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Living lessons for university learners of English

Gino Yu

Multimedia Innovation Centre

Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Hong Kong

The rapid expansion in web-based teaching throughout tertiary institutions coupled with advances in multimedia delivery are making it possible for educators to encapsulate and deliver on-line interactive lessons to students. World Wide Web (WWW) based technologies have generally been employed to place syllabi, lecture notes (with text, graphics, and hyperlinks) and assignments on the WWW for students to view (Goldberg & Salari, 1997). Media including audio and video clips, animations, and applet programs often accompany such notes. In most cases, web-based materials are intended to supplement regular classroom teaching.

Universities seeking to reduce costs and expand their presence internationally are currently driving widespread use of web-based lectures and tutorials. These can supplement traditional teaching methods, replace certain classes to reduce teaching load, or ultimately replace traditional teaching delivery modes entirely and thereby enable universities to more easily deliver programmes globally. To ensure consistency and to simplify maintenance, institution-wide web-based teaching requires the development of a common platform for delivery. Furthermore, the platform should support delivery over Local Area Networks to supplement campus education, broadband internet delivery (1.5Mbits/sec) for emerging customer services, and hybrid CDROM/narrowband Internet delivery for modem-based computers. In a hybrid system, media such as video, images and audio reside on a CD-ROM, while real-time discussions and text annotations are delivered through the dial-up connection.

One of the ways computer-mediated learning can be used is to replicate the classroom lesson experience through an online format that is either live (delivered remotely) or stored for viewing at the students’ pace. This may include presentation slides synchronized with video, audio, text, and hypertext. While such systems are suitable for more "passive" learning experiences such as lectures, they are poor at creating the participatory, collaborative and "moderated exploration" experiences students commonly undergo in the communicative English language learning classroom.

However, by incorporating opportunities for student annotation of content and real-time communication services, the traditional distance learning experiences may be transformed to suit more interactive and student-centred modes of education.

This paper introduces the concept of the "living lesson" that evolves with student input. It presents a framework for the development of a web-based platform to create, deliver, and support lesson-based education. The paper describes this framework and considers how it may be applied to tertiary level English Language Teaching (ELT).

Online forums and discussion boards provide a medium through which people can contribute their individual views and opinions. Given a "seed" topic or article, people submit their views and comments through web-based forms and thus documents "grow" over time and become "living documents". While most forums use static text articles as a basis for discussion, it is possible to use real-time media including video and audio "lessons" as the "seed." Discussions conducted in the form of annotations are attached to the media at the exact point under discussion and played back simultaneously. As subsequent viewers play the media, the related annotations are displayed at the relevant time. Each lesson thus becomes a "seed" within which students subsequently incorporate their views and opinions through the electronic annotation. Annotations may include hyperlinks to other relevant resources on the WWW that the student has found. In this way, every student becomes a stakeholder in a "living lesson" and the content becomes richer with input from each student that participates in the lesson.

Students are encouraged to participate in discussions both through annotations and also through real-time chat where they can discuss their views and opinions, and join in a group discussion of the lesson topic with other students and/or a teacher. Although chat information is not recorded for future playback, it provides an additional channel to stimulate student participation and interaction. By involving students through annotations and chat, more passive traditional lesson viewing experiences become more engaging and interactive while empowering students to participate also improves retention of presented information (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991).

For tertiary education in Hong Kong, an immediate challenge facing English teachers is to equip freshmen students with sufficient skills to comprehend lectures given in English. In actual "live" lecture situations, students are rarely able to interrupt and ask questions. The progressive manner in which lecture-based materials are presented makes it difficult for students who fall behind to catch up. Furthermore, the practice in most secondary ELT contexts of teaching listening comprehension through exposing the students to relatively short, non-authentic chunks of spoken language does little to prepare students for the tertiary lecture experience.

The living lessons framework presented in this paper provides a simulated lecture environment to help prepare incoming students for lecture-based instruction. Students can view lectures at their own pace, repeat sections if they wish, ask questions and use on-line glossary facilities to learn terminology in context. Additionally, teachers as well as students can annotate the lectures to focus students’ attention on various linguistic and pragmatic functions the text performs as well as possibly making sub-titles available for additional reinforcement. By assigning lessons within the simulated lecture environment, monitoring viewing patterns, participating in real-time communication and testing comprehension, can also help teachers to assess their students’ ability to follow lectures.

