Applying wireless technology to teaching environment

APPLYING WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY TO TEACHING ENVIRONMENT Harri Hämäläinen Lappeenranta University of Technology P.O.Box 20, 53851 Lappeenranta, Finland [email protected] Jouni Ikonen Lappeenranta University of Technology P.O. Box 20, 53851 Lappeenrant, Finland [email protected] Jari Porras Lappeenranta University of Technology P.O. Box 20, 53851 Lappeenranta, Finland [email protected] ABSTRACT On this paper, an online virtual environment to increase student participation in a classroom teaching situation is presented. The presented teaching environment allows students to give anonymous real-time feedback for the teacher. Teacher sees the feedback immediately and has a possibility to react depending on the given comments. This environment is based on the use of modern wireless communication technologies. KEYWORDS Virtual education, online virtual environment, student participation, wireless technologies, WLAN, Bluetooth, SMS, GPRS. 1. INTRODUCTION The actual problem in a normal learning environment is the lack of real-time feedback. Many of the students are too shy to participate actively on learning by commenting the presentation, proposing their ideas or asking questions. Especially on courses with tens or hundreds of students this is a large problem. Teachers may not notice students' weak knowledge on a particular issue until verifying their exams - which is definitely too late. A possibility to react earlier for this would be useful for both students and teachers. The goal for the project was to implement instruments that help to increase the interaction between the teacher and the students by using modern technologies. Technologies themselves are not the main concern but they provide one possible approach to achieve the given goal. The implemented virtual environment should be utilized during the lessons to give the students a chance to have a real-time effect on the lectured topics. The advantages from teacher's point of view are incontestable. Teachers often have problems to estimate their student's awareness of current issue. Often they explain issues they see hard to understand very precisely and do not necessarily pay attention to the easier issues. Occasionally even these issues may be hard to understand. Our approach does not remove the problem, but hopefully makes it easier for the teacher to realize it. As teaching is discussed in this publication, it should not be considered to be limited to a high school or university environment. The feedback system can be applied to corporate environments or even kindergarten as suitable technology is likely to become available in the near future. 2. RELATED WORK One of the first steps on virtual interactive lecturing was a "Classroom Communication System". It allowed the teacher to present questions during the lecture and see the diagrams. It was highly hardware dependent accepting only a certain type of devices with a fixed wired network. It mainly replaced the traditional quizzes with an automated approach. It solved only some parts of the whole problem.[1] One step forward is the "Student Response System (SRS)", a server-side web application, which requires only a web browser on client side. Quizzes can be answered with handheld computers via wireless networks. The results can be seen as charts and can be projected to students. This approach only replaced wired links with wireless ones.[2] "Ubiquitous Computing in Education (UCE)" is a project targeted also for non-present participants. The implementation is built to be run in Java Virtual Machine to maintain platform independency, which nevertheless may cause some problems. Their system includes e.g. voting, online feedback and quiz.[3] Darmstadt University of Technology has a project called "Open Client Lecture Interaction (OCLI)". Their approach is very similar to ours; students can send questions during the lecture, they can submit ratings and the teacher can do tests online. The approach used by OCLI is based on eXtended Markup Language (XML) and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT), requiring only a device with a web browser or a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled cell phone from the client. Although the service is applicable to almost any device with a browser, the WAP approach may increase the complexity of the system.[4] ActiveCampus of University of California provides some virtual classroom education, called ActiveClass, as a part of their campus network. The end users are using Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) with a WLAN connection. The basic idea of the Client-servertype application is that students using portable, wireless communication devices can anonymously ask questions, answer polls and give the professor feedback on the class. The system is not designed for distance learning or to be used in computer-equipped classroom. ActiveClass is a browser-based web application designed to be used on PDAs.[5] 3. WIRELESS TECHNOLOGIES To use the interactive learning environment students need devices through which they can use the implemented services. Increasing number of laptops and PDAs among the students gives a change to utilize the online learning in the near future. Most of the students have a 30 cell phone of their own and providing an interface to be used by the mobile phones would give a possibility for even more students to use the service these days. In our approach both Bluetooth and wireless local area network (WLAN) could be used as the communication methods for the online virtual environment. Also GSM short messages (SMS) could be used as most students own already suitable devices. However only WLAN access has been implemented so far. Bluetooth is a wireless data transmission technology that offers a connection with two or more devices at a short distance. In the future the chip will most likely be included in many electrical devices, such as mobile phones, laptops and personal digital assistants. This makes it possible to use them as peer-to-peer devices on a short distance within a classroom. Group work during the lecture could be a good example of short-range communication. Using Bluetooth as a communication method students will not have to pay any fee to participate the teaching. WLAN technology gives a change to connect into local area network without plugging into a wired LAN wall outlet. To operate WLAN network needs an access point though which data is routed to the Internet which may be a limiting factor if classroom does not have a WLAN access. The advantage of WLAN is a larger coverage area that makes it possible to connect the whole classroom of students into the same discussion. WLAN connection to the network can be established by a WLAN-card that is installed into a laptop or a PDA. According to Mobile CommerceNet [6] Nokia [7] has plans to include the WLAN access into some of their mobile phone models in the future. SMS messages can be sent using cell phones. Penetration of cell phones operating in GSM network in Europe is high, especially among students, as well as geographical coverage. This gives the possibility to use wireless services for the most of the targeted people. Implementation is not a problem, but question if the students are willing to pay the price of SMS messages for the services is completely an other issue. The length of a short message is limited to 160 characters although recent phone models can divide longer messages in multiple pieces. The maximum length and unpleasant typing of messages with the most of the currently used devices may also be seen as negative sides of SMS. GPRS (General Packet Radio Services) operates on GSM networks. It provides a packet-based wireless communication service to the Internet for mobile phone and computer users. In theory the speed of GPRS connection may be more than 100 kbit/s but sharing band with other users decreases the actual bit rate lower. GPRS is in theory a cheaper choice compared to old-fashioned circuit-switched data connections. Infrared data communication is playing an important role in wireless data communication among laptop-, PDA- and mobile phone-users. Infrared connection in practice needs a clear way without any obstacles between receiver and sender. It is basically used to connect two devices into each other and transferring data between devices cannot naturally be charged. 