First full e-Lecture

The Setup (Tablet PC, external monitor, extra keyboard and mouse, good headset and webcam)

I am really interested in the possibilities hidden in the utilization of e-Learning technology in supporting the education of Japanese language in Jordan.

Today I had my first full length e-Lecture. It was not a blended style lecture (a Face to face lectures supported by an online e-Lecture), but a fully online experience from start to finish.

The content is designed for a person working in a Japanese company who wishes to acquire Japanese for the work environment. Initially I designed the lecture with two 2 hour sessions each weak hoping to finish one of two textbooks assigned to the course in 2 months. The same content is covered but in more detail in 5 levels at the JAAJ Japanese language course. The remaining 2 months will concentrate on business Japanese from the perceptive of usage per situation and introducing Japanese business culture and manners.

Pen Input is very important in my course!

The platform for the lecture delivery is a nice online service called "Vyew", which I discovered surfing the Google chrome app store. It is a convenient work sharing and online collaboration service, but I thought it would serve quite well as a Virtual class room environment with out having to resort to more difficult to use or expensive paid for solutions.

Setting a room in Vyew is easy! Below is the room called "Japanese for business". I can send invites to students to limit participation or make it a fully open to the public.

Through the service you can communicate face to face or in conference with students using audio and video easily inside the interface itself, with out having to use other software like Skype of Gtalk working and using up screen space. There is also a dedicated chat window and I liked that members could set their status to self explanatory statuses such as "away", "raise hand", "Applause" and even "slow down" to give a more interactivity to their online status.

You load up the material, be it in Word document, spreadsheet, PPT presentation and even PDF files and have them displayed on screen while giving you the option to control the flow of information and synching all screens to ensure that all students are seeing the same content.

You can also write and draw directly on a virtual blackboard which is quite easy to use. You can share your screen with others to give them a glimpse of how to do stuff with out having to explain.

The Vyew interface, clean and simple with everything you need to interact with the students. Mr. peanuts is the sensei.

There are really many other nice features to share in Vyew, but I leave it to you to poke around.

But there are certain limitation to this distance learning environment....

For one, the person on the other side (the student) should not be a PC genius but should be able to set up his own-environment on his side (know how to connect to the correct Vyew room, set up his webcam, connect his headset and mic by himself. This is not that difficult, but expect lots of "How do I do that?", "What should I do next?" in the first few sessions, which can sometimes be a bit frustrating.

The second big hurdle is the internet itself. 512Kbps is the absolute minimum to reduce lag time in the virtual environment. The higher the speed, the better! And the difference is clearly felt.

The biggest FATAL problem with Vyew that I can't yet solve, is that you cannot type directly in Japanese on the virtual White-board, although it should be supported... the only workaround to this is to type in any other application (Word, Notepad, etc.) and simply copy and paste to the virtual White-board. It works, but a bit inconvenient and will hinder the lesson flow.

The tablet pen input helps in direct input of Japanese! On other PCs I just could not get it to work.

But all in all, it was a smooth experience! Looking forward to my next lecture and maybe hopefully expanding this course to accommodate new students :D