Real Time Virtual Classroom: A Case Study in a Blended Approach

Introduction to 'Real Time Virtual Classroom', Dale E. Parson, Summer 2015

Updated somewhat March 16, 2020. Blackboard Collaborate from 2015 is now Zoom. Here is a link to my RTVC / Zoom page.
That is now the place to look for current info, although this essay is still useful.

Description

Real Time Virtual Classroom, or RTVC, is an approach to blended distance learning adopted by Kutztown University's Department of Computer Science and Information Technology in 2014 for its three master programs in Software Development, Information Technology, the Professional Science Master's Program (PSM), and the 2019 Grad Certificate Program in Data Science. The name derives from the fact that KU's CS&IT Department unanimously supports growing its graduate programs using distance learning without sacrificing the real-time experiences of classroom interactions. The department offered one graduate-only (500 level) course in fall 2014, expanding to two in spring 2015. Enrollment and student response to RTVC were very encouraging. The plan is to offer all graduate-only courses this way, and to have all combined upper-level undergraduate / graduate courses (400 level) in RTVC mode by fall 2016. The following three paragraphs come from the script for a promotional video that the department is preparing with the Kutztown PR organization over summer 2015.

Real Time Virtual Classroom permits students to attend class sessions from remote locations of their choice while retaining the interactive experience previously available only by being present on campus. Using a collection of browser-based, interactive software tools, instructors and students can stream audio, video, and chat room messages to each other during class. A presenter can display diagrams, slides, and discipline-specific artifacts – anything that can be displayed from a conventional classroom computer – to remote attendees simultaneously. Remote attendees can ask questions and participate in classroom discussions.

During a typical RTVC session, the students are split evenly between those present in the classroom and those attending remotely. They report benefits of this type of course delivery that include eliminating the commute to campus and the ability to attend class during inclement weather or while out of town on business.

Finally, students can catch up on classes missed due to illness or schedule conflicts. A multimedia archive holds all class interactions, from formal presentations to chat room interactions, and it is available throughout the semester.

Instructional Significance

Real Time Virtual Classroom is an example of a so-called blended approach to on-line learning. According to Charles Graham's introduction to The Handbook of Blended Learning: Global Perspectives, Local Designs (copyright Wiley, 2005), blended learning includes combining instructional modalities, combining instructional methods, and combining online and face-to-face instruction. (There is a free available draft copy of Graham's introductory chapter here, verified June 3, 2015). Graham goes on to say, "The first two positions above reflect the debate on the influences of media versus method on learning ... Both of these positions suffer from the problem that they define BL so broadly that there encompass virtually all learning systems. One would be hard pressed to find any learning system that did not involve multiple instructional methods and multiple delivery media. So defining BL in either of these two ways waters down the definition and really does not get at the essence of what blended learning is and why the concept of blended learning is exciting to so many people. The third position more accurately reflects the historical emergence of blended learning systems and is the foundation of the author’s working definition." Graham uses diagrams, freely available in the draft copy on the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (unitar) click4it Learning & Training Wiki, to illustrate the ongoing historical convergence of face-to-face and online learning in blended approaches, and to illustrate the following four dimensions of interactions in these converging approaches.

• Space: Live (physical/F2F) <---> Mixed reality <---> Virtual (distributed)
• Time: Live Synchronous (very short lag time) <---> Asynchronous (long lag time)
• Fidelity: High (rich all senses) <---> Medium (e.g., audio only) <--> Low (text only)
• Humanness: High human / No machine <---> No human / High machine

Two of Graham's illustrations available on the click4it Learning & Training Wiki site:

Graham concludes his introductory section by saying, "While it is impossible to see entirely what the future holds, we can be pretty certain that the trend towards blended learning systems will increase. It may even become so ubiquitous that we will eventually drop the word “blended” and just call it learning as both Masie and Massy (this volume) predict."

