Project Report for CHE 624 & ENCH 633: Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics

Instructors: John Shaw, University of Alberta, and M. Satyro, University of Calgary

Class Situation

The graduate course was delivered in collaboration with Teaching with Technology Initiative (TTI). The initiative itself was unique effort in combining the distance and traditional learning in which instructors wanted the high graphic quality of delivered contents along with an interactive class room ambience. The class consisted of students and instructors concurrently located at University of Alberta and University of Calgary who delivered the lectures in real time basis from the respective places.

The challenge for the technology was to achieve a classroom ambience coupled with the high quality transmission of the course contents which involved power point presentations, word documents, use of World Wide Web, and demonstration of softwares at real-time basis. Various options were explored for this purpose. We started with the traditional vide-conferencing over IP. The persons on both the ends could interact with each other in a convenient manner. The technology had the benefit of providing an interactive class room environment. But the tradeoffs were the poor graphic quality of the text material. The text material was of very poor quality and was discernible only at large fonts.

Next we explored web based live information sharing application technologies, like Elluminate, in which the instructor can deliver lecture and share the lecture materials. The technology has the advantage of high graphic quality of lecture material but lacked the classroom environment provided by video-conferencing.  The technology provided good audio quality but the video qualitative was limited by the use of web camera. To overcome the abovementioned tradeoffs, we decided to use the video-conferencing in conjunction with Elluminate.

Initially, the hardware at the both ends included the computer system, one projector, and vizualizer.  The initial results were satisfactory. The set up provided good audio-visual interaction along with the high graphic quality of lecture materials. The students could interact with the instructors via video-conferencing, and the see the lecture material through the Elluminate. The limitations of the setup were that the hardware constraints allowed the projection of only single image at a time, either of instructor or of lecture material. So instructors have to pay considerable attentions to manually synchronize between the images at the both ends. Failure to do so resulted into poor quality of transmitted data.

To solve the problem of manually synchronization, we shifted to dual projection system on the both ends. The main projector was dedicated to the video-conferencing, which continuously displayed the instructor on the remote end. Second portable projector was set up to project the text content, through Elluminate, on the second screen. Thus in any classroom session, students could see the instructor from the remote end in parallel to the course material being presented by the instructor.

TTI assisted the instructors to achieve the goal of effective delivery of course material in an interactive way. The setup harnessed the benefits of the video-conferencing and the web based instruction softwares like Elluminate. The use of technology helped to bring the expertise of two instructors at the same platform.  This immensely benefited the students in terms of high quality of course contents delivered by two experts which complemented each others area of research.