“Delivering Effective Web-Based Education: Streamed Audio on the Web at SIGGRAPH” by Coleman, Bondi and Grange
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Title:
- Delivering Effective Web-Based Education: Streamed Audio on the Web at SIGGRAPH
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Abstract:
Providing effective education outside the traditional classroom is a challenge more education professionals will face in the near future. While many approaches exist for solving this problem, one expedient solution is videotaping traditional stand-and-deliver classes, compressing the video to stream off the Web, synchronizing important visual material to key points in the video, and placing everything in a well-designed and easy-to-use Web site.
Our team created a Web site for educating 5,000 IBM field service personnel worldwide. Traditional classroom instruction could not reach that many students. The instructors were, in real life, product development programmers, who barely had time to organize and present the material once. The expected “shelf life” for the information was three years, and every six months there would be significant updates to the material. Running the presentations as satellite classes was not an option because of the lack of universal access to the necessary facilities. The depth and breadth of the material, along with its volatility, squashed any realistic notion of crafting computer based instruction modules. Those who could not attend the live presentations were stuck with downloading the reading handouts from the presentations, muddling along as best they could.
