Desi

Abstract

Distance education (DE) today is mostly in broadcast mode, where classes are broadcast over networks for students to consume. While the instruction mode has remained close to the physical classroom metaphor, what is often lacking is the rich two way interaction that happens between students and the teacher and between the students in a physical classroom. In this paper, we describe the design of DESI, a virtual classroom system for DE. We consider the scenario wherein a student is attending a class at home on a PC, or an internet-connected TV, and explore the use of student and teacher interfaces that promote classroom interaction and integrate multimodal interactions to enable richer and more interactive virtual classroom experiences. We briefly describe the software architecture of the DESI system, and present preliminary results from testing an early version of the system with end users. Our work is relevant to distance education on TV broadcast networks, online classrooms, and enterprise collaboration and e-learning systems.