University of Wisconsin-Madison
 Engineering professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison use their eTEACH® rich-media authoring environment and Microsoft® Windows Media® to deliver online lectures for the Computer Sciences 310 course. Rich-media presentations combine video, slides, and other graphical elements to replace large lecture hall sessions, enabling students to view the lectures on their own schedule and professors to spend their time working closely with students in team labs. The new course format has improved the educational experience for both professors and students. Because of the success of this project, other university departments have created online courses using Windows Media.
Founded in 1848, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a leading comprehensive research university, and one of the largest Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States. The university currently enrolls more than 40,000 undergraduate, professional, graduate, and doctoral students, and it employs nearly 14,000 faculty and staff members.
Each semester, approximately 300 sophomore and junior engineering students enroll in the Computer Sciences 310 course entitled "Engineering Problem Solving Using Computers." This course teaches students how to solve engineering problems using two advanced mathematics programs: Maple 8 and MATLAB.
In the past, a professor taught the course with two large, back-to-back lectures each week. A teaching assistant would then teach a weekly computer lab that covered the use of the problem-solving software. Using this format to teach so many students made it nearly impossible for the professor to observe the learning process in the individual students. Also, lecture and lab attendance was low.
As a result, the professor misperceived the students' level of understanding, and student performance didn't meet faculty expectations. In course evaluations, students expressed dissatisfaction and stated that the lectures and labs were disconnected.
Recognizing the need for a new teaching approach, Professors Gregory Moses and John Strikwerda decided to create a solution that would boost student learning and improve teaching methods.
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In the fall of 2000, Moses and Strikwerda reformed Computer Sciences 310 by replacing traditional lecture hall sessions with online rich-media presentations. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation through the National Partnership for Advanced Computing Infrastructure.
Instead of having to attend a lecture hall with more than 100 other students each week, students can, at their convenience, watch a 20-minute browser-based, rich-media presentation that includes Windows Media-based video, Microsoft PowerPoint® slides, and other HTML and graphical elements. They can view the lectures at engineering computer labs on campus, in their dorm rooms via the campus network, or at their private residences using dial-up or broadband connections. The students also attend two hands-on labs to work on the engineering problems. One lab is an individual session led by a teaching assistant, and the other is a team lab taught by a professor and a teaching assistant. In the team lab, students work in teams of three on 12 computers, discussing the problem and solution methods and solving the problems together. The professor works directly with the students in the problem-solving process. Professor Moses said the new format reverses the traditional lecture/homework paradigm. "In a sense, students are doing their homework in class and they're doing their lecture out of class," he said.
To create the online lectures, professors use a rich-media authoring tool called eTEACH, which was developed by Researcher Michael Litzkow. Similar to Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint 2002, but developed before Microsoft Producer was available, the eTEACH authoring tool enables users to combine Windows Media audio and video with PowerPoint slides, Web links, an interactive table of contents, and other navigational features.
Using two video cameras, an LCD screen, and a laptop, Moses records his lectures while sitting at his desk in his office. He plugs the LCD screen into one of the cameras so he can see himself and adjust his position and the lighting. He also plugs his laptop computer into the screen so he can view his PowerPoint slides while giving the lecture. When Moses is done recording the lecture, students from the engineering department encode and edit the video using the Vegas Video program. They sync up the two cameras, so they can switch from one camera to another if Moses made a mistake in the lecture and had to start over, or if they need to cut something out of the video. "It looks like all the cuts you see every 5 seconds on TV all the time," Litzkow said. "It looks perfectly natural." When the video editing is complete, the students use the eTEACH tool to match the video with the PowerPoint slides, add animation, Web links, and a table of contents. They also record a closed-captioning file of the lecture. Closed captioning is an accessibility feature offered by eTEACH.
The Department of Engineering Physics hosts the content on two Microsoft Windows® 2000-based servers running Windows Media services-one server for the video and one for the other content. The course's syllabus is available online through a course-management tool called WebCT, which is run by the university. The syllabus has links that point to the engineering department servers.
Moses and Litzkow chose to use Windows Media for several reasons. Windows Media Player is already installed on desktops running Windows, and it works well with Internet Explorer. Windows Media offers the quality at bit rates below 300Kbps that was needed for eTeach. The Windows Media Software Development Kit is also well documented, and support is available from Microsoft and Windows Media newsgroups when needed.
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The use of Windows Media has improved the learning process for students. A course evaluation over two semesters showed that students who took the online lecture version gave significantly higher ratings to all aspects of the course, including lecture usefulness, professor responsiveness, the course overall, and the instructor. About two-thirds of the 531 students surveyed said it was easier to take notes and understand the lectures with the online format, and 78 percent of students appreciated the ability to view and review course lectures on their own schedule. Moses said the new team lab also gives students valuable experience working as part of a team, which they will have to do when they're employed in the engineering field. Professors prefer the new course format as well. They say it's more difficult than giving a traditional lecture, but it's also more rewarding. Because the professors work face-to-face with students in the team labs, they get a much better picture of the learning process. "You're right there looking at what they're doing, watching them puzzle over what command to give next to get to the next step in the problem solution," Moses said.
Because of the success of the online format for Computer Sciences 310, other university departments have incorporated Windows Media in their courses. The School of Nursing is using eTEACH with Windows Media video to deliver a continuing education course to practicing nurses located around the state. The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater uses eTEACH to deliver several online courses to MBA students. In the Spring of 2003, the Nuclear Engineering department is using eTEACH to deliver an on-campus course in nuclear reactor theory. A first course in nuclear engineering is currently under preparation with support from the Department of Energy, and will be offered to students nationally in 2003.
Moses and Litzkow also plan to add accessibility and self-assessment features to the online lectures. They would like to enable the use of eTEACH without a mouse and to develop a way to create PowerPoint links that provide detailed descriptions of complex images for people without sight. They're also working on embedding multiple-choice quizzes into the slides, so students can quiz themselves on the lecture material. The quizzes would include links for wrong answers, so students could review the part of the lecture where that information was explained. "Our plans for the future are to build more sophisticated software on the server side, so we can actually capture the results and use that as a guide in the student learning process," Moses said.
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