Altilab2005 - Distance Education Blog

There’s a classical adage attributed to Confucius: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

To me it simply means that ‘doing’ things helps the learning process. As the great Chinese thinker enumerates specific senses and actions, the idea of hands on or practicing has always been proven very effective in learning. Typically that involves a teacher or an instructor who would show how things are done. Most probably this has been the case since times immemorial when we were hunters and gatherers.

So while humankind became capable of passing on its knowledge from one generation to another a ritual of sorts was established, which eventually became institutionalized and named education.

As such, for thousands of years the method of learning in a classroom has been the most popular way to educate, teach, update and train people.

The economics of teaching presents two models:

-          One teacher and one student or the One on One System;

-          One teacher and many students or the Classroom System.

A good example of One on One System takes us back in history about 2300 years ago when the great philosopher Aristotle was the personal teacher of Alexander, the son of King Phillip, who later became famously known as Alexander the Great. Many princes and children of nobility benefitted from this teaching method.
However, even if the One on One System is very effective it is not as economically efficient as the Classroom System for obvious reasons: costs and logistics.

It is more productive to have one teacher speaking to a group of students in a designated area. The teacher couldn’t be in several places at the same time. The same classroom could be used by various groups of students at various times and various teachers could teach various groups of students in that classroom. That pretty much covers the description of a typical school.

In the last hundred years, increased mobility, electricity, telephony, photography, cinema, radio, television, VCRs, personal computers and the Internet caused a radical change in the process of teaching and learning.

Yet, to these days, the classical method of teaching still is the lecture. A lecture is an oral presentation intended to present information or teach people about a particular subject. Usually the lecturer will stand at the front of the room and recite information relevant to the lecture’s content. But lectures have been criticized as being a one-way method of communication that does not involve significant audience participation and it is not as effective as one on one teaching and learning.

During the 1980s and the 1990s there was a trend of experimenting with active learning, which placed emphasis on several models of instruction that focus the responsibility of learning on learners.

For the last 10-15 years fast developing technologies have allowed for new approaches and advancements in self-instruction. Interactive learning has been the buzz expression in learning and teaching. When one on one is not possible, interactive learning is the best alternative, and it involves various degrees of human-computer interaction.

So, where are we now? Is the question-title of this article making more sense after discussing this historical perspective?  Are the best way to learn and the best way to teach converging somewhere, sooner or later? Let’s look at this scenario.

Dr. Cédric lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. A world-renown scientist in biotechnology, Dr. Cédric shares his work time between research and teaching. He also has to travel to various biotechnology conferences around the world and not in the least has to spend time with his wonderful family. Time management is of essence for the professor’s optimal performance while he is often multi-tasking. Lately, a breakthrough in his specialized field of science required of him to make more presentations at various world symposia and congresses. This is also an essential part of a necessary process for assuring funding for more research. One serious dilemma is that his number of students has considerably increased. This is a good thing, but it also presents a challenge for the students’ optimal access to certain parts of Dr. Cédric’s course. So, after looking at various options, a solution is envisioned. It is based on the new technologies of distance learning or e-Education (online learning).

One of professor’s assistants, Mr. Kwan, is also a versatile documentary filmmaker. He has been in charge of videotaping the lectures of Dr. Cédric and he has worked with Ms. Lassalle who is the editor and publisher of Dr. Cédric’s books.

Being a friend of Dr. Cédric and his family, I had personally met them both at a summer’s BBQ at the professor’s residence.

One day I received a phone call from Mr. Kwan who mentioned some of their specific needs for producing an e-course for Dr. Cédric’s student.  So we arranged a particular day and time when the four of us could have a four-way video conference by using ooVoo. Dr. Cédric was in Amsterdam, Ms. Lassalle was in Melbourne, Mr. Kwan was in Vancouver and I was in Calgary. I had asked Mr. Kwan to send me prior to the video conference an email explaining in detail the requirements of the project.

Before the video conference a few more emails were exchanged amongst us. During the conference which I initiated on ooVoo, I made a short presentation of options and workflow.

The ooVoo video conferencing has a very useful feature that allows showing to all the other participants my entire desktop screen on which I can pull up all kinds of documents and websites.

We had a series of back and forth questions and answers. One of my suggestions was to use Camtasia’s helpful features in editing the videos of Dr. Cédric and then deploying the (dis)course on Screencast. The video edited on Camtasia would benefit from many features such as zooming in/out of an area of the screen and many other symbols and annotations inserted by way of SnagIt (http://www.techsmith.com).

But after looking at some samples of PresenterMax, a system in which I use both  Camtasia and Accordent, as well as Adobe applications, we all decided to go with PresenterMax.

We addressed the issues of production budget and timeline (http://www.presentermax.com). Cool.

Mr. Kwan required three days to log and choose the video footage from Dr. Cédric’s lectures and then digitize them with Windows Movie Maker. Then, he would email them to me as Window Media files along with a few Power Point presentations and a series of Photoshop illustrations converted to Jpeg.
Ms. Lassalle would send me several documents in Microsoft Word, as well as several Gif files that documented lab experiments. She also would send me a list of relevant URLs that would be used throughout the course.
Dr. Cédric would be making himself available for whenever some explanations would be needed. We would use ooVoo again that makes possible the recording of the video conference. The Flash video files could be retrieved anytime by me and converted to Windows Media files for various inserts during editing of the video.

All of these may sound complicated, but really it is not. More significant is the fact that the students found the system easy to use. Here is one of the students’ comments:

“This online course was indeed very useful. In fact I’m convinced that I would benefit from having access to more online lectures in addition to the so-called normal lectures. For me, focusing on listening during class is essential for comprehension and yet extremely difficult if I am scribbling notes at the same time.”

Mr. Kwan also had a valuable observation:

“This online course offered our students much more flexibility in the way they acquired and learned the content of the course.  Incidentally, another benefit for our students seems to be the valuable psychological benefits such as a sense of security and a reduction of anxiety.”

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