Paper accepted to the World Conference on Educational Media, Hypermedia and Telecommunications (ED-MEDIA 99), June 19-24, 1999, Seattle, WA.

MIXING MEDIA FOR DISTANCE LEARNING:
USING IVN AND MOO IN COMP372

Brian M. Slator
Department of Computer Science
North Dakota State University
Fargo, ND 58105-5405
U.S.A.
www.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu 		Curt Hill
Mathematics and Computer Science
Valley City State University
Valley City, ND 58072
U.S.A.
www.vcsu.nodak.edu

ABSTRACT

A mixed media approach to distance education was developed which combined 1) traditional classroom lectures with Interactive Video Network (IVN) multicasting, 2) WWW-based assignments, notes, and course materials, 3) WWW-based quizzes, 4) assignments turned in, and results returned, using E-mail, and, most notably, 5) a virtual environment modeled on the Museum metaphor, where students explored singly and in groups, developed virtual machines that became part of the Museum's "collection", and interacted with instructors who kept "virtual" office hours. The course was attended by students from two campuses 70 miles apart, and delivered by two instructors, one from a third campus, 60 miles in the other direction.

Introduction

Methods for managing distance education continue to evolve. Interactive Video Networks (IVN) are one method for delivering lecture and other programming to remote locations. The Worldwide Web provides the ability to compose attractive text and image presentations, and has become an increasingly vibrant medium with animation and even video. It is more and more common to find course materials online in the form of syllabi, lecture notes, and reference materials. Recently, more active elements have appeared in the form of online quizzes and simple demonstrations. These two approaches supplement the time-honored methods of distance education: correspondence courses and broadcast media. Most recently, research into the development of virtual environments for education have started to have a limited but highly promising impact.

Approach

There are many challenges, both in terms of developing new approaches to content and curriculum, and in delivering that content to remote learners. This paper describes a curricular experience that combined virtual lecture with virtual laboratory to produce a virtual course. In particular, we combined a Virtual Lecture, using the Interactive Video Network (IVN), with a Virtual Laboratory and Museum of Computer Science, the ProgrammingLand MOO (Hill and Slator, 1998), to deliver both lecture-based and hands on instruction to students in remote locations. In doing so we pursued a particular theoretical approach to this new pedagogy - an approach that stresses the importance of virtual environments, authentic experiences, and active learning. We developed a relatively standard IVN course, but then augmented it with networked, multi-player, simulation-based, interactive multi-media - an educational environment that is both immersive and highly interactive (Reid, 1994).

The ProgrammingLand Museum implements an Exploratorium-style museum metaphor to create a hyper-course in computer programming principles aimed at structuring the curriculum as a tour through a virtual museum. Student visitors are invited to participate in a self-paced exploration of the exhibit space where they are introduced to the concepts of computer programming, are given demonstrations of these concepts in action, and are encouraged to manipulate the interactive exhibits as a way of experiencing the principles being taught (Duffy, Lowyck, Jonassen, 1983; Duffy and Jonassen, 1992).

Locality and Temporality

Virtual classrooms and virtual laboratories will help solve many of the problems facing the modern university: distance learning will become a reality, learner diversity will be accommodated (both in terms of learning styles and life styles), and in many cases the curriculum will become more active, more role-based, more self-paced, and more "learn by doing" than "learn by listening" (Schank, 1994).

It is not hard to imagine a day when the curriculum is taught in both real and virtual laboratories - or to foresee a time when students will take virtual field trips in order to prepare for the real thing. One can also imagine a curriculum that combines physical classrooms with virtual ones: where some lecture material is delivered same time and same place, and other material, employing "time shifting" and "place shifting," is not (see Figure 1).

