Virtual Interactive Classroom Overview

Virtual Interactive

Classroom Summary The virtual interactive classroom introduces a compelling distance-learning experience by combining video with mobile phone-based messaging. During initial pilot courses delivered through the Bangladesh Open University, this new approach to learning has shown increased student retention and improved performance. Relative to traditional distance learning courses, students feel more engaged in these interactive classes where they receive immediate feedback and can connect via their mobile phones to other students and to the teacher. This approach also reduces the cost of providing quality education in under-served regions and enables good instructors to serve more students while maintaining a high standard of quality. The nonprofit UnaMesa Association, in conjunction with the Bangladeshi Soft-ED the inventors of the a virtual interactive classroom methodology - propose establishing a virtual interactive classroom web service to support teachers and institutions who want to offer virtual interactive classes. We believe that such services could significantly improve the accessibility of quality education in under-

served regions and that the demand for such services could be very strong. Several educational organizations have already expressed interest in using these tools. Institutions in Ghana, Mongolia, and South Africa are currently considering plans to offer such services to their students. To develop and offer the virtual interactive classroom service on a global basis, the UnaMesa Association and Soft-Ed are seeking partnerships with organizations willing to invest in creating new educational opportunities. We plan to fund development of this project through a combination of grants, investments, and customer guarantees. Please direct all partnership inquiries to Greg Wolff ([email protected]), President of the UnaMesa Association.

Introduction Virtual Interactive Classroom (VIC) is an innovative solution to the problem of implementing a quality distance education program in countries such as Bangladesh, where contemporary methods, such as the use of internet and computing resources, are both expensive and impractical. VIC makes use of mobile phones and Shorting Message Service (SMS) messages to add a layer of interactivity to educational videos. This allows distance education students to interact with the lecturer much as if they were present in the classroom or using a computer. While access to the internet is both limited and prohibitively expensive for students in countries such as Bangladesh, a recent [1] demographic study at a particular village in Bangladesh showed that less than 1% of households own a computer while 27% own a TV and 47% own a mobile phone as shown below:

Fig.1. Household possessions (Fig.4.2) [1]

Therefore, the use of mobile phones and SMS messaging allows for interactive distance education to be provided to students in demographic regions where the use of internet resources and video conferencing is not possible. The addition of such interactivity to video lessons has shown some success [2, 3, 4, 5] and is being piloted by Bangladesh Open University in one of its English language courses [3, 5]. Furthermore, institutions in Ghana, South Africa and Mongolia have expressed an interest in implementing this technique. However, in order to scale the technique and allow administrators and lecturers in developing countries to easily include VIC interactivity in their educational video lessons, there is a need to create a web based service that would provide support and infrastructure. As administrators of distance education courses are generally urban based, they are likely to have access to the internet in order to set up a VIC course that can subsequently be delivered in rural settings.

VIC Methodology in More Detail The value of the interactivity provided by VIC can be appreciated in light of a PhD thesis that studied the nature of drop outs from courses of Bangladesh's main distance education provider, Bangladesh Open University (BOU). BOU traditionally uses pre-recorded video lessons as the medium of instruction and does not offer any means of interaction for the students. Out of the 700,000 students registered each year, only a total of about 35,000 sit exams. The conclusion drawn was that lack of

interactivity and feedback in the delivery techniques contributed to a large portion of the drop outs as the course failed to adequately engage students. The VIC methodology extends the idea of classroom response systems or CRSs [6] to interacting with a teacher on a pre-recorded video. The video features the teacher interacting with students in a classroom setting, as well as remote students interacting via phone calls and SMS messages. This provides a “live” feeling to the lessons when viewed by remote students later on, even though the lessons are prerecorded. This feeling of engagement, along with the ability to interact with the lesson via SMS, serves to capture and maintain the students' interest as well as improving the quality of the education imparted. As the video may be played at any time or at any place, a mobile phone is used as the response device. The response is stored in a database that can reside either in a local server or in a web database. Programs on the server respond interactively directly to the individual’s mobile. Graphs of total responses can both appear on the video and in the mobile phone. The response in the mobile can include the response of the individual student while the graph on the video represents the responses in percentages of the students in the studio. The graph allows the student to see the correct answer and, also, to see how other students responded. The teacher in the video can also call up real students to discuss the answers, just like the life line “phone-a-friend” in “Who wants to be a millionaire.” The students can be engaged using participatory questions such as, “What benefits can be gained by participating in this course?” The answers of the students in the studio are categorized in a participatory manner to reach a consensus. Such questions engage the student and allow them to take ownership of the contents of the course. The response of the student watching the video is stored in the database and can be analyzed later by the teacher running the course. VIC uses the mobile phone only as an interactivity tool as opposed to traditional ‘mobile learning’ [7] which focuses on delivering content on the move. This allows the cheapest mobile sets to be used. VIC reintroduces the ‘personal touch’ of the face-to-face teacher and permits the student to interact ‘virtually’ with the teacher. The video medium is more suited to regions where literacy levels are low and local language content is required. A schematic of the basic infrastructure involved in VIC is shown in Fig.2 below.

