The Problem

• Main Authors: Raj Boora, Alan R. Davis, T. Craig Montgomerie
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Canada; Fort Vermilion
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.124.7949; http://www.racol.ualberta.ca/documents/pdfs/paper_3012_5680.pdf

Abstract: Students miss classes for a number of reasons. With emerging technology, providing asynchronous access to that class is possible. Rural Advanced Community of Learners 1 (RACOL) is creating a new standard in delivering distance education to students in rural Alberta. RACOL uses a combination of the Community of Learners Models of Instruction, n-way broadcast quality real-time video classes in which the instructor and all students can be seen by all participants, state of the art visualization using interactive whiteboards, individual computers equipped with workgroup software, and provision of asynchronous access for students who may miss a lesson. This paper describes the system developed to record synchronous communication and to provide asynchronous access to that material by students or teachers. The Fort Vermilion School Division #52 (FVSD) is located in the Northwestern corner of Alberta, a very rural and remote area of Canada. In conjunction with the University of Alberta and a number of other partners, FVSD is implementing the Rural Advanced Community of Learners (RACOL) project to provide state of the art, synchronous instruction to students in K-12 and post-secondary courses (see Montgomerie, King & Dropko, in press). The design of RACOL includes four concurrent streams: • an MPEG-2 stream that contains the video of the presenter (usually this is the teacher/instructor), or, if the visualizer is being used or a DVD or Videotape is being shown, this will be displayed with an optional picture-in-picture of the teacher/instructor, • an MPEG-2 stream that contains the combined images of the student locations in a split-screen format, • a mixed audio stream, and • an AVI data stream that is the combined image of what is displayed on the SmartBoard ™. Our challenge was to create a Web-based system that would allow students and teachers to access these streams asynchronously.