Building Bridges - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 241

Figure 2. The in-class awareness display, with
identifying information blurred. The top right box
represents the satellite campus, the top middle box
is a guest observer, and the remainder are remote
student participants.

Figure 3. The satellite and remote viewing inter-
face. (a) Webcast Video, (b) User Controls, (c)
Active Speaker, (d) Remote Participant List, (e)
Presentation Content, (f) Chat.

System Description

Here we provide a very basic description of our
experimental system, as it was seen by our par-
ticipants. For a much more detailed description,
see (Baecker, et al., 2007). This chapter builds on
the prior paper by providing empirical evaluation
data about experience with the system described
in detail in that paper.

part of the videoconference) and selected which
of the two camera shots would be webcast.
Students at the satellite campus sat in a smaller
room where the presentation was projected on a
large screen at the front of the room (see Figure
2). There was also a single camera, and one staff
member who was responsible for setup and cam-
era operation. For VoIP interaction, there was a
wireless handheld microphone. Students indicated
their desire to speak by raising their hand, and the
microphone was brought to them.
Students who could not be present at either
campus could also log in and participate fully in
the lecture from any location. If they had a web-
cam, their video could optionally be displayed on
the awareness display (see Figure 3) in the lecture
room.
We note that the primary instructor in this
course is one of the authors of this chapter. The
other authors were conscious of this potential
conflict in the design and execution of the study,
in that data gathering efforts focused mainly on
students, guest speakers and teaching assistants,
none of whom were involved with the technology
development or its evaluation.

The Viewing Interfaces

The remote viewing interface is shown in Fig-
ure 3. As with traditional webcasts, participants
receive the video feed in sync with presentation
material, such as slides. Questions and comments
can be sent to other remote participants and the
in-room display using a persistent chat tool. The
chat interface is based on the BackTalk system
described by Fono and Baecker (2006), and al-
lows for tagging and formatting of messages to
categorize them or attract attention, as well as
browsing past conversations.
Remote and satellite students could interact
with others in real time via multi-point videocon-
ferencing between the instructor and a subset of
the webcast viewers. This videoconference con-
versation was then streamed immediately to the