SMS Server

Questions

Graph of

2-way SMS communication

Answers

Live verbal conversation with individual

Participants distributed over rural countryside

students ‘LIVE’ Presenter on National

Television Fig.2 Mobile as an Interactive Tool in Distance Learning [2]

Various

pedagogic methodologies can be implemented on this basic infrastructure: • Students can be reminded before lessons are about to be broadcast. • The teacher can ask students questions. • Students can see their responses, compare them with other answers and see the correct answer. • Responses may be group or individual. • Students can have their misconceptions corrected. • Student attendance can be taken. • The server can keep track of student activity or group activity. • An analysis of class performance can be performed. • Students can also be assigned to tutors who could respond to their queries. • Students can take self-assessment quizzes. • Students can be congratulated on their class performance or quiz performance, etc. The VIC methodology, therefore, serves to engage the student regardless of location and time. All of the above suggests that the VIC methodology is a good a tool for lecture delivery in distance education in developing countries with low literacy levels and/or lack of internet and other facilities used in contemporary distance learning techniques, e.g. Bangladesh and countries in Africa.

As things stand, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Education, Winneba, Ghana has requested that the VIC delivery methodology be implemented in its Distance Education Institute. It is now looking for ways to fund this initiative. An educational TV channel recently set up in Mongolia is thinking of implementing VIC to supplement its video lessons as well. In addition to the four levels of complexity as suggested by Leung [7], VIC requires video class preparation and recording with interactivity in mind. Teachers preparing to record VIC lessons need to know how to build in interactivity components as part of the pedagogy used to teach the students. Therefore, training the teachers is an essential part of implementing VIC, and it would be useful to have a web-based tool that can be used a guide towards interactive delivery of educational content.

Results of Initial Trials The VIC techniques have been trialed in a series of video lessons. The first two were recorded at Orebro University. Subsequently, a VIC video course of 28 English Language lessons for 2nd Year college students was developed for Bangladesh Open University (BOU). This course is now being aired on the national television carrier, Bangladesh television (BTV) every Saturday morning. Reaction of Students to the First Two Pilot Interactive Video Lessons For the first VIC video, interactive components were inserted into a pre-recorded lesson. Both the original non-interactive video and the modified interactive VIC video were shown to a class of students divided into two groups. Group 1 was shown the non-interactive video and group 2 the interactive VIC video. Both groups were observed as they were watching the videos. The eyelids of a number of students in Group 1 were drooping while the students in Group 2 were wide awake and ready with their fingers on mobile buttons to respond to the next question. When the same VIC interactive video was aired on national television, it was noticed that the number of respondents increased with each question. This implies that as the lesson proceeded, students were motivated to attempt to answer the questions asked by the teacher on the video. The increasing number of respondents was also observed in the airing of the second VIC video. The second VIC video was a fresh production, this time with two students in the studio. It can be said that VIC video interactivity motivated students to participate and attempt answers. When interviewed, the students involved appreciated the fact that the graph of answers as well as the correct answer were subsequently revealed. Anonymity of the answers was also appreciated. This motivated them to try their ‘luck’ at answering the questions. The psychology of the students was confirmed by developing the same interactive programs on networked computers without the use of mobiles. A group of 35 students aged 40+ were given a lesson on spreadsheets using computer terminals as the interactivity medium. Whenever the bar graph of collective answers along with the correct answer appeared on the individual screens, there was a hum of excitement in the class. These students confirmed the finding given by the students using mobiles during interviews.

