Research Projects in Educational Technology

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Last update: 9/5/2008

Here is a summary of current research projects. The main emphasis of my work is in connecting educational technology with computing for the developing world. There are many opportunities for participation, as undergraduate projects, quals projects, and research projects. Some of these projects could also be the basis for external collaborations. There are possibilities of RA funding with Classroom Presenter Project, Digital StudyHall, or the Center for Collaborative Technologies. If any look interesting, please get in touch with me. I will attempt to keep this relatively up to date (but experience shows that these types of pages can lag reality).

Active Research Projects

• Classroom Presenter We have been working on Classroom Presenter since 2002, and it is now a mature project. Version 3.1 has been released, there is a growing, world wide user base, and it is being adopted both in K-12 as well as at universities. With a deployed system and stable platform there are still many challenges in understanding how technology can support good teaching, and how to continue to develop the system to meet users needs.
• ConferenceXP ConferenceXP is an network based conferencing system targetting multisite classes. The project is now hosted by our Center for Collaborative Technologies. Work continues on making the system more robust and easier to deploy. We are exploring how to extend the system to support different levels of bandwidth so that it can also be used in networks in resource constrained environments.
• Classroom presenter integration with mobile devices [Craig Prince] An important next step for Classroom Presenter is to support student clients on a wide range of mobile devices. This involves both developing the application framework to span devices, and also addressing many form factor and UI issues. An important question to answer is how well can teachers achieve their pedagogical goals in environments where students have a significant range of devices.
• Classroom presenter for low cost laptops Many schools world wide are investing in low cost laptops (Classmate, ASUS eee, XO). However, the big question is "how will these devices be used in the classroom." We believe that Classroom Presenter could be an important component by providing a system that allows the teacher to coordinate active learning in the framework of a slide based lesson. We have localized Classroom Presenter to Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Chinese as a first step to explore this area. We are looking for partners who have deployed low cost laptops and are interested in experimenting with Classroom Presenter.
• Video conferencing for international courses We are interested in using ConferenceXP to support real time, international courses. Last year we had a successful class with Pakistan and this year we are doing a seminar with Chile. On the technical side, we need to understand how to optimize the conferencing system to the conditions on international networks. The goal is to have very low latency, to allow for natural interactions across sites.
• Digital StudyHall evaluation study Digital StudyHall is a project that aims to improve education in poor rural schools in India. We are going to perform a moderate scale study in Lucknow, India, to assess the educational effectivenes of the methodology.
• Facilitated video instruction We have been involved in a series of projects, dating back to 1998, where recorded lessons are delivered by facilitators. This teaching methodology combines expert delivered content with classroom interation. Digital StudyHall (and spin off projects) are examples of this methodology.
  • Designing materials to support to facilitator [Natalie Linnell] The challenge is develop low cost mechanisms for adapting content to make it easier to use by a facilitator.
  • Tutored Video Instruction tools Our experience with TVI in higher education is that the facilitator will often want to lecture independently, so the goal is to have a smooth integration of the video tools with other presentation tools.
• Multimouse [Jennifer Hansen] There are several different directions for combining MultiMouse with Classroom Presenter - one is on the student client and another is to allow multiple mice to interact with the public display. The value of multimouse is that is that it reduces the cost per participant, and the challenge is to provide rich interaction and input with just a mouse.
• ICTD Education As we are developing educational programs in ICTD, we want to develop high quality curriculum, and also methodologies that allow multidisciplinary student teams to work in the area.