Self-access modes of learning can be encouraged by requiring students to find additional related information on the internet and attach their findings to the media by annotation, and to include an explanation on the relevance of their discovery.

In terms of the productive skills, practice is given in the careful formulation of the views and comments expressed in an annotation, and in the more spontaneous real-time, quasi-oral expression of the chat-room.

The components of a modular framework to support web-based lessons are illustrated in Figure 1. Defining and adopting a framework allows individual components to be upgraded without affecting the overall system.

Figure 1: The developmental framework

The components include the following.

Currently the components are implemented using commercial tools and custom server-side scripts using Active Server Pages (ASP) running on a Windows NT platform.

Content Delivery

Apart from providing content in the form of a presentation, film clip etc., the content delivery component provides links to other components of the framework. Factors influencing the design of content delivery components include the following.

• Effectiveness of the approach - is the material presented clearly? Is the layout and interface intuitive for students?
• Bandwidth requirement - can content be delivered with acceptable performance though the internet?
• Production time and cost - how inexpensively and how fast can content be converted to web-based format?
• Support for multiple languages - if desired, how easily can the translation and/or glossary of difficult lexical items be provided in the student’s mother tongue?

The Content Delivery interface simulates a classroom experience. The content is delivered via video and audio (using RealVideo G2) and slides stored as image files. Isolating the slides from the video reduces distortions caused by video compression and improves their legibility. A real-time chat window allows communication between students and tutors viewing the screen. Hyperlinks to additional resources are displayed synchronously with the presentation. Students can attach their questions to any slide using the Annotations component.

Figure 2: Content Delivery interface

The use of a "talking head" adds significantly to the production cost, required bandwidth, and storage. Thus, a second approach has been developed that replaces the video with animated PowerPoint and speech. This reduces both required bandwidth and production costs. Short video-based explanations may still be attached at appropriate points in the lesson through synchronized hyperlinks. Presentations are authored with PointPlus.

Quiz

The Quiz component provides online database facilities for maintaining questions and answers for online quiz and self-test. The quizzes provide students with instant feedback and can act as an additional method for assessment in distance education (Hazari, 1998). Questions are web-based and include a variety of different styles including true/false, multiple choice, select from group, short essay, and "identify the element" (graphical). Questions may also be classified by level of difficulty and may be attached on a per-slide or per-lecture basis and maintained in a database. Quizzes are dynamically created from the bank of questions and so students viewing the same lesson could end up with different quizzes. The back-end system logs the specific questions each student is asked as well as their score.

Online References and Resources

Content may include synchronized hyperlinks to other web resources which are displayed within a scrolling list. Old links are pushed off the list as new links are introduced. When a link is selected, the referenced materials are presented in an independent browser window, and the presentation is paused. Hypertext reference materials may be annotated using web-annotation software such as ThirdVoice (Thirdvoice) or Note-It (Noteit).

Annotations

Students can post their annotations (questions or comments) onto slides through a modified discussion board (Hypernews)) and thus each lecture becomes a "seed" for discussion and elaboration. The discussion board system is modified to provide a unique forum for each slide. Discussions may be viewed by session, or as a summary of a series of sessions. Annotations are also posted and forwarded to the assigned teacher via e-mail who then posts answers to the discussion board and which are then also e-mailed to the student. By posting questions and answers, frequently asked questions need answering only once.

Real-time Tutoring

The real-time tutoring component provides an environment for "live" discussions. Both one-to-one and one-to-many style discussion is supported. Communication between tutor and student can be conducted via text, audio or video. Services such as shared web-browsing, shared PowerPoint presentation and electronic white-board services may also be used. Text-based discussions may be recorded, edited, and attached as an "online reference and resources" item. An online calendar/scheduler coordinates the tutoring sessions on a per-module basis.

Back-end Services and Profiling

All of the components are integrated into the back-end services and profiling component. This component maintains the student database and records all events occurring in the content delivery component into the database. It also provides a web-based interface for teachers and administrators to modify components (e.g., manage quizzes, and students’ questions and answers; add additional resource links to relevant locations within a lecture; etc.) and to view the system statistics.