When students watched other students in the video, they felt they were a part of the same class. This was confirmed by two separate observations. Both videos had students in the studio. The first observation was made on the second VIC video. The second observation was a non-interactive video of a classroom consisting of 12 students. When the students in the non-interactive video got up to greet the teacher, the students watching also responded by getting up to greet the teacher. When the teacher in the second VIC video made a phone call, the students watching the video looked around the classroom at the other students to find out who had received the phone call – confirming the feeling of a ‘live’ or a real-time class. The method of using video to create a virtual classroom with students responding to a teacher was well received by students [3]. The video creates an almost face-toface classroom situation where the students get a feeling of being personally addressed by a teacher and enjoy getting the teachers’ response to their answers. Current trends in distance education and on-line learning do not necessarily allow the student to see or meet the teacher face-to-face. The VIC method is more suited to countries where levels of basic literacy are low and, as a result, video is the preferred medium for distance education. It has been the experience of the author that students in Bangladesh are unable to write sentences well even at the university level. It is obvious, however, that VIC needs to be combined with assignments and feedback to students on their learning. At a recent workshop in Penang at Wawasan Open University (WOU), a combined model for distance education using both VIC and assignments was proposed [8]. Reactions to BOU VIC Lessons: Administrators: The Vice Chancellor of the Bangladesh Open University (BOU) has become a keen supporter of VIC and now sees the Virtual Interactive Classroom as a methodology that should be replicated across all the distance education courses of the seven faculties at BOU to make these courses interactive and, thereby, increase the retention rate. Studio Students: The students who participated in the studio recordings of the English language course benefited immensely [3] and want other courses to be delivered using the VIC methodology. BOU recruits a large number of students, around 300,000, across all faculties. As responses are handled by a server, VIC easily lends itself to scalability. Distance Students: Six lessons have been aired to date. Although VIC has not been officially announced or made compulsory, students all over Bangladesh have started responding through SMS. For the first six programs, a total of 661 SMSs were received. Out of these, 24 participants were randomly selected and contacted for their views on VIC. Nine out of the 24 were available and responded to six questions each. Eight had said they had already recommended the VIC lessons to other persons. The 9th person said that he was thinking the program would be useful to two of his friends. The things they liked were immediate feedback, ability to interact, ‘live’ class feeling and teacher discussion in class. Three said that the length of the lesson should be increased and the public should be invited to participate. One said

that weaker students should be included in the studio class. Three felt that this was an easy way to learn. The nine participants were from all over Bangladesh. One said that such things are not seen in remote regions – the program helped him feel that he had a voice.

Implementing VIC in other courses Implementing VIC requires the availability of suitable infrastructure for the SMS response system, and tracking student responses and class participation, as well as workshops to train teachers and other staff in the delivery, recording and production of interactive video content. Infrastructure To facilitate implementation of VIC in new courses and regions, there is a need for a web service where course administrators can register their course and be provided with SMS aggregation facilities, as well as other tools needed to implement VIC pedagogical techniques, including training of the teaching staff and video production techniques. Such a web service would provide a step-by-step guide to setting up a VIC course and, for a teacher wishing to implement VIC, it might look as follows: 1. Types of VIC interactivity currently available: To introduce a new user to VIC, the types of video interactivity that are currently available need to be shown with links to short videos showing examples of in-class use. 2. Number of lessons: The teacher should be able to select the number of lessons offered in a particular course. 3. Lesson Plan: The types of interactivity go hand-in-hand with the lesson being delivered and the pedagogy used. A lesson plan template could be provided that allows a teacher to plan the interactivity along with the total length of the lesson. The teacher could plug in the interactivity required. The time required for each interactivity would be totaled showing the total needed. 4. Storage of student responses: Once responses are received from students, these can be stored in a web database against the student’s registration ID. These responses can be analyzed for monitoring student participation and performance as the course progresses. The teacher would have to select which interactive responses are required and select these from a database template. Alternatively, once the teacher has selected the interactivity, the fields required could be automatically selected by default. 5. Self-Assessment Questions: The teacher should be able to set up selfassessment questions for the lesson. 6. Homework: The teacher should be able to set up the homework/assignment question for the lesson. 7. Dictionary: This could be words like a glossary for the lesson, or FAQs, etc. The teacher should be able set these up. 8. Help: Help could be hints or steps for the lesson. 9. Launching of the lesson: The time when the lesson would start. 10. Facility for loading the lesson, once recorded: The lessons should ideally be available on DVD. However, as an additional archive, the lesson could also be stored on line.