Real Time Virtual Classroom as a term is a recent development, coined by several members of the Computer Science & Information Technology Department of Kutztown University of PA. Its major goal is to preserve the Time, Fidelity, and Humanness of face-to-face classroom interactions while supporting both physical face-to-face and virtual-distributed interaction Spaces simultaneously. It originates out of a desire to retain the benefits of live classroom interactions while removing geography as an impediment for remote students. It recognizes that advances in distributed, multimedia interactions and Internet bandwidth will continue to make it possible to recover modes of instructor-student and student-student interaction that have been lost by many online approaches.

Specific Examples

Real Time Virtual Classroom as outlined in this wiki is a specific example. It is a case study in how this approach adopted by Kutztown's Department of Computer Science and Information Technology embodies aspects of the following three strategies making up this wiki. This case study is specific to master-level computer science & information technology courses, but it is the authors' belief that these examples can serve as catalysts for RTVC courses in other academic disciplines.

Strategy 1: Lecture

Preservation of live, classroom interactions among the instructor and students, typically in a lecture-oriented course, is the hallmark of Real Time Virtual Classroom. Class-time interactions including lecture relate to all four dimensions of Graham's taxonomy.

• Space: Live (physical/F2F) <---> Mixed reality <---> Virtual (distributed)
• Time: Live Synchronous (very short lag time) <---> Asynchronous (long lag time)
• Fidelity: High (rich all senses) <---> Medium (e.g., audio only) <--> Low (text only)
• Humanness: High human / No machine <---> No human / High machine

Space - Students can occupy the physical space of the classroom or the virtual space by attending remotely via interactive Internet software tools. RTVC works across this dimension. In courses offered so far, about 1/2 of the students attend in person and 1/2 attend remotely for a typical session. Exams are usually take-home, open-ended design problems with extended completion periods. Most students take those from home. Students make presentations either in-class or remotely. One student reports attending class using an Android app during a regular bus ride with wireless service.

Time - Interactions take place at fixed class times. However, students who must miss a class due to illness or scheduling conflicts can watch an archive that includes all video, audio, chat, and other lecture presentation and interaction from the class period. Of course, these students can interact with an instructor and peers ofter the class using Discussion Boards, Chat Rooms, Electronic Mail and Phone calls. Therefore, even though RTVC emphasizes "Live Synchronous (very short lag time)", it spans this dimension to "Asynchronous (long lag time)" via the archives and other tools.

Fidelity - Support for interactive, multi-way video and audio streaming, computer screen display, class-time chat room, and virtual whiteboards make RTVC a high Fidelity medium, regardless of a student's Space or Time.

Humanness: Interaction and rapport are very good. Asking and answering questions are easy, engaging in repartee is easy. In fact, many students in the classroom log into the software tools, thereby participating in aspects of the environment experienced by their remote peers. Even they raise their electronic hands to ask questions. Logging in gives them an opportunity to watch for problems that the instructor might not see, leading to correction as quickly as possible.

The following list of lecture-oriented instructor-student interaction protocols come from a 2015 guide for Kutztown CS&IT faculty, replaced in 2018 by this page. While these example documents focus on the (prior) Blackboard Collaborate browser-based tool for live interaction, RTVC is agnostic with respect to particular software tools. Any software tools that supports at least the capabilities of Blackboard Collaborate can serve the needs of Real Time Virtual Classroom.

Instructor-student interaction protocols learned while using Real Time Virtual Classroom in a lecture setting in fall 2014 and spring 2015:

