personal touch of ‘Guru-Shishya’ (personal touch) missing.

Acceptance of paradigm by masses.

Educational Issues

Efficacy of such a system - studies to quantify and compare

the E-education systems with conventional system is required.

Where organization does not have good teachers, they can

provide to student access to an excellent teacher (of course

personal touch will be missing but Certainly a better

option).


Technology issues

Hierarchy of servers for implementing large E-education

systems.

Multicast implementation (for usage efficiency)

Management system for maintaining large spread of

servers.


Conclusion

Whatever be the technology

motivation of student- extremely important.

Motivation to learn - not to clear the examination (social issue).

Smart and goal oriented approach toward learning objectives

extremely important.

Copyright 2001:YNSE-education1 Internet applications in Education Yatindra Nath Singh Electrical Engineering Department IIT Kanpur Email: [email protected]@ieee.org.

Documents

plugin slide

course material slide

streamed slide

class slide

ynsingh slide

ynseeducation7 tools

ynseeducation15 course

teacher student interaction