The fine line between face-to-face and virtual teaching

On October 20 IE Business School launched a project we’ve been working on for some time: a classroom we call The WoW Room (Window on the World), conceptualized and created with the help of SyncRTC and designed to create a fully immersive educational experience that pushes the boundary between online education and the classroom learning experience (see references to the presentation in Times Higher Education or Le Monde, among others).

Since 2000, I have been watching how online education has become much more than simply a replacement resource, more than just a way to provide education to those who, for whatever reason, cannot commit to being in a classroom in a particular place.

The formula we decided to use leveraged our teaching staff’s work, with no assistants, tutors or substitutes of any kind, based on relatively small groups (despite the clear economic benefits that teaching to tens of thousands students at a time could offer), and direct, constant interaction through forums and other participation schemes.

We soon appreciated the superiority of this approach: the best discussions were no longer taking place in classrooms, but online. As a professor, using a case study in an online session was the best way to feel fully prepared for a classroom session.

The requirements for online education were not simple: platforms needed to provide adequate tools for interaction, but it was not as simple as it had at first seemed: we had to bear in mind that some students were in places with little bandwidth, for example. Our platforms limited our methodology, and I always had my doubts, expressed in academic publications and conferences, about the suitability of focusing all activity on a specific platform, rather than using other more generic tools that students could find useful in other environments, such as blogs, fora, etc. For professors, working in an online environment meant completely reconceptualizing cases and strategies to adapt them to the new environment, and involved a lot more preparation.

Forums proved to be enormously intense, requiring consistent professors’ participation to encourage discussions that contributed to the goal and cut those that seemed less fruitful or were not focused on the subject, while the working week was stretched to the point of almost falling asleep on my keyboard on many occasions. Yet, despite the positive results, both in terms of learning and student satisfaction, as well as group dynamics, we still felt a certain degree of separation from our students.

As a result, many courses evolved into blended formats, with some classroom sessions at the beginning or end of the period, which helped to attach a face to the name and get to know students a little better, although they had made great progress between themselves during the time they spent preparing their classes, thanks to continuous online interaction using all kinds of tools.

The WoW Room is an attempt to give the online experience an environment that really brings together the best of the network with the best of the face to face experience, along with sophisticated tools to properly manage the class. This is a big classroom with a huge video wall consisting of 48 LG 55-inch borderless screens in a U-shape covering 230 degrees. The total area is 45 square meters of screen divided into three sections, ie, four continuous columns of four screens each. These three groups of 16 screens are each controlled by a computer equipped with an Intel QuadCore i7 processor, two NVIDIA GTX 1080 cards paired with SLI and with 32GB of RAM, meaning that each of these machines has more memory on their graphics cards than their motherboard. These three computers can move a resolution of 4K each four times, allowing the group the ability to run twelve times 4K.

The WoW Room is also equipped with 1600W sound: four speakers in the ceiling, Sennheiser microphones and an amazing mixing desk that I am determined to master (I just love things with buttons! :-) The lighting comes from three fixed RGB programmable spotlights, two motorized RGB programmable wash lights, and two green programmable lasers. The professor is filmed on a Philips X1000 4K mounted on a Pixio tripod base that follows their movements as they walk around the classroom. There are also two multi-touch 65-inch monitors that allow us to manage the virtual blackboard and the various applications we use during a class. Finally, if we are delivering the class from another place, we can be holographically projected on to a 2x1-meter Holoscreen.

The software is entirely based on HTML5 and WebRTC, which runs on three full-screen Chrome windows, making it probably the largest web application created so far. The classroom can emit two 4K video feeds, one of the teacher and one with a full panoramic view. In its regular configuration, thanks to cloud-based multipoint control units based on the Licode open source project from UPM, the WoW Room receives and emits up to sixty 1080p video streams to and from students from anywhere in the world, with a latency of 200ms or less, which is crucial for proper interaction. In other configurations, we can reach two hundred students without impacting on latency.

In addition, the software allows you to consume, create or edit multimedia documents and applications, offering collaborative browsing, all office formats, images, videos, interactive maps, virtual screens, and an application for real-time surveys that works infinitely better than asking students to raise their hands in class and then counting. Also, as you would expect in a real classroom, it is possible to connect YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, etc., carry out searches, or introduce any other element into the session, either planned or in response to how the discussion develops. Resources are managed by using two specially designed touch screens, as well as through a voice recognition algorithm.

Finally, our WoW classroom offers other stuff professors dream about: the ability to measure student participation, emotional analysis of their attention levels or the time they spend analyzing or using the material they’ve been given. All this, moreover, in a versatile environment that can also be used for other purposes: projecting 360 degree videos, augmented or virtual reality, and simulations and visualization of large analytical models.

Can such a classroom allow us to make the leap from the traditional classroom to a convincing virtual scenario? In my tests with the WoW classroom since September, I am beginning to see the possibility to managing it in such a way as to avoid the feeling of artificiality and that is now comfortable enough to almost forget the interface and focus on interaction, and what’s more, I can control everything myself: there is no need for anyone backstage (when no one is watching, I can even think about using the humongous screen to play FPS :-)

This is just our first WoW Room, and we are starting to build an identical one in our campus in Segovia. We are now in a situation where, as it happens in our regular face-to-face classes, it is completely normal to have “classes” of up to fifty people scattered around the world, but with an interaction as good as any in a real classroom.

I’ll keep you posted…

(En espa?ol, aquí)