An Online Collaboration Environment

Education and Information Technologies 7:1, 41–53, 2002.

# 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

An Online Collaboration Environment

KEVIN CURRAN

Intelligent Multimedia Research Group, School of Computing and Intelligent Multimedia, University of Ulster,

Magee Campus, Northern Ireland, BT47 3QL, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Helpmate is an Internet based software application that helps teachers, students, executives, managers and teams

achieve their strategic goals. Utilising an easy to learn and use, multi panel, web browser based, user interface,

users can communicate in real time via a chat room, engage in a video/audio/whiteboard session, communicate in

a multi-lingual fashion through real-time translation, see tutor controlled demonstrations on their local PC, view

historical data and interact with other students to form a self organising, self help group. It is the only tool of its

kind which has the potential to serve senior executives who need to establish that an organization’s critical

collaborative goals and initiatives translate into successful, multinational, multilingual team projects which

produce superior results in internet time.

The purpose of this effort is to conduct research directed toward the development of an electronic environment

to support a lecturer who wishes to conduct a series of lectures online to a group of undergraduate computer

science students. This paper is concerned with the feedback and lessons learnt from this endeavour.

Keywords: remote collaboration; online teaching; multimedia; distance learning.

Introduction

Education is becoming increasingly collaborative with the advent of the Internet, so it is no

surprise that collaborators around the world are seeking improved methods of collaborat-

ing through the medium of the Internet. We have developed a web based collaborative

system, which enables one to collaborate with remote colleagues on projects. One has at

their disposal tools such as a web cam, email, whiteboard and a chat room applet. The

collaborator also has access to other collaborators through the chat room applet and can

browse through the history to check whether questions have been previously answered.

Remote control software allows each collaborator to take control of each other’s machine

in order to trouble-shoot problems=demonstrate formulas.

Helpmate is a comprehensive, polished, and extensible collaboration platform. The

client, called the transceiver, includes a large library of standard modules for discussion

groups, peer to peer and server-based shared files, a sketch pad, voice and text chat,

language translation and scheduling. You can download new components and install them

into Helpmate by effortlessly ‘‘injecting’’ them into its interface.

Development of a true, multi-media, Internet based collaboration application has been

hindered by the lack of bandwidth available to the business community. Audio, video and

interactive whiteboard data streams have a heavy bandwidth overhead and run very slowly

on a 56K modem over a dial up connection. ISDN, ADSL, Cable and 3G cell phone

‘‘always on’’ broadband connectivity is exhibiting exponential growth and is fast becoming

the norm for the target market. This in turn creates the conditions in which an Internet

based collaboration tool can be very successful.

Helpmate is an Internet based software application that helps teachers, students,

executives, managers and teams achieve communication and dissemination of information

in real-time. Utilising an easy to learn and use, multi panel, web browser based, user

interface, users can communicate in real time via a chat room, engage in a video=audio=whiteboard session, communicate in a multi-lingual fashion through real-time translation,

see tutor controlled demonstrations on their local PC, view historical data and interact with

other students to form a self organizing, self help group.

Helpmate can very easily and quickly move out of the purely academic area into general

business where these functions, plus others can be used within a team environment to

define critical initiatives, translate them into team specific actions, collaborate and

communicate in real-time, and track their success on the web. Helpmate, is well positioned

to become the tool collaborative executive managers use to set the agenda, drive

implementation, and measure results in their organizations. We envisage Helpmate will

be purchased=authorised by the executives at the CEO, CFO level and indeed other

educational institutions. Other senior executives seeking to drive and manage critical,

collaborative corporate initiatives would be important in the evaluation, recommendation

and use of Helpmate. Instructors from all modes of life will value the speed of deployment

and the ability to get to work with little or no drain on their internal IT organization.