Time/Place Shifting Same Time Different Time
Same Place Classroom Lectures
Pros: personal, sometimes interactive,
Cons: inflexible schedule, social pressures, mostly passive learner experience, strictly local audience 		Virtual Environments
Pros: self-paced, immersive, potential for active learner experience, programmable
Cons: high development costs
Different Place Live Broadcast (e.g. IVN)
Pros: personal, sometimes interactive, recordable for later review, potential for wide (broadcast) audience
Cons: similar to lecture: inflexible schedule, social pressures, mostly passive learner experience 		Recorded or Broadcast Programming
Pros: self-paced (rewindable)
Cons: non-interactive, passive learner experience
Figure 1: Time and Place Shifting

Recursion

From the first day, and throughout the course (Comparative Programming Languages), we attempted to stress recursion as a theme. This served two purposes. First, recursion is one of the most difficult concepts in computer science. It is an elegant and abstruse mathematical construct that often baffles undergraduate students. Unlike most other computing concepts, recursion is difficult to teach because of the relatively few common sense day-to-day activities that depend on it, making it difficult to draw useful analogies. And unlike previous generations of computer science curricula, it is common in these enlightened times to introduce recursion as early and as often as possible, in an attempt to reinforce the concept until it becomes familiar and workable.

One of the most productive moments for covering recursion in the curriculum is during a course on programming languages. In this context program execution is viewed from the viewpoint of the runtime environment where all programs are managed in terms of memory allocations and activation records on a runtime stack. From this point of view, recursion is not a matter of infinitely embedded abstractions, but a more concrete matter of pushing and popping activation records from a stack. The stack is a powerful metaphor in computer science, and provides an excellent image for understanding recursion, but understanding stacks requires understanding more fundamental computing concepts, and so stacks are not immediately introduced to beginning students. Ironically, with recursion so early in the curriculum, it is now possible for students to be introduced to recursion before they learn about stacks.

Second, in the interest of approaching recursion from an unusual angle, and in order to motivate the programming assignments in the course, we decided to assign projects that called for building virtual machines that illustrated programming language concepts, as a method of teaching these concepts. In other words, the students were asked to learn about concepts in order to build artifacts that would be used to teach those concepts. The virtual course, as we styled it (because of the IVN, WWW, and MOO mix), was about studying programming languages in order to recursively implement museum exhibits in order to teach about programming languages.

Course Components

NDSU COMP372: Comparative Programming Languages, was offered in the Summer of 1998 during the 4-week session, and was comprised of the following elements.

IVN, The North Dakota Interactive Video Network

The North Dakota Interactive Video Network (ND IVN) is a two-way interactive telecommunications system located at many sites throughout the state of North Dakota. Any combination of two to fourteen sites may be connected together for a single event and several events may occur at the same time. Over 25 specially equipped telecommunications classrooms and conference rooms link the 11 North Dakota State University System campuses, the state capitol, 5 tribal colleges in ND, and 25 high schools in the state. In addition, ND IVN has the ability to connect to sites world-wide. ND IVN participants can hear all sites at all times but see only one other site. The Network automatically switches the video to the site that is currently speaking. For the automatic switching to occur, a sound must last about two seconds.

An IVN room is designed to as closely resemble a traditional classroom as practical. Each room had approximately 25 seats. There are two television monitors, one displays the current image and the other the image being transmitted from this location. Each student has a microphone on their table. When a student speaks, then the image from that location is broadcast to the other locations. Thus a reasonable conversation can be carried out; however, the originating site can not tell if their image is being transmitted or not. An instructor can also transmit computer images or the display of a paper that then functions like a blackboard. In this particular course, there were four such sites: two on the NDSU campus, one on the UND campus and one on the VCSU campus.

WWW Syllabus and Assignments

All pertinent documents, such as the syllabus and assignments, were posted on web pages. In most classes this is a courtesy to students. In this course it was a requirement since none of the locations were within 50 miles of each other.

WWW Exams

The WWW test system was developed at NDSU for multiple choice tests on the web. It is similar to many other such test-giving systems. A student may log in by registering their name and obtaining an ID. They may then take a test during a particular window of time, which was usually from Friday after class to Monday before class. On completion of the test they were immediately given their resulting score. An instructor could gain access to enter a test, modify a test or obtain class scores. Any common web browser could be used.

E-mail

In such a situation e-mail becomes a critical communication form, since distance keeps face to face conversations at a minimum. E-mail was used for a variety of situations in this course. Assignments that were not MOO based were handed in through e-mail, with the program and other documentation as an attachment. The time stamp of the e-mail determined whether the item is on-time or late. MOO assignments were handed in by e-mail that announced its completion and specified the object numbers of the finished products. Many of the office visit situations were also handled with e-mail, sometimes more easily than a real visit; questions could be answered and programs could be examined. For example, it is often easier to attach an example program to an e-mail than it is to put it in the students hands in a visit, moreover it is much easier for them to run it later. The time delays of this approach leave something to be desired, but this is remedied by virtual office hours as discussed below.