Student profiling is a very important aspect of the system for assessing both the performance of students as well as the effectiveness of the system. Events logged into the system include the following.

• Students’ viewing patterns - all browser events are recorded on a per-student basis including the specific web-pages viewed, the time spent viewing each web page and the path travelled through the materials.
• Tutoring sessions - statistics recorded can include the identity of the teacher, the students that signed up, the students that attended the session, and, for text-based interaction, the degree of their participation (based upon the number of characters they type).
• Quiz results - questions that are asked and the students’ results are recorded. Results can be viewed by student or by question.
• Questions and answers - the back-end system simplifies the maintenance of student-submitted questions. Each submission includes a hyperlink to the specific section of the relevant content for teachers to better understand the context of the question. The time and date that teachers respond to questions is also recorded which allows administrators to ensure that questions are answered within a reasonable time.

Production and Authoring

Developing an interactive online module is a labor-intensive task and careful consideration must be taken to minimize the production time. Currently, content is created using off-the-shelf tools (e.g., Adobe Premiere for video capture and editing, RealProducer for video encoding and RealPresenter for PowerPoint integration). A template has been created that fully integrates content into the platform including back-end systems. Online systems have also been created to manage student questions and answers, online quizzes, and "live" discussion materials. A suite of custom tools is currently being developed to streamline the authoring process.

Application Issues

When adopting a web-based community-building service such as living lessons, several issues must be addressed including the following.

• How to make user-moderated information manageable - information within living lessons must be sorted and organized for quick and intuitive access.
• How to preserve the integrity of information provided by users - information submitted by students needs to be relevant and correct. Irrelevant or inappropriate information must be safeguarded against but will require increased maintenance.
• How to exploit the lecture format for ELT - the living lesson will need to be integrated into a series of classroom sessions focusing on the listening skills needed for effective academic listening. It will then probably be best exploited in terms of being able to provide a forum for the discussion of issues previously introduced in the classroom.
• How to engage student participation - students, in general, are reluctant to "commit" themselves publicly. With living documents, this is exacerbated by the fact that any comments contributed to a living lesson site may become "preserved forever." It is necessary therefore for students to be prepared both linguistically and in terms of content prior to being expected to contribute to a living lesson.

The use of distance education systems, which were designed for more passive lecture-style delivery, may be employed to support more active approaches to learning by adding support for real-time communication, self-test, and annotation by student and teacher. Living lessons allow students to discuss and co-author online lessons. Their contributions become additional materials for subsequent students. A variety of active learning methods are possible including group learning, student centered "exploration" and self-paced study. The system also allows teachers to monitor and assess students’ contribution, and to identify problem areas that need further attention.

In this paper, we have introduced the concept of the living lesson in the context of preparing freshmen students for English language lecture-based education in universities. There are, however, other potential areas for its application within ELT. These might include replacing lesson presentations with movie clips, short presentations or even music clips that could be used to encourage students to research and submit related internet resources, and to exercise their communication skills through group-discussion. The use of a hybrid CDROM/Internet package, whereby some content is stored on CD-ROM and thus reduces download time, enables widespread deployment to areas where Internet access is less stable and more expensive than in Hong Kong.

Our ultimate goal in applying technologies such as living lessons to ELT is to provide rich learning experiences that promote inquiry, group interaction, participation and contribution irrespective of students’ physical location. The system provides faculty and students from universities and high schools around the world with an environment to participate in joint online activities and provide remote support to regions where ELT expertise is lacking.

Goldberg, M. & Salari, S. (1997). An update on WebCT (World-Wide-Web Course Tools) - A tool for the creation of sophisticated web-based learning environments. In Proceedings of NAUWeb 1997.

Hazari, S. I. (1998). Online testing methods for web courses. In Proceedings of the 14^th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, 1998, pp155-157.

Pascarella, E. & Terenzini, P. T. (1991). How College Affects Students: Findings and insights from twenty years of research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

PointPlus Presentation Engine.

RealVideo encoding.

Thirdvoice Web Annotation System.