4. CASE: INCREASING INTERACTION THROUGH MODERN TECHNOLOGY We have built up a system that gives a possibility for the students to affect the learning situation. We provide modules that can be used to support different events during the 31 presentation. Because of the modularity of the system, new features will be rather easy to include into existing systems. In our approach WLAN is used to provide the students an access to public network. The students need to have an access to the server where the webapplication is installed. Positioning has been considered as a method for checking if student is present in the lecture hall where the lecture is given. This would prevent access from those students that are physically not present. The requirements for this kind of authentication are that the network operator has to provide the user locations to the services and the service has to be granted by the student to give the access to his positioning information. The currently implemented modules are presented in the following list: 4.1 Presentation slides available for everybody Nowadays most of the presentations are given in electric form (ppt, pdf). Using the features of this software, teacher can easily share the presentation for students by uploading it into the server, so students can then have the slideshow downloaded for their personal devices before the lecture. Students may change the content of the presentation they have or add some notes of their own among the teacher’s presentation. Teacher does not have to have any further knowledge of computers, the capability of using web-browser is enough. 4.2 Student feedback and questions Students also have a possibility to give feedback and make questions. The original idea was that the screen projected into canvas divided into separate frames. In the largest frame is placed the most important thing, the presentation. All the questions will be printed next to the running slideshow, so that all the participants, as well as teacher, have a possibility to see them and to comment. All the questions are saved into the database where they can be found later and possibly be answered later if not during the lecture. 4.3 Lecture evaluation Students can also evaluate the presentation by giving votes. Teacher sees the results from the selected interval as a real-time diagram on the canvas. Poor evaluation during a short period indicates a need to explain actual issues more precisely. In traditional learning environment some students may raise questions and demand more explanation but unfortunately this does not happen too often. This data also with the timestamp is saved into the server so getting information or drawing a figure of votes and average is possible for teacher. 4.4 Student evaluation Teachers do not necessarily know whether the students really have understood the issues in a way teacher wanted them to. Teacher now has a simple way to create an online quiz to watch over understanding. Compared to old-fashioned random tests given in paper the summary of results can now be seen immediately through a web-form. For teachers it gives a possibility to react, if the results demonstrate that the students have not understood the 32 issues well enough. Quizzes may also perform as a part of final grade for the students. On mass courses having a random test and evaluating them takes somewhat of teacher’s time – quizzes with multiple answer choices removes this disadvantage from teachers. Figure 1: Principles of the functionality Figure 1 describes the relationships and functionality of the service. All the data between students and the teacher goes through a web server, where it is stored for later analysis. Because normally there is no wired connection to network present for students, they connect mobile. Teacher instead normally has a wired connection that he can use to run the service. 33 Figure 2: Screenshot from the presentation projected into the canvas The teacher's view shown in the canvas is represented in figure 2. In the top-left frame is shown the current slideshow. The right frame includes the results of students' evaluation of the presentation. In the bottom frame are shown the questions and feedback sent by students. By setting all the relevant information into one framed screen we decrease the need for additional overhead projectors. 34 Figure 3: User (student’s) interface. The user interface of the service that is represented in figure 3 is kept as simple as possible. By doing this we aim that the service is platform independent. The content is placed on the lower and larger frame, upper frame is used for navigation instead. There is no need to install any programs on the clients, just a simple web browser and connection into the network is all we need. To test this education environment in practice some PDAs with network access will be provided to students during the lecture. Students can then use these devices to participate the online teaching. Based on the experiences and feedback probably some modifications are made. As a result it can be seen if this kind of service is useful from both teachers' and students' point of view. 5. CONCLUSIONS This paper presents an idea where virtual environment is brought as a part of online teaching experience. This environment uses modern wireless communication technologies 35 like Bluetooth and WLAN to increase interaction between the students and the teacher. WLAN technology has been added on an existing virtual environment and functions like lecture evaluation, student evaluation through quizzes, questions and presentation material are implemented. Through this environment the teacher will have better understanding (grading) of students and may improve (individualize) the lectures. Students may affect the content and presentation of lectures and finally get better understanding on the issue. REFERENCES [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Robert J. Dufresne, William J. Gerace, William J. Leonard, Jose P. Mestre and Laura Wenk, 1996. Classtalk: A Classroom Communication System for Active Learning. Journal of Computing in Higher Education. 7 (2), 3-47. University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Pearson Education and Hypercube, 2002. Numina II Student Response System. URL http://aa.uncwil.edu/numina/srs/ [Refererred 26.2.2003] Martin Mauve, Nicolai Scheele and Werner Geyer, 2001. Enhancing Synchronous Distance Education with Pervasive Devices. Christoph Trompler, Max Muhlhauser and Witold Wegner, 2002. Open Client Lecture Interaction: An Approach to Wireless Learners-in-the-Loop. Proceedings of 4th International Conference on New Educational Environment. University of California, San Diego. ActiveCampus. URL https://activecampus.ucsd.edu/ [Refererred 26.2.2003] Mobile CommerceNet. URL http://www.mobile.commerce.net/ [Refererred 7.6.2003] Nokia. URL http://www.nokia.com/ [Refererred 20.2.2003] 36