The importance of E-mail made it crucial that both authors processed all e-mail several times a day. The course had a very short time duration, just four weeks. It was imperative for students to receive quick response to e-mail; and three exchanges with a single student in a single day was not uncommon.

The ProgrammingLand Musuem

ProgrammingLand is a MOO (Curtis, 1992) being developed on the VCSU campus as a Virtual Lecture adjunct to introductory programming language classes. The paradigm employed is that of a museum where students examine exhibits, reading the explanatory text displayed on the walls of each room. In addition to the displayed text there are a number of interactive demonstration objects in the museum that clarify or demonstrate the concepts. One such object is a code machine which contains a short segment of programming language code and can display the code; display with line by line explanations; or display a line by line execution of the code. ProgrammingLand augments programming language courses, either locally or at a distance. At the beginning of this course there were four wings under construction. One of these was an introduction to using a MOO, each of the other three dealt with the one of C++, Java or BASIC.

This approach to a MOO has much in common with many web oriented approaches, with some differences as well. A room in a MOO corresponds to a single web page. The MOO is exclusively text-based while a web page can augment the text with various multimedia objects. However, every room of a MOO is also a chat room and users of the MOO are aware of the presence of others in the room or in the MOO, unlike web pages. The MOO keeps more and better server side records of the students and their actions. The MOO server code actually has a web interface, but using it loses many of the interactive advantages of the MOO.

Three assignments in COMP372 were completely MOO based. The first was a trivial exercise in MOO navigation. They were to find an object, which was called the totem pole. When they found it, that fact was marked on their MOO user ID. The purpose of this was so that the students could explore the MOO and see how it was arranged and how exhibits conveyed the desired content. In the second assignment each student was given a LISP function. Students had to build an instructional suite of rooms about their particular function. They were to reinforce their learning by teaching others in the context of the MOO. The third MOO assignment was to create an interactive machine that demonstrated their particular LISP function. This gave them some unique insights into their function, but also the object oriented script of the MOO. The machine in question took one of several function calls and results and verified that the function did indeed produce the stated output.

Since every room of a MOO is a chat room, the students interact with each other and the instructors in the MOO. This suggested the concept of virtual office hours. Each instructor would guarantee that they would be in the MOO at a particular time. Any student with a question or problem could then go and have a real time conversation with the instructor. If that conversation involved a MOO project, then it was a simple matter to visit the room and give what ever help was needed. This approach is not quite as personal as a face to face meeting and it does tend to test the typing skills of the student, but is a solution to the distance problem.

Textbook

The textbook was Concepts of Programming Languages (3rd Edition) by Robert W. Sebesta. Published by Addison Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-8053-7133-8.

Course Details

This course was a typical Junior level Programming Languages courses for Computer Science majors and minors. The first author had taught the course in previous terms, using a MOO. However, a number of wrinkles were requested by the administration. There was some demand for the course on another campus of the NDUS system, so it was requested that the course be taught over the Interactive Video Network (IVN). The course was to be taught in a four-week session, but the number of contact hours available on IVN was three hours short of what was needed for a three hour course. These constraints provoked us to use a strategy not previously used by either of us. The content materials would come from lectures delivered by IVN and the student’s offline reading of the textbook. Tests would be delivered through a World Wide Web test system developed at NDSU. All assignments and related material, such as the syllabus, would be available on a WWW page. Conventional programming assignments were done on a separate minicomputer using a LISP interpreter and handed in via email. The recursive learn-by-teaching approach was used, by having students generate lessons inside the MOO.

The course was completed over the course of four weeks (actually, 18 class meetings), and was composed of the elements just listed. Lectures were multicast daily by the first author from an instrumented IVN classroom on the NDSU campus. There were several students in that IVN room, several more in an IVN classroom across campus, and a handful in another IVN classroom on a campus 70 miles to the north. In addition, the second author participated from another IVN location 60 miles to the west. There were 50 students altogether. This technology, described above, is relatively solid and caused few problems (there were, however, occasional audio anomalies, where sudden bursts of static or other noise would be emitted, and there were times when the voice-activated nature of the two-way audio communication was awkward, as sometimes disembodied voices would emanate over the transmission but the accompanying video would never arrive).

