Streaming Video, Videoconference and Computer Conference for Learning and Teaching On-line(1)

Abstract
I will discuss the practical experiences of teaching and administrating a web-based distance course in Business Administration distributed from Örebro University to both campus students and students from other parts of Sweden. The project also involves the cooperation with twenty community learning centres. The presentation will be practically oriented and therefore beneficial to teachers and administrators who are interested in introducing IT as a tool for both distance education and campus courses. I will discuss topics such as the technical and pedagogical challenge teachers are likely to be faced with, including the issues of teamwork, student activity and student feedback.

Keywords
Streaming Video
Videoconference
Computer Conference
Synchronous
Asynchronous
Teamwork
Learning Centre

1. Introduction
There is a great demand for higher education among people in sparsely populated areas in Sweden. Both young people and people in their most active phase of life are forced to move to places where the universities are located. This is a great problem for many communities where the ageing and less educated population can be an obstacle that leads to no incentives for new enterprises. The declining population leads also to a situation where the whole district comes to a standstill with the closing down of services such as schools, shops, and post-offices.

Many communities have realised that the possibility of higher education for the citizens serves as a magnet to people and as a lever for the local economic development. In an attempt to change the negative development they have established learning centres in order to bring university courses closer to the inhabitants. The learning centres are all equipped with modern technique like videoconference equipment and computers with access to the Internet. The localities are also available for students both on weekdays and on holidays. Most of the learning centres serve as a distributor for university courses and do not arrange any courses of their own. Even if it is possible to reach students who otherwise would not have been able to attend university courses individually through the Internet these learning centres have an important role to play in the aspect of life long learning.

Because of this demand for higher education the Department of Business Administration at the Örebro University, six years ago, started a project of distributing a one-year basic course in Business Administration to community learning centres. Since then both the number of students and the number of learning centres has grown and much experience can be made from this course that started with comparatively very little planning and a small staff

2. Technical challenge

One of the first issues to consider is what technique shall be used for the course. When I started this course six years ago there was only the option of videoconference combined with telephone, fax and post. So videoconference became the main communication technique during the first two years. The students got together once a week at the learning centre to attend lectures and lessons brought to them via videoconference from the university. The lectures were quite traditional in the sense that they prepared the students for a certain item or problem. There were of course some practical things that have to be taken into consideration. Videoconferencing using ISDN (a technique for transmitting sound and picture in ordinary telephone cables) at low speed (128 kb) gives no television quality and there was a problem to illustrate models and methods to the students through a comparatively small television screen. My solution to that problem was to make all illustrations that would be used at the lecture in advance using a presentation program (Microsoft PowerPoint). The illustrations could then be miniaturised and copies could be sent to the learning centre where the person in charge distributed the material to the students before each lecture. This service proved to be very appreciated by the students.

One of the advantages of videoconference is that it is possible interrupt the lecture for questions and discussions in real time. Unfortunately this possibility is not used very much by the students according to my experience. I believe that the reason for this is both technical and psychological. Technically there are some problems when many different brands of videoconference equipment are connected at the same time through a bridge. The problems are mostly concerned with the sound, like echo and weak microphones at the learning centres. When using video conference the technical limitations makes it hard for the teacher to improvise and for example using the whiteboard and moving around in the classroom while lecturing. Most of the material must be produced ahead and presented computerised or on the document camera. The technical difficulties are not insurmountable though and with a little training and routine it is possible to handle the problems. The psychological problems are more difficult to handle. There is always hard to make most people talk in front of a camera and a microphone. There are always just the same few students who take part in the discussion while the majority remain silent

Besides having lectures, I also had lessons on videoconference. These lessons were in time directly connected to the lectures. The object of the lessons was to further discuss and clarify problems that were the topic of the preceding lecture. The students were divided into groups, one for each learning centre. These groups were then divided into lesson groups with five learning centres in each one. This arrangement was made in order to increase the interactivity between the students and I still think that for small groups videoconference can be a good tool for real-time interaction needed at lessons and seminars. One common opinion among the students in the evaluations of the course was that the lessons were too slow because of the technical limitations of videoconference. The problem could of course be less if there were fewer students attending the same lesson. This was unfortunately not possible because of economic reasons.

During the first two years I combined, for economic reasons, campus students and distance students by having lectures together. This meant that the technical equipment for videoconferencing had to be brought to the auditorium where the campus students normally get their lectures This was very well accepted by the distance students as they didn’t expect anything else and knowing that the technique even with its limitations and drawbacks was the very prerequisite for attending the course. The campus students on the other hand felt that the technique and the way it limited the lecturer’s way of communicating with the class in the auditorium made the lectures rather static and rigid. After two years I found that it was not possible to develop the methods of distance education more when combining distance students and campus students. This coincided with the establishing of a new multimedia lab at the university, which also included a new studio for videoconferencing. The course was then divided into two separate courses for the benefit of both the campus students and the distance students.

After having used the videoconferencing technique for five years I have now shifted to streaming video through the Internet. This is made possible because the number of computers in households is rising rapidly in Sweden. Technically there are many advantages by using this technique. When using videoconference to transmit lectures to many learning centres you must connect through a bridge, which should be booked ahead. This is rather expensive and can also be a source for technical malfunctions. This third part involvement is not needed using streaming video as the files are accessed from a server at the university. Streaming media can also be produced and broadcasted in a number of ways. A lecture can for instance be broadcasted either as a slideshow with sound or as a streaming video synchronised with a slideshow through smil programming. With the use of small digital camcorders it is also very easy to keep the content of the course up to date with interviews and reports from industry or society. The technical quality of the streaming media is dependent on the speed of the connection of the target group. Even if there is a great activity in increasing the bandwidth in Sweden one can not expect that the ordinary student can have more than 56kbps modem speed at present. That is of course a limitation especially for the picture quality of streaming video. For that reason I have continued to give the students all material for each lecture as a pdf file on the course web site. If the student don’t have an Internet connection that is goodenough it is always possible to go to the learning centre to watch and listen to lectures and get print outs.

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