25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning
For more resources: http://www.uwex.edu/disted/conference
Network EducationWare: NEW Features for New Distance Learners
Charles M. Snow
Associate Professor
Department of Applied Information Technology
George Mason University
J. Mark Pullen
Professor
Department of Computer Science
George Mason University
Priscilla McAndrews
Manager, Networking and Simulation Laborartory
C4I Center
George Mason University
Introduction
Universities, both public and private, are today facing unprecedented stress. The economic downturn has
led to reductions in funding resulting in cuts at institutions (Anas, 2009: MacGillis, 2009). That same
economic downturn has also driven large numbers of mature students to seek retraining or updates to
previous education, competing for limited space with new student applicants (Lipsett, 2009; Kinzie,
2009). Faced with demand for their services growing faster than predicted and sever budget cuts,
universities turn even more to distance teaching tools as a way to meet this demand at minimal additional
cost.
This situation stresses distance teaching on a number of fronts. Firstly, universities seek to support a
wider range of courses than previously; many of these courses have lab or other special “hands-on”
exercises. Considerable effort has gone into the design of remote-labs and simulations that let students
gain hands-on experience, if in a simulated way, as part of a distance education program. In the
engineering and technology fields there is a wealth of commercial (e.g., Cisco’s “Packet Tracer”) and
open-source tools (e.g., SOFTICE from the University of South Florida) (Gaspar et al., 2007). There is
now increased effort to integrate these simulation and lab tools with teaching tools; at present this is being
done largely via ‘umbrella’ applications like learning management systems (e.g., Blackboard, Moodle).
Solutions that provide direct connection of applications with in-class presentation and activities are more
effective still.
Secondly, distance education tools are being used to reach a wider range of student types, and so need to
better support the different types of learners. Auditory and visual learners have long enjoyed support from
distance teaching systems as the traditional lecture format these tools readily support aligns well with
their preferred learning techniques. Kinesthetic learners benefit less from such traditional presentations,
but more from the growing availability of labs and simulations. Unfortunately, for the most part, these
‘hands-on’ tools have been distinct applications which students use following some lecture exposition.
Once again, the ability to provide some direct integration of applications with the classroom presentation
would provide a single, more encompassing, environment for all learners.
This remainder of this paper looks at how one open source distance teaching tool, Network
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25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning
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EducationWare (NEW), accommodates this widening range of requirements: a single tool suitable for
both synchronous and asynchronous teaching, able to present multimedia content including annotatable
application demonstrations, and the ability to run selected applications on student computers for
illustrative purposes. At the same time, it has a small server footprint, scales gracefully, and has a simple
web interface for users and administrators. NEW has been described previously (Snow et al. 2005); it was
developed at George Mason University where it continues to evolve and be used in a number of courses.
NEW is primarily a simulteaching tool: a presentation tool for students in the live classroom providing a
virtual classroom experience to remotely connected students who can be active participants in the live
class. To achieve this, NEW primarily delivers audiographics: audio of instructor’s voice synchronized
with presentation slides and annotations.
In the Beginning
NEW began as a system to support traditional lecture-oriented presentations in courses. Central to this
role is its whiteboard, which displays individual pages (slides) that can contain anything delivered in pdf
or jpg formats. Each is an individual file. In typical usage, the size of these files is limited to 128 KB so as
to ensure that users connected over low capacity connections remain synchronized with the live class. In
cases where remotely-connected participants are all known to have high capacity connections, this
constraint can be relaxed to allow significantly larger file sizes.
Each of the whiteboard’s pages can be annotated using arrows, lines, or simple unfilled polygons,
handwriting, free-hand drawing, and typed text. This capability provides effective cues for visual learners,
in the classroom as well as those participating remotely. By providing the ability to insert blank pages at
any time, NEW allows for spontaneous side-bars to be incorporated into the presentation. These can be
used for, e.g., supplementary explanations of content, or student work at whiteboard as part of a class
exercise. The evolution of each whiteboard page is recorded with annotations and attendant audio. At any
time during the live class or playback of a recording, a pdf snapshot of the whiteboard, as it appears at
that moment, also can be made.