Helpmate

Helpmate intelligently packages a group of communication tools to overcome the distance

barrier when communicating. These tools basically provide access through various media

to collaborators. It also utilises fully the existing knowledge base of the participants

through the chat room history, discussion forums and allowing other persons to respond to

problems. A typical session may be where twoþ people agree to commence a meeting

online. Therefore both go to the Helpmate web page to collaborate in a variety of ways,

which include:

Communication

– Instant Messaging

– Voice Chat

– Text Chat

– Threaded Discussion

– Language Translation

– Email

Sharing

– File Sharing

– Picture Sharing

42 CURRAN

– Desktop Sharing

Interaction

– Whiteboard

– Notepad

– Calendar

Helpmate generally allows participants to share remote documents (FTP) and make real-

time amendments (both see changes); use video or=and instant messaging to chat to each

other; receive help from colleagues through the chat room; post answers to frequently

asked questions in the chat room— thus using it as a type of discussion forum; allow

others remote access to their machine so as to ‘poke around’—basically run programs,

check code, execute code etc., debug the problem remotely; communicate over longer

periods through the discussion forums; use the real-time translation to convert their native

language into a specified foreign language in real-time so that each person uses their

preferred native language and the whiteboard can be used to allow doodles or models to be

sketched for each member in the project to see or indeed to make amendments;

In Figure 1, we see the standard Helpmate screen where two participants have logged

on. The participant logged on within the forum is displayed on the right of the chat applet.

Participants can come or go and the session remains active until the last participant leaves.

We see the Project Leaders’ names preceded by an ‘@’.

As can be seen in Figure 1, the four main sections each contain a communication tool

such as email=remote control software, web publishing (HTML lab notes), web-cams,

Figure 1. Two colleagues holding a conversation.

ONLINE COLLABORATION ENVIRONMENT 43

whiteboard or chat room. The Whiteboard is a pop-up window. (Not shown in these figures

is the document sharing, email, remote desktop control, discussion forum or language

translation). In Figure 2, we see that someone has logged on using a nickname which is

taken by another participant therefore the system prompts her to enter a new nickname.

The person responds by entering a new name ‘mary_coyle’.

One may also take complete control of another agreeing participant’s machine remotely.

This allows one to perform a variety of tasks— from installing new software and verifying

system settings to browsing documents. In fact anything that a person can do whilst sitting

in front of the machine can be performed remotely using Helpmate’s remote control

component. Obviously one danger here is the actual serious security risk involved in

allowing others to take control of another person’s machine. Helpmate incorporates a

secure desktop sharing protocol. Once connected to the other person’s machine, one is then

free, for example to poke around and change class path settings to enable one, for example,

to compile a molecular simulation program. An example of viewing another person’s

desktop on one’s local machine is illustrated in Figure 3.

A typical session may be where two collaborators agree to commence a meeting online.

Therefore both go to a Helpmate URL page. A master page is usually set up on the

co-ordinator’s machine (using a local web server daemon). They can then use Helpmate in

a variety of ways.

� They can share remote documents and make real-time amendments (both see changes);

� They use instant messaging to chat to each other;

� They can receive help from colleagues through the chat room; the lecturer also posts

answers to frequently asked questions in the chat room— thus using it as a type of

bulletin board;

� They can let one-another login to their machine and ‘poke around’—basically run

programs, check code, execute code etc., debug the problem remotely;

� They can communicate using the web-cam and audio;

� They can use the translation software to convert their native language into a specified

foreign language in real-time so that each person uses their preferred native language;

Figure 2. A typical conversation using the chat applet and white board.

44 CURRAN

� The whiteboard can be used to allow doodles or models to be sketched for each member

in the project to see or indeed to make amendments;

Language translation scenario

We have also incorporated the real-time translation package Systran (http:==www.

systransoft.com) into Helpmate to allow users to type in their native language and have

the software perform the translation. This has proven to be one of the strengths of our

toolkit. Figure 4 shows a real-time concurrent translation transcript from English into

Figure 3. Remote control view of another person’s desktop.

Figure 4. Translation examples.


French and German in a simultaneous three way international collaboration chat room

meeting performed by the Software, while Figures 5 and 6 show a message being

translated from English into French inside the Chat component.