1. A student who wants to ask a question via the Chat should type the question and THEN raise the electronic hand (Raise Hand icon) that rings a bell. If the student rings the bell first, everyone winds up waiting while the student types. The only exception is when the instructor is racing out ahead of the student’s question. Then the student should raise the hand earlier in order to pause the lecture.
2. If a student is going to ask a question using audio, the student should turn on the Talk button & then raise the electronic hand so the instructor pauses. The student should then talk, and should turn off the Talk button when done. Assuming that the moderator limits audio to 2 talkers maximum, students will need to turn off the Talk button when not talking in order to enable other students to talk. Note the reversal of protocol here – the hand/bell goes raised/sounded before the audio question. This protocol is all about not talking over each other, just like in a phone conversation. Otherwise, participants would be muting each other all the time. Since most students mostly use Chat instead of Audio, this protocol hasn’t had much use. Students have used audio only for remote presentations.
3. During the time an instructor is scrolling a window or changing windows or tabs, students may see a blurred display. Therefore, instructors should not start talking about the contents of the display until it is stable and stationary.
4. Shut off the instructor’s microphone when a remote student is making a presentation or asking a question via audio. Otherwise, all students will hear annoying echoes from the student’s voice recirculating through the audio stream.
5. Arrange for remote student to turn in presentation slides ahead of the class period. Remote student video streaming may suffer from low bandwidth, resulting in much video breakup. Until high bandwidth Internet access becomes universal, it is better for the instructor to flip slides when cued vocally by a remote presenter. This requirement should eventually go away.
6. The instructor should provide a virtual classroom in which students are moderators so they can practice setting up microphones and delivering presentations at any time.
7. Remote presenters should not wear headsets when they present a talk. Use the computer's speakers. Otherwise, the delayed chatter in the ears becomes annoying.

Below is a screen shot of a Blackboard Collaborate virtual room used to support RTVC in a spring 2015 class composed mostly of student presentations. There were four remote students and about eight in the room at the time this session archive was captured. Privacy concerns preclude posting the actual video archive outside of the course D2L site. Note the interactive Chat window in the lower left, the attendee list, and a complete copy of the instructor's computer desktop. Application sharing allows an instructor to share specific applications or the entire desktop with remote students. This instructor shares the entire desktop so that remote students get the same view as students in the room looking at the projection screen. Also, the instructor prefers to use browser-based illustration tools whenever possible, to minimize the time and temporary video noise incurred in jumping from one application to another.

Projects of the courses in this study are computer science and information technology projects. Typical projects include programming projects on remote servers, data mining (also on servers), and database management (again, on servers). Any discipline that supports on-line storage of images and editable documents relating to course content can work as an RTVC course. The discipline need not be computer science. The next two screen shots show programming code using an interactive terminal emulator in common use by computer science faculty and students, along with documentation generated from code using the Javadoc utility.

While a case study from a specific academic discipline cannot address the needs of all disciplines, there are many disciplines in which project artifacts take the form of documents, program code, images, and other media that instructors and students can store on remote servers. Computer science is not unique in this regard. Cloud server sites such as Google Drive and Dropbox provide servers for document storage. Many academic organizations have the use of servers inside of firewalls, including D2l, for document storage.

Getting back to one of Graham's dimensions:

• Time: Live Synchronous (very short lag time) <---> Asynchronous (long lag time)

Programming projects in Kutztown's graduate programs tend to be predominately asynchronous in time, with students working on projects according to their schedules. However, the instructor allocates class time for questions and interactive debugging. Those sessions have used Blackboard Collaborate for Q&A about projects, and have been very productive. Student teams also use both interactive D2L Chat Rooms and D2L Discussion Boards, along with telephone conversations and texting, to coordinate group programming project efforts. That leads us to the next strategy, Small Group Work.

Strategy 3: Small Group Work

Small Group work equals Small Group projects for software and database design courses. Here are two images of small group discussion boards and chat rooms for small team projects in a fall 2014 Advanced Object-Oriented Programming course at Kutztown.

The course illustrated above used commercial cloud application services such as Lucid Chart and Google Drive for creations and storage of group project artifacts. Many tools including these two are now integrated so that they work together without additional login and file transfer overhead. They typically offset free sample periods and academic discounts. A letter from the instructor to Lucid Chart led to a free five-year license for the instructor and several students at a time. Below is a sample graphical software model captured via Lucid Chart and used in the course.