Future projects

• Educational outreach in resource constrained environments Expanding the reach of education is a fundamental problem in the developing world. One of the important cases is allowing established, in country organizations to reach wider audiences. Candidate projects involve working with Aravind Eye Hospital in India to support multisite courses, and to help a university in Zambia offer a soil science course at other colleges.
• New deployments of digital study hall Last year, we investigated setting up a Digital StudyHall site in Eritrea - but for various reasons, the time was not right. Opportunities could exist for other international deployments of DSH.
• DSH for Health Use facilitated video instruction along the lines of DSH or Digital Green in the health domain. This will require identifying a UW partner with an health education project to work with.
• Computing Education Computing environments in Africa and Asia can be very hostile - with far higher rates of virus infection and malware then in the US. There are multiple causes of this - out of date, unpatched, or pirated software as well as a lack of understanding of maintaining and running machines. Can this be addressed through technical and educational initiatives? I'm of the opinion that this is an area where computer scientists could make a big difference if we take up the challenge.

Older projects

• Digital Ink Based Communication Ink is a very effective communication tool when used in conjunction with speech and prepared content. Our work has concentrated on the Tablet PC, although one could look at other form factors as well. There are many open questions in how people use ink in communication, and how best to develop inking technology to support communication. One important factor is that when communicating with ink and speech, the writing device is likely to recieve only limited attention, so the writing application must designed with a low cognitative load. This would be an interesting domain to explore novel pen based interfaces. There are also many interesting questions related to rendering ink in support of presentation.
• Analysis of Lecture Artifacts It is straight forward to capture and playback digital ink when it is used in presentation. Automatic analysis of speech and ink from lectures could be used to improve classroom applications, as well as to create summaries and indices of recorded lectures. We had an ACM Multimedia paper several years ago which explored some of the opportunities for analyzing recorded lectures. The analysis problems range from low level problems (such as how to classify ink between attention, textual, and diagrammatic and match attentional ink to content) to high level problems (identify key frames of a diagram used to make several points, simplify a diagram to present the ink useful for note taking). One very interesting challenge is to combine audio analysis with ink analysis - for example, can speech recognition and handwriting recognition be used together to improve recognition accuracy.
• Ink RecognitionThere are a number of specific ink recognition problems which come out of this domain. First of all, the general challenge of recognizing "instructor scrawl". Domain specific diagram recognition arises in a number of areas. One I am particularly interested in is recognizing data structure diagrams, such as trees or arrays. An application of this would be in analyzing student submissions. Another very challenging domain for recognition is mathematical handwriting, possibly done in conjunction with audio information.
• Classroom Technology (Systems issues)There are many technology issues in developing a distributed system for classroom use. There are issues with using the devices in a wireless environment and some usage models could run into bandwidth limitations. Real time content distribution can be a challenge in a wireless environment, specifically distribution of a slide deck to a large group of users at the start of lecture.
• Ink based pedagogyWriting has always been a very import tool used in the delivery of lectures. We are interested in understanding how digital ink can be used most effectively in lecture presentation, and how practices vary across disciplines. Recorded lectures give us a very rich source of data to study, and growing use outside of CS (in fields such as Chemistry), allow us to begin to compare across disciplines. Understanding how best to use ink can be tied back into curricular design, as well as to the development of better presentation tools.
• Classroom Presenter Extensions Here are a few ideas relating to enhancing Classroom Presenter.
  • Ink analysis framework. Develop a tool for reading in saved ink files and slides that performs basic analysis on the ink - e.g., classification into stroke types and handwriting recognition. this.)
  • Transparent ink overlay. Extend Presenter to allow a transparent overlay to allow Presenter writing to be done over other applications.
  • Content parsing. One of the key uses of writing on slides is to identify slide content. Develop a tool that parses slide source (ppt, latex, pdf), and then matches ink to content.
  • Erasing during presentation. Probably the most challenging aspect of manipulating ink while lecturing is erasing content. We have observed frequent difficulties in this area. Many lecturers choose the erase all option, instead of attempting to erase individual strokes or pixels. The problem is deeper than just having stroke and area erasers that are easy to control, it is probably necessary to have ways of selectively erasing different types of material (such as a pressure sensitive eraser!).
  • Develop mechanisms supporting richer use of displays - e.g., mechanism for multiple view ports or overlaying content.
  • Generalize the content models of classroom presenter beyond PPT. A framework to support a broader collection of document types would be great.

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