Educational scenario

Helpmate was initially developed for remote tutorial presentation or support (no talk, just

help offered) by a lecturer from his desk. An example might be where a student logs on to

receive a web-cast from a lecturer. The audio-video is streamed in the top left of the

browser while annotated slides are presented in the middle left of the browser window. The

student will also see questions raised by the students in real-time in the chat applet and will

be able to peruse questions asked earlier in the current presentation. If the student spots a

question that no-one has answered, he can select the question and type an answer. The

answer will be automatically registered with the system, all students are then notified that

the question that the question has been answered.

Live webcams need constant ‘‘live’’ feeds and generally need to run server software

on each computer. To overcome this limitation with users who access the web through

slow modems we implemented the web cam software using JavaCamPush. JavaCamPush

(http:==surveyorcorp.com=webcam32help) is a Java applet supplied integrated as part of

Webcam32. Using JavaCamPush, an Internet Explorer or Netscape user can view real

time live streaming video from Webcam32 (see Figure 7).

Figure 6. Kevin sending Pierre a ‘thank you message’ in English.

Figure 5. Pierre receiving Kevin’s thank you message’ in French.

46 CURRAN

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Evaluation

The main goal of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed asynchronous

collaboration environment as compared to traditional ‘present in classroom’ tutorials. We

were interested in discovering:

� How convenient was the on-demand (or archived) format? Did the students actually use it?

� Do lecturers save time or do the online-questions take up as much or more time?

� Given the collaboration features provided by Helpmate, was class participation

comparable?

� Lecturers frequently enjoy teaching live classes due to interaction with students. How

satisfied did they feel with the interaction online?

� How satisfied in general were the students with the online teaching and collaboration

features?

A total of eight online teaching sessions took place over four weeks in association with

traditional classroom lectures. Students were asked to fill out an 18-question survey at the

end of the experiment and a shorter 6-question survey at the end of each lesson. The

lecturer also answered an ‘Instructor oriented’ questionnaire.

The lecture was streamed over a forty-minute period. Forty students were present in the

computing lab. Two additional teaching assistants were present in the lab to provide

assistance if needed. The slides were presented in the main browser window also. The chat

area allowed questions to be posed at any time during the talk, but was mainly used for the

interactive parts of the tutorial.

One of the questions asked was to indicate the percentage of time taken up with each

component. This was obviously an educated approximate guess but we do believe the

Figure 8. Percentage of time spent each week using components.

48 CURRAN

results are accurate and indicate many interesting trends. Figure 8 illustrates the results of

this survey. One trend that is noticeable is that as the percentage of time watching the

actual video (lecture speaking) decreases— the time spent viewing the slides increases.

This may be that the novelty of the video wore off and the content of the slides became

more important as the students realised that the content was the most important part of the

lesson. Likewise the amount of chat in the discussion area increases week on week and

likewise the desktop sharing. The whiteboard component was used very little as too was

the email. We believe that the students simply found no real use for the whiteboard

component. The FTP was beginning to increase in usage. This may have been related to

the fact that some of the students were shown for the first time how to actually use a file

transfer protocol program.

To assess the students’ liking for this type of tutorial with regard to the goals listed

earlier, we found that students in general found the online tutorial interesting and

convenient (85%). Lecturers however felt the lack of overall feedback a problem and

had no control over the attention of individual students throughout the tutorial. Another

goal was to assess lecturer efficiency. In the traditional method, an instructor spent on

average 10–15 minutes moving between lecture theatres and fine-tuning teaching equip-

ment once there. This was obviously eliminated with the online tutorial. Aspects such as

the inability to accept callers at the office during these live broadcasts is another issue,

which is more difficult to quantify. The amount of emails generated by the online tutorial

seem to take as much time as answering questions in person after a traditional lecture,

therefore no real time was gained here. In examing the level of class participation in both

traditional and live Webcast, we found students participated more or less the same in each

format. We did note that students placed a higher value on another student’s contributions

in the online tutorial over the traditional tutorial (67%).

