Transcript Beyond Traditional Lecturing: The Interactive Computer

Bassam Hammo (Ph.D)
Department of Computer Information Systems
King Abdullah II School for Information Technology
Jordan University
Amman Jordan
e- mail: [email protected]
What is an Interactive Classroom
 An interactive classroom is a place where
learners are encouraged to communicate with
peers and teachers in a meaningful way.
 Creates useful learning opportunities in which
the teacher presents the material in a way that is
interactive and therefore meaningful to the
learner.
Interactive Classroom
 Electronic classroom or simply “E-classroom” is
equipped with technologies that
 capture classroom activities,
 allow for audio and video recordings of lectures,
 slides presentation,
 capture the notes written by the lecturer, and
 make class material available all the time.

can be accessed and reviewed by students for missing
parts, studying difficult concepts or to prepare for exams.
Why Interactive Classroom
 Cognitive psychologists:
 learning is more productive when the acquired
knowledge occurs in an interactive environment.
 Experimentally, it was found that students attending
interactive lectures learn more than students attending
a traditional one.

This is because students in an interactive environment do
not spend the time in writing and copying the material from
the board as the case in traditional classrooms; instead,
they spend the time in thinking, understanding and asking
questions .
Why Interactive Classroom
 Efficient learning techniques became mandatory to
keep up with the demand of productive learning:
 Significant improvements in computational power,
 networking bandwidth,
 storage capacity and graphical user interfaces
 New teaching methods, such as long-distance and
virtual learning, where students are separated in
space and/or time, become increasingly common in
many universities and educational institutes
Motivation
 Lecturing at King Abdullah II School for Information Technology
(KASIT) at the University of Jordan (UJ) is based on electronic
presentations using PowerPoint slides:
 Classrooms are equipped with ceiling-mounted projectors and
whiteboards for writing notes.
 A typical lecture is around 50 minutes and has around 60-80
students.
 The classroom is the only place where students can learn and take
notes.
 Lecture notes, in most cases, are not made available outside the
classroom.
 Recently, KASIT starts offering few courses through Blackboard:
 but yet not as efficient and utilized as required.
 high running cost of the system
 serves only a thin slice of the huge community of the UJ.
Motivation
 Support a long-standing problem of teaching an
obligatory, multi-section course of Computer Skills
required by all students at the University.
 huge number of students per section was not very
conducive to establish meaningful interaction between
students and the instructor.
 The performance of some students was always low
and students have to repeat the course more than
once.
Interactive Classroom Model
Features of our Interactive Classroom
 Our system aims at exploiting the potential of computer
technology for improving the way we teach and learn:
 Bi-lingual (Arabic/English)
 Developed to enable students within the campus of UJ to
interact with the lecturer’s computer, where lecture notes
are available for projection.
 It enables the lecturer to improve the organization of the
course material:


presents lectures and give a means of simplifying extensive
content
monitors students’ activities through receiving immediate feedback
regarding how well they have learned the material in an interactive
way.
Features of our Interactive Classroom
 For students, the new system encourages them to
participate and complete the coursework with more
variety in learning experiences, such as:





answering questions directly,
taking quizzes,
downloading audio and video files,
reviewing past lectures,
uploading due assignments and many other interesting
tasks.
 Our system comes at low cost
 It has the advantages of being flexible, easy to use, and
has the ability to run at any place within the campus where
a networking connection is available.
The Roll of the Administrator
 Add a new lecturer
 Establish instructor-student relationship.
Connecting with the Instructor Server
 Two major tasks through this server:
 manage the coursework content,
 start a presentation.
Starting a Presentation
 Delivered material could be simply:
 PowerPoint™ presentation,
 material from the World Wide Web,
 supplementary audio/video files, or
 execution of any number of different programs on the
main computer.
 Monitoring students’ activities
Connecting with the Student Machine
 Displays a list of online active instructors running on
servers.


Student chooses to join an instructor;
login window requesting the student’s ID and the password.
Connecting with the Student Machine
 Student can perform a set of tasks:



downloading missed lecture notes,
reading messages sent by instructor, and
viewing an active presentation.
Joining an Active Presentation
 Student Joins a Session
 Student has no control over the displayed material:
 just setting there watching the presentation and other
activities presented by the instructor,
 checking attendance record,
 reading notes sent by the instructor,
 raising hand to ask a question,
 uploading an assignment when requested to do so, and
 responding to quick Yes/No questions.
Joining an Active Presentation
Conclusion & Future Directions
 We aim at utilizing over thirty computer labs distributed around
the campus and already equipped with latest computers, servers,
and connected over a high-bandwidth network to be used in
teaching synchronous multi-section courses interactively.
 It overcomes separations in space by exchanging audio, video,
and textual materials at different computer labs.
 It worth to mention that the project was initiated and developed
as a six-month project, and it was driven by practical needs and
targeted at providing a friendly, easy to set, low-cost
Windows/PC-based interactive classroom environment.
Thank You for Listening