Bassam Hammo (Ph.D)

Department of Computer Information SystemsKing Abdullah II School for Information Technology

Jordan UniversityAmman Jordan

e- mail: b.hammo@ju.edu.jo

What is an Interactive ClassroomWhat is an Interactive Classroom

An interactive classroom is a place where learners are encouraged to communicate with peers and teachers in a meaningful way.

Creates useful learning opportunities in which the teacher presents the material in a way that is interactive and therefore meaningful to the learner.

Interactive Classroom

Electronic classroom or simply “E-classroom” is equipped with technologies thatcapture classroom activities,allow for audio and video recordings of lectures,slides presentation, capture the notes written by the lecturer, andmake class material available all the time.

can be accessed and reviewed by students for missing parts, studying difficult concepts or to prepare for exams.

Why Interactive Classroom

Cognitive psychologists: learning is more productive when the acquired

knowledge occurs in an interactive environment.Experimentally, it was found that students attending

interactive lectures learn more than students attending a traditional one. This is because students in an interactive environment do

not spend the time in writing and copying the material from the board as the case in traditional classrooms; instead, they spend the time in thinking, understanding and asking questions .

Why Interactive Classroom

Efficient learning techniques became mandatory to keep up with the demand of productive learning:Significant improvements in computational power, networking bandwidth,storage capacity and graphical user interfaces

New teaching methods, such as long-distance and virtual learning, where students are separated in space and/or time, become increasingly common in many universities and educational institutes

Motivation

Lecturing at King Abdullah II School for Information Technology (KASIT) at the University of Jordan (UJ) is based on electronic presentations using PowerPoint slides: Classrooms are equipped with ceiling-mounted projectors and

whiteboards for writing notes. A typical lecture is around 50 minutes and has around 60-80

students. The classroom is the only place where students can learn and take

notes. Lecture notes, in most cases, are not made available outside the

classroom.Recently, KASIT starts offering few courses through Blackboard:

but yet not as efficient and utilized as required. high running cost of the system serves only a thin slice of the huge community of the UJ.

Motivation

Support a long-standing problem of teaching an obligatory, multi-section course of Computer Skills required by all students at the University.huge number of students per section was not very

conducive to establish meaningful interaction between students and the instructor.

The performance of some students was always low and students have to repeat the course more than once.

Interactive Classroom Model

Features of our Interactive Classroom

Our system aims at exploiting the potential of computer technology for improving the way we teach and learn:Bi-lingual (Arabic/English)Developed to enable students within the campus of UJ to

interact with the lecturer’s computer, where lecture notes are available for projection.

It enables the lecturer to improve the organization of the course material: presents lectures and give a means of simplifying extensive

content monitors students’ activities through receiving immediate feedback

regarding how well they have learned the material in an interactive way.

Features of our Interactive Classroom

For students, the new system encourages them to participate and complete the coursework with more variety in learning experiences, such as:answering questions directly,taking quizzes,downloading audio and video files,reviewing past lectures,uploading due assignments and many other interesting

tasks.Our system comes at low cost

It has the advantages of being flexible, easy to use, and has the ability to run at any place within the campus where a networking connection is available.

The Roll of the Administrator

Add a new lecturerEstablish instructor-student relationship.

Connecting with the Instructor Server

Two major tasks through this server:manage the coursework content, start a presentation.

Starting a Presentation

Delivered material could be simply:PowerPoint™ presentation,material from the World Wide Web,supplementary audio/video files, orexecution of any number of different programs

on the main computer. Monitoring students’ activities

Connecting with the Student Machine

Displays a list of online active instructors running on servers.

Student chooses to join an instructor; login window requesting the student’s ID and the password.

Connecting with the Student Machine

Student can perform a set of tasks: downloading missed lecture notes, reading messages sent by instructor, and viewing an active presentation.

Joining an Active Presentation

Student Joins a SessionStudent has no control over the displayed

material:just setting there watching the presentation and

other activities presented by the instructor,checking attendance record,reading notes sent by the instructor,raising hand to ask a question,uploading an assignment when requested to do so,

andresponding to quick Yes/No questions.

Joining an Active Presentation

Conclusion & Future Directions

We aim at utilizing over thirty computer labs distributed around the campus and already equipped with latest computers, servers, and connected over a high-bandwidth network to be used in teaching synchronous multi-section courses interactively.

It overcomes separations in space by exchanging audio, video, and textual materials at different computer labs.

It worth to mention that the project was initiated and developed as a six-month project, and it was driven by practical needs and targeted at providing a friendly, easy to set, low-cost Windows/PC-based interactive classroom environment.

Thank You for Thank You for ListeningListening