Another finding was that the absence of adequate keyboarding skills exacerbated the

difficulties of email=chat discussions for some, however we found that students had no

problem with the concept of chat rooms and quite frequently answered problems posed by

their peers. There is also the ability to hold multiple conversations as in Figure 2. The

overall tendency was for students to use the chat room for communications, which were

more specifically about that particular project, while email was used for general queries

that arose during the tutorial. 8% of students found the Helpmate environment a distraction

and preferred to work ‘over the phone’. Students felt a range of skills were developed as a

result of the project. These included chat room and video conferencing (78%), clearer

graphic communication (32%) and patience (12%). Selected results of a survey are

displayed in Table 1.

Students also made the following comments:

� They would have placed a significant increased value on the environment if lectures

could have been taken at home. The average student in our sample only had access to

56K modem lines. They did indicate that they would have accepted plain audio

streaming however.


� Notes were generally taken on plain paper. Slides were also printed onto paper. Students

didn’t use the computer to store notes. The general consensus was that they were more

likely to read them again if they were printed.

The main concern among lecturers was the lack of student feedback and the lack of

control over how the student behaves when out of a controlled classroom environment.

Ongoing work

At present, Helpmate has become a spin-out company form the University of Ulster due to

interest from venture capitalists. Thus the application is changing from a purely online

tutorial environment to a more general collaboration environment. A design goal of

Helpmate is that it should be ‘‘open’’ in the sense that easy access to the environment by

third party applications can be enabled. We have incorporated an interactive whiteboard

application called E-beam (http:==www.e-beam.com). It is also envisaged that third party

applications for vertical markets such as construction (CAD), engineering (CAM) medical

and others will also be viewed and used within the overall environment.

We are also constructing a meeting manager, which will call and schedule an on-line

meeting, meeting contributors will be selected from a contacts database and invited by

email to join an on-line meeting at a pre-arranged time. The meeting reminder function

will e-mail reminders to the group at 7 days, 1 day, 30 minutes and 5 minutes. Contributors

Table 1. Evaluation results

% students

Found Email Useful 54

Did not feel information overload 78

Prefer this environment 92

Found Chat helpful 88

Found Video helpful 70

Amount of time spent learning tools

worthwhile

85

Found experience enjoyable 79

Felt part of a group 84

Felt that group collaboration enabled

higher quality lab sessions

69

Value of other students

comments=questions

67

Actually learnt more in this format

than traditional

55

Paid more attention during the online

tutorial

61

50 CURRAN

can be within the same organisation and communicate across a company network or can be

located elsewhere and communicate by VPN or via the public Internet. Communication is

via Web cam audio visual, on-line chat or by interactive whiteboard. The chat function is

open to everyone, the on-line whiteboard is visible to everyone but managed by one

person— the meeting manager, audio visual is one-to-one, meeting manager to contributor

rather than contributor to contributor. The entire meeting can be saved, compressed,

encrypted and archived off-site for future replay.

Related work

Although there are other distance learning and collaboration tools available no other tool

has Helpmate’s current and potential combination of features and business benefits (e.g.,

file sharing, remote access to desktops, whiteboards, chat and real-time language transla-

tion). Distance learning facilitates collaboration when scientists cannot meet at the same

place. Helpmate therefore falls within the category of ‘distance learning’ yet distance

learning encompasses much more—however we are content with the term ‘distance learn-

ing tool’ being associated with Helpmate. Therefore a lot of research into distance learning

on the web is related. The Java-Enabled TeleCollaboration System (JETS) is a collabora-

tion system designed for real-time sharing of Java applets (Shirmohammadi et al., 1998).

Using any Java-enabled Web browser, multiple users in a telecollaboration session are able

to share generic applications in the form of Java applets. JETS is aimed at the sharing of

applications rather than the presentation of a tutorial and access in real-time to help in

various forms. JETS provides a shared white-board which could be used for requesting

help although it was not designed for this purpose.