11. Student Feedback: The teacher should be able to derive statistics for the class and individual students. Any response that the teacher wishes to give should be stored. A student should be able to see comments given by a teacher. Before a teacher can do all of this, an administrator would have to set up the following: 1. Register the institute: The website should allow an institute to run its individual courses using the VIC methodology. This would require the institute to register first. 2. Short code: As part of the registration process, the institute will have to select a short code of ideally three letters that would be used to send all the SMSs for that institute, e.g. Bangladesh Open University uses a short code, BOU. For an interactive response to any lesson, the short code will be followed by course code/ID, lesson code/ID followed by code for type of interactivity. The number of parts to the code can be reduced given the volume of SMSs. The combined response text would be sent to a node number such as 2347 instead of a regular mobile number. For this purpose, an agreement with a mobile company of the country would be required. 3. Short code for each interactivity: The types of interactivity preferred by the institution would need to be selected. For each interactivity a code would have to be assigned. For instance, a code sent could be BOU 02 5 A. This could mean an attendance (A) response is for Bangladesh Open University (BOU) for course number 02, lesson number 5. The mobile number from which the response is sent could be recognized as the registration for the student, whose attendance would be recorded in the web database against the course and the lesson. Similarly, ‘P’ could be selected as short code for a students opinion, which would be used in a response like BOU 02 5 P punctuality, which could be a response to a question like, ‘What discipline do you consider important?’ 4. Course facilities: Other course facilities can also be selected, which could be either lesson wise or course wise. This could include Help, Dictionary, Text (e.g. notes or brief reading material or instructions), timetable for course, guidelines/rules as well as set up of Learning Partners. The attached mind map details some of these features. 5. Teacher password: The administrator should be able to register individual teachers logins and passwords which can be changed by the teacher. The teacher would use this password to set up each individual lesson. Workshops To initiate the use of VIC in new courses, workshops would need to be held for the teachers who wish to adopt the methodology, as well as for the staff involved in recording the videos. The teachers' workshops would train them in the techniques required to deliver lectures in a manner appropriate for VIC techniques, methods of adding interactivity to their lessons and, subsequently, being able to log into the VIC web tool to create lessons and monitor student participation and progress. VIC would complement the

assignments that are part of a distance education course. Assignments would be checked by tutors who would give adequate feedback to help the students progress through the course. VIC Support Unit It is proposed to establish a VIC Support Unit. The VIC Support Unit would support all those wishing to implement VIC as part of their distance education courses. To convert existing courses into the VIC methodology, a specialised unit is required that would provide the following support: • teacher training • content preparation for video delivery • preparation of script/lesson/powerpoint • injection of mobile interactivity components into lessons • mobile infrastructure support • mobile server programming • server database administration • web-based tool for supporting VIC • video recording • video editing • post lesson support tools for student monitoring • teacher support As Bangladesh lacks rural Internet infrastructure, along with a host of other problems that most developing countries face, VIC holds good promise as it does not rely on internet use by students. VIC uses video (TV) and gets the students to interact using readily available mobile phones that interact with a server running learning management program modules. As such, VIC is a viable alternative method of education delivery for developing countries such as Bangladesh. Given the positive response from the students, UnaMesa and Soft-Ed Ltd are looking to expand the use of this methodology in order to establish it as a viable alternative method of distance education delivery in developing countries. The objective of the project is to support the capacity building of a self-sustaining VIC unit that would support the implementation of this alternative distance education paradigm across BOU and other countries with similar needs. Project deliverables are: • Capacity building of the key skills and resources required to support and implement VIC as an alternative distance education methodology. • Developing materials and methods for smooth and self-sustaining implementation of VIC. • Support research work by students at both Masters and PhD levels to evaluate the extension of the Virtual Classroom method to new areas in education with an eye to poverty alleviation. • Host international workshops on the VIC methodology.

References: 1. Rahman, Zillur ASM, “Mutho-Phone”: Study on factors associated with using Mobile Phone as a potential health communication channel in Bangladesh context, MPH thesis, 2007, pp.13 (Fig.4.2). 2. Yousuf M. Islam, Manzur Ashraf, Zillur Rahman, Mawdudur Rahman: "Mobile Telephone Technology as a Distance Learning Tool". ICEIS 2005, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Miami, USA, May 25-28, 2005. ISBN 972-8865-19-8, pp.226-232. 3. Nesa, M and Islam, Y.M, “Use of mobiles to introduce a mechanism of feedback in Distance Education delivered through video/television for the purposes of improving quality of delivery”, at the International Conference on “Quality Enhancement in Educational Communication” held during March 29-30, 2008. 4. Grönlund, Å., Islam, Y. (2008) Bangladesh Virtual Classroom: eLearning for all – today. Forthcoming at e-Challenges, Stockholm, October 2008. 5. Grönlund, Å., Islam, Y. (2008) Creating an interactive eLearning environment for developing countries. The case of Bangladesh Virtual Classroom. Submitted to Information Technology for Development. 6. Fies, C., Marshall, J., “Classroom Response Systems: A Review of the Literature”, Journal of Science Education and Technology, Vol 15, No. 1, March 2006, pp 101 – 109. 7. Leung, C.H., Chan, Y.Y., “Mobile Learning: A new paradigm in electronic learning”, 3 rd IEEE Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’03). 8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxSzHJqnsdQ A proposed model for distance education in Bangladesh. Video created after two weeks workshop on ODL administration and curriculum development at Wawasan Open University, Malaysia. September 1 – 13, 2008.