Distance education as an application of MICE technology
Distance education is an important application of technology for real
time multimedia conferencing. Two of the MICE partners, University of
Oslo and Norwegian Telecom Research, have in a joint project
MultiTeam/MUNIN built a system for distance education, seminars and
meetings between electronic classrooms. The third participant in this
project is the Center for Technology at Kjeller. The system includes
the multimedia components part of the classroom, how they are fitted
into a classroom as well as the network technology employed for
linking the classrooms.
Each electronic classroom is equipped with an electronic whiteboard as
well as cameras, monitors, microphones and speakers. The electronic
whiteboard is a wall mounted shared drawing area.
It has been a key design goal for the system to be as transparent as
possible to the users and as far as possible allow the users to behave
as if in an ordinary classroom. This resulted in the development of
the electronic whiteboard as a distributed whiteboard as well as led
decisions on using audio technology enabling close to full duplex
audio communication between classrooms. Also the classrooms are
equipped with roof or table mounted microphones allowing anyone
present in the classrooms to participate in a discussion at all times.
The electronic white board
The electronic white board have the size of an ordinary black-board
that usually is present in a lecture room. The board consists of a
semitransparent screen which is used as a display screen for a video
canon placed behind the screen. The video canon is attached to the RGB
interface of a UNIX work station that is used to control the board. A
UNIX-program implementing the user interface of the electronic white
board is running on UNIX-workstations in each participating classroom.
Unlike most other similar schemes the board is active and enables hand
writing on the board in much the same way as it is done on an ordinary
black-board. The present version of the electronic board realizes this
by the semitransparent screen being a large scale digitizing board
which can be written on with an electronic pen. The communication
software linking the electronic whiteboards allow users in all
participating classrooms to simultaneous write and otherwise
manipulate the electronic whiteboard adding to the feeling of being in
the same classroom.
Prepared foils may be displayed on the electronic whiteboard and the
users can easily change foils as well as save updated foils for
printing, e.g. to be handed out to participants.
Video and audio communication
Each electronic classroom is currently equipped with two sets of
cameras and monitors. Each set consisting of a camera, a large monitor
showing picture(s) from remote classroom(s) and a smaller monitor
showing the picture being sent from the local classroom. One set is
placed in front of the classroom beside the electronic whiteboard,
facing the students. The other set is placed at the back of the
classroom with the camera focused on the front of the classroom where
the teacher normally will be located. An automatic control system
selects which camera is active based on where in the room the current
speaker is located.
For the electronic classroom a H.261 based video codec by the Finish
company Bitfield is used. The codec which is capable of running at
more than 2MBit/s is on an ISA card and the project has together with
Bitfield developed a driver for HP-UX for this card. As a part of the
MICE project software enabling this codec to communicate with the
other codecs being used in the MICE project has been developed.
So far 3.1 kHz audio has mainly been used for audio communication
between the electronic classrooms. Promising experiments are now
carried out on using 7 kHz audio between the electronic
classrooms. Tests show that this increase in audio quality greatly
improves the participants feeling of being present in the
sameclassroom.
Usage of the electronic classrooms
During the fall 1993 semester the two electronic classrooms currently
operational at the University of Oslo and at the Center for Technology
at Kjeller as been used for teaching of a graduate course in data
communication. This use of the classrooms is the basis of an
evaluation of the system which is currently under way by experts on
distance education. A report is expected in January of 1994. The
classrooms has also been used for project meetings between the sites.
The electronic classroom at the University of Oslo has also been used
to follow some of the MICE seminars as well as to give one of the
seminars.
Continued development of the technology
The electronic classroom technology is under continued
development. One current goal is to be more compatible with the MICE
technology, e.g. use IP Multicasting for more of the communication. We
are also working on improving the user interface, e.g. by adding a
special control console with a touch sensitive screen, and adding a
scanning device to rapidly bring printed material onto the electronic
whiteboard. We are also working to better allow participation through
workstations either over IP networks or through
ISDN.
Basic classroom configuration
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