Slides Are Not Enough
NEW accommodates a wide gamut of teaching and learning styles. For instructors who wish to teach
with, figuratively, nothing more than chalk and blackboard, NEW can let an entire class be a succession
of blank whiteboard pages onto which the instructor writes or draws.
For instructors with prepared slides, the whiteboard allows these to be presented, albeit without the catchy
animations or transition effects offered by some slide presentation software. Each such slide can be
annotated as described above, and a given slide can be inserted, annotated, and re-inserted in its original
state for different annotation, as often as needed. It remains one of NEW’s strengths that it is easy to teach
with slides prepared using a variety of formatting tools including proprietary formats such as Microsoft’s
PowerPoint as well as open source formats including Open Office and LaTeX.
For courses offered purely asynchronously, NEW can be used to record content-specific module
presentations that students can watch (individually or in groups).
With increasing frequency, instructors want to integrate demonstration of some software application with
a class presentation. NEW supports the ability to copy any window currently displayed and to paste this
onto the whiteboard. The window’s content may be imported once or at regular intervals to present
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changing content in that window. Since this window has become a whiteboard displayed object, it is
subject to the same annotation features as is any other slide. This provides a powerful way to illustrate a
concept using some application, with instructor annotations directing the eye to appropriate parts of the
window; see Figure 1.
Figure 1. NEW user interface showing an imported application (Windows Task Manager, seen to right of
NEW whiteboard) with annotations.
A limitation of this application sharing technique is that whiteboard display updates occur less frequently
than the application performs updates; typical update rates are once in three to five seconds, to ensure that
users remain current without being overwhelmed with updates. For cases where the software to be
demonstrated must be updated more frequently, and/or requires large amounts of data to be transferred to
each client, NEW provides the ability to have downloaded, a priori, application data files to each
connected user’s computer. The instructor can launch the application at the appropriate point in the lecture
[Pullen & Chen (2008)]. NEW makes available to the instructor the status of each connected student’s
download so it is possible to launch a file, knowing that all students have received it.
The Classroom Experience
In addition to the presentation of slides and demonstration of applications, the classroom experience
includes other dynamics. Students can ask questions in the classroom by simply speaking out (or, in a
more orderly fashion, perhaps raising a hand first). Students can also answer questions posed in the class
by the instructor and/or by their peers. NEW provides the means for students to speak their questions (or
answers) or to post them in writing to the live session: students may elect to send only to the instructor, or
to all connected users. Experience to date suggests many are more comfortable typing than speaking.
A common teaching practice is interactive ‘voting’ wherein a question is posed to the class whose
members, using informal show of hands or, increasingly, remote voting technology (e.g., Elluminate),
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indicate their response (true or false, or one element of a set of possible answers). NEW now offers this
feature, allowing on-line students in the live class to vote in response to an instructor question, with
results displayed to the instructor.
Another popular technique is breaking up of the class into smaller sets of students, each of which works
as a group. In real classroom settings, this may be done by moving of people and/or chairs to form small
groups. NEW now provides instructors with the ability to create one or more ‘breakout rooms’ in each of
which a group of students may work independently. Breakout rooms can be created and destroyed
dynamically during a class: this provides the opportunity to support spontaneous discussions that may
arise and be profitable to the class. Such a breakout room need not be limited only to remotely connected
users: any student in the live classroom session with a computer can be part of a breakout room group.
Remote Hands-On
Many courses require students to participate in ‘hands-on’ lab exercises. Much progress has been made in
the development of both open-source and proprietary simulation tools to offer on-line learners a credible
experience using ‘real’ equipment. The combination of using these tools for labs with NEW as a way of
concurrently providing lab instruction is a powerful means of delivering lab experience at a distance.
NEW provides a channel to each connected student’s desktop, which may be used as a custom link to the
instructor’s software of choice. Starting in 2009 Pullen has used this to distribute three-dimensional
virtual environments to students participating in class over the Internet.
