Project LIVE: A Classroom for Students on the Go

The classical lecture environment represents one of the most important opportunities to directly interact with students, allowing professors to leverage an array of communication and teaching techniques and to be immediately responsive to students’ questions. However, during a lecture students must absorb considerable amounts of new information within a very brief timeframe. As a result, the student who is unclear about a presented topic or misses a lecture may find this educational medium to be a bottleneck to the learning process since the unrealized learning is difficult to recover. With today’s mobile technologies, new opportunities now exist to extend access to classroom lectures by making them available via the Internet. This capability addresses two problems. First, students who are unable to physically attend a lecture can virtually attend a ‘live-lecture.’ Second, students can carefully review the lecture in its entirety or selected parts to gain a better understanding of the materials presented. The LocationIndependent Video Education (LIVE) system provides an innovative solution that enhances student-faculty interaction through wireless remote access to live and archived instructional materials. The overall project goals are to integrate, test, and disseminate new and emerging technologies that link the mobile student to the classroom or laboratory. Through a video/audio capture capability installed in the classroom and a network server, lectures can be streamed in real-time or archived for later viewing. Students can have access to these resources using handheld devices, tablet PC’s, or laptops with mobile connectivity. When viewing a live lecture, students will have the ability to interact with the instructor using messaging software. This paper will detail the basic system requirements as well as the technical approach that is currently being used to implement the system in classrooms and laboratories. In addition, the pedagogical aspects of creating a viable learning environment will be addressed. If sufficient network bandwidth and appropriate secure access can be provided, current capabilities of the LIVE system will be demonstrated.