The course syllabus was posted at a website online, and reading assignments (both from the text and from online sources), and homework assignments were posted on that site too. In addition, the details of the homework assignments, as well as information on how to negotiate the pitfalls of electronically submitting homework.

Although hosting the course on the Interactive Video Network, and posting the syllabus on the WorldWide Web were steps in the virtual direction, the technologies of the Internet were employed in even more interesting ways than that. In particular, exams were held outside of class and administered over the Web. Tools for creating these online quizzes were provided by the NDSU Multimedia Center, but they were experimental and proved problematic. Uploading quizzes was painfully time consuming and fault-intolerant. Some students complained about not being able to re-take a quiz if they lost their connection, and there were a few anomalies in grade reporting that had to be corrected by hand. However, the technological difficulties with online quizzes were not extreme.

The pedagogical difficulties with online quizzes were a little more profound, because of the offline, self-paced nature of the Web. In this class, tests were posted on Friday and students were given until Monday evening to complete them. This unstructured, unproctored protocol meant students could take quizzes at their leisure with their textbooks open on their lap. As a consequence of all these factors, quizzes were painful to implement and were relatively weak indicators of student progress. Hence, quiz grades were quite high on average.

There was no attempt made to conceal that this approach was as new to the authors as to the students. It was perceived that they responded well and entered into the adventure. This did require flexibility when various technical problems occurred. In the end, the students rated the class highly (see below).

Local Context

The NDSU World Wide Web Instructional Committee (WWWIC) is currently engaged in several virtual/visual development projects: three NSF-supported, The Geology Explorer (Slator et al., 1998), The Virtual Cell, and The Visual Computer Program, as well as others. These have shared and individual goals. Shared goals include the mission to teach Science structure and process: the Scientific Method, scientific problem solving, deduction, hypothesis formation and testing, and experimental design. The individual goals are to teach the content of individual scientific disciplines: Geoscience, Cell Biology, and Computer Science.

These projects are designed to capitalize on the affordances provided by virtual environments. For example, to

Summary

The combination of IVN, WWW, and MOO proved to be quite effective and stronger than any of these alone. The use of the MOO greatly enhanced the effectiveness of the course by reducing the perceived separation of student and instructor. Student evaluations of the course were quite high, with 92% of the students responding rating the quality of the course as either above or much above average. Similarly, 88% of the students believed their understanding of the course content was either good or very good.

Future Plans

We intend to conduct a more thorough study of this approach when the course is offered again in the first summer session of 1999. This study will include a survey given at the beginning of the class and follow up survey at the end that attempts to capture student perceptions of this form of distance learning.

References

  1. Curtis, Pavel (1992). Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities. Proceedings of the conference on Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing (sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility)
  2. Duffy, T.M. Lowyck, J. and Jonassen, D.H. (1983). Designing environments for constructive Learning. New York: Springer-Verlag
  3. Duffy, T.M. and Jonassen, D.H. (1992). Constructivism: new implications for instructional technology. In Duffy and Jonassen (eds.), Constructivism and the Technology of Instruction. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  4. Hill, C. and Slator, B.M. (1998). Virtual lecture, virtual laboratory, or virtual lesson. Proceedings of the Small College Computing Symposium (SCCS98). Fargo-Moorhead, April. pp. 159-173
  5. Reid , T Alex (1994) Perspectives on computers in education: the promise, the pain, the prospect. Active Learning. 1(1), Dec. CTI Support Service. Oxford, UK
  6. Schank, Roger (1994). Engines for Education. http://www.ils.nwu.edu/~e_for_e/
  7. Slator, Brian M., D. Schwert, B. Saini-Eidukat, P. McClean, J. Abel, J. Bauer, B. Gietzen, N. Green, T. Kavli, L. Koehntop, B. Marthi, V. Nagareddy, A. Olson, Y. Jia, K. Peravali, D. Turany, B. Vender, J. Walsh (1998). Planet Oit: a Virtual Environment and Educational Role-playing Game to Teach the Geosciences. In the Proceedings of the Small College Computing Symposium (SCCS98). Fargo-Moorhead, April. pp. 378-392.

For further information on our virtual worlds software development , visit the NDSU WWWIC web site.
ProgrammingLand Project Page: www.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu/~slator/html/PLANET/wwwic-pland.html