To Review
NEW makes its recordings on the client computer so that, in the event of a network failure between the
client and the server, the recording is unperturbed. Users who were unable, due to the network outage, to
attend the live class, will still be able to play back the recording when it is uploaded to the server.
NEW recordings typically use 5 Mbytes per hour of presentation time. Students can stream these
recordings, or download them for local standalone playback. It is more common for students to do the
latter, since the files are comparatively small, fast to download, and there is the advantage that once
locally stored, the recording is available for playback at any time. Another advantage is that students may,
using NEW, introduce their own annotations on the slides in the recording so as to generate their own set
of notes for the class.
Steps to integrate NEW more fully with open source learning management systems (Moodle, in
particular) are on going. Particularly effective for students is the ability to jump directly to the relevant
part of a presentation that dealt with a specific topic as, e.g., when reviewing their answers on a quiz.
As schools strive to save time, money and effort while still reaching as many students as possible more
courses are being taught jointly or combined. NEW offers the ability to join two courses to have the same
live class time and to share the same slide files and recording files. What’s more if a current course is
joined to a course taught previously, NEW has a simple way to provide asynchronous courses using the
slides and recordings already available.
Conclusion
Universities look to distance education tools to help support rapidly growing demand across different
student demographics. NEW offers many practical and valuable features to meet this demand, is
economical of computing and network resources, and, as open source software, is freely available to
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25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning
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universities. Work on improving and expanding NEW is on-going, so that adopters can expect to see
improved and expanded capabilities to support a broader range of course types and students.
References
Anas, B. (2009, January 13). CU bracing for state cuts. Daily Camera.
Gaspar, A., Armitage, W., & Boyer, N. (2007). Design of a distance, 2+2, IT curriculum in Linux System
Administration. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 23(2), 104 – 111.
Kinzie, S. (2009, May 1). U.S. colleges bask in surge Of interest among Chinese. The Washington Post.
Lipsett, A. (2009, April 23). Over-20s in rush for scarce university places. The Guardian.
MacGillis, A. (2009, May 12). Despite stimulus funds, states to cut more jobs. The Washington Post.
Pullen, J. M., & Chen. J. X.(2008). Distributed application launching for high quality graphics in
synchronous distance education. Madrid. Proc. ACM SIGCSE Conference Information
Technology in Computer Science Education.
Snow, C., J., Pullen, M., & McAndrews, P. (2005, November). Network EducationWare: An open-source
Web-based system for synchronous distance education. IEEE Transactions on Education, 48(5),
705 – 712.
Author Summaries
Charles Snow is an Associate Professor of Applied Information Technology at George Mason University.
He holds a Ph. D. in Computer Science from McGill University. His main interests are pervasive
computing and the effective application of technology to the areas of education and medicine.
Address: Bull Run Hall 102F
10900 University Boulevard, MS 4F5
Manassas, VA, 20110
E-mail: csnow1@gmu.edu
Phone: 703 993 8461
Fax:
703 993 8450
J. Mark Pullen is Professor of Computer Science at George Mason University, where he heads the
Networking and Simulation Laboratory in the C4I Center. He holds BSEE and MSEE degrees from West
Virginia University and the Doctor of Science in Computer Science from the George Washington
University. He is a licensed Professional Engineer, Fellow of the IEEE, and Fellow of the ACM.
Address: 4400 University Drive, MS 4B5
Fairfax, VA, 22030
E-mail: mpullen@gmu.edu
Phone: 703 993 3682
Fax:
703 993 1706
Copyright 2009 Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning
For more resources: http://www.uwex.edu/disted/conference
Priscilla McAndrews is the Laboratory Manager and a research contributor in the areas of Web-based
distributed systems. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Vanderbilt University, a BS in Computer
Science from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and an MS in Computer science from GMU.
Address: Science & Tech II, Room 322
4400 University Drive, MS 4B5
Fairfax, VA, 22030
E-mail: pmcandre@netlab.gmu.edu
Phone: 703 993 1728
Fax:
703 993 3692
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