RC (Remote Collaboration) is a tool created at the University of California, Davis, to

enhance interaction between humans using Internet connectivity(Blake, 2000). It combines

a number of features such as chat; annotatable images; sound messages compressed for

transmission; shared viewing of web pages and a collaborative writing tool. Helpmate

differs mainly in the interactivity provided by the web cam along with the live audio and

the remote control of the Collaborator’s machine. An example of an industrial collaborative

environment is REDISE (Jopke and Lother, 1999). This collaboration is realised by using a

net conferencing system. The net conferencing system allows the communication by

video, audio, shared whiteboard and shared text editor as well as the usage of shared

applications. The main difference again like most tools is that the tools are all separate

applications, which must be invoked individually by the users to conduct a session. We feel

that any collaboration environment that is to be used in a educational setting must operate

as a ‘whole’ and not depend on Collaborators to invoke individual components.

The BSCW system (Appelt and Mambrey, 1999) is based on the metaphor of shared

workspaces where users access these workspaces with their normal Web browsers. The

system allows users to collaborate using text messaging and document sharing. The system

however does not contain the functionality richness of Helpmate as it provides no

interactive tools such as video=audio or whiteboards. The North Carolina School of

Science and Mathematics teachers partner with other high schools to create teacher


collaborations. The collaboration provides teachers with an opportunity to integrate

technology and new approaches into an existing course or adopt a new course. Teachers

involved in collaborations meet twice a week with the class and once a week to plan and to

discuss issues. Collaborations are effective for new teachers and teachers teaching out of

field (http:==www.dlt.ncssm.edu=distance learning).

With regards to the educational issues of collaboration, Kubala (1998) shares his

experiences as a university professor teaching Internet-based graduate courses to commu-

nity college faculty and administrators in Florida. He finds that online courses provide an

individualized form of instruction and encourage active student involvement in class

discussions. Design and implementation strategies are discussed and importance of

technical supports and careful preparation of assignments are emphasized. Students’

evaluation reveals that online courses are more flexible and convenient than traditional

classroom teaching.

Conclusion

This paper outlined some of the aspects of a multimedia collaborative environment, which

provides a range of communication tools for online tutorials. We have developed and

extensively tested a set of collaboration tools in the domain of online educational

collaboration. A style of rapid-prototyping was employed in this development, such that

the users of the software were involved in its inception and in every stage of its

development. This development has resulted in a toolkit of software that supports

collaboration in education, by a geographically distributed set of lecturers=teachers,

observing and controlling remote tutorials.

There were minor complaints about the interface; most requests were for increased

functionality. Students genuinely seemed to enjoy the online tutorials. The interaction

during lectures was on the increase each week and attendance was above average for the

rest of the year. A key challenge for the future will be how to support the kind of

interaction that is available at present in traditional ‘lecture present in classroom’ tutorials.

References

Appelt, W., Mambrey, P. (1999) Experiences with the BSCW Shared Workspace System as the Backbone of a

Virtual Learning Environment for Collaborators. Proceedings of the World Conference on Educational

Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications ED-MEDIA 99, Seattle, 1999.

Blake, Robert (2000) RC— remote collaboration—computer mediated communication. In Language Learning &

Technology, Vol. 4, No. 1, May, University of California, Davis, pp. 120–136.

http:==surveyorcorp.com=webcam32help

http:==www.systransoft.com

http:==www.e-beam.com

http:==www.dlt.ncssm.edu=distance learning=

52 CURRAN

Jopke, K. and Lother, M. REDISE—Remote and Distributed Software Engineering. EKA ‘99—Conference on

‘‘Development and Operation of Complex Automation Systems’’, Technical University of Braunschweig,

Germany, September 1999, pp. 44–48.

Kubala, T. (1998) Addressing student needs: Teaching on the Internet. T.H.E. Journal, 25(8), 71–74.

Shirmohammadi, S., Oliveira, J. C. and Georganas, N. D. (1998) Applet-Based Telecollaboration: A Network-

centric Approach. IEEE Multimedia Magazine, 5(2), 64–73.


An Online Collaboration Environment

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