ON OPERATIONAL SCHEME FOR REMOTE LECTURES

IN INTER-UNIVERSITY DISTANCE LEARNING PROJECT

Noriatsu Kudo, Kotaro Kataoka

Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, 5322 Endo, Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan

Jun Murai

Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, 5322 Endo, Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan

Keywords:

Remote lecture, Operational scheme.

Abstract:

This paper proposes an operational scheme to support remote lectures in an inter-university distance learning

project. Besides the signiﬁcant improvement of video conference systems, the operational aspect of remote

lectures among participating universities tends to be less attended because its operation is basically indepen-

dent in each university. Lack of a practical experience on operating remote lectures will introduce factors of

reducing the quality, scalability or sustainability of the distance learning project. Our solution is to standardize

the operational scheme among participating universities based on the concept of Layered Architecture of the

remote lecture environment, Administrator that can access and maintain the entire environment, and Central-

ized Application Network to achieve these features. The proposed scheme has been evaluated at the actual

operation of more than 600 remote lectures in an inter-university distance learning program in Japan since

2007.

1 INTRODUCTION

The evolution of broadband Internet and Videoconfer-

ence system has led to a rise in the sharing and distri-

bution of video and audio lectures among universities

around the world. Inter-university distance learning

promises to build a new educational curriculum that

will improve lecture lineups at each participating uni-

versity. However, general guidelines regarding how

to operate an entire remote lecture have yet to be ac-

tively addressed. This is largely due to the fact that the

operations of distance learning environments are in-

dependently managed at each participating university.

This situation prevents inter-university distance learn-

ing projects from keeping the quality of remote lec-

tures high and continuing them throughout a semester

or an academic year.

This paper proposes a method for the operation of

distance learning environments that ensures 1) con-

sistent communication among remote classrooms, 2)

scalable operations and 3) sustainable lectures. This

scheme has been conducted since 2007 to support

more than 600 remote lectures.

This paper shares best practices for conducting re-

mote lectures through one or more academic

semesters. We expect our ﬁndings will beneﬁt those

who want to launch new distance education projects,

or improve existing ones in a practical manner.

2 DISTANCE LEARNING

ENVIRONMENT

2.1 Remote Lectures

We deﬁne a conventional lecture in this paper as be-

ing composed of a talk from a lecturer to students,

and a Q&A session between the lecturer and students

during or after the lecture. A distance-learning envi-

ronment for remote lectures consists of one or more

remote classrooms that are connected to the Internet

and attended by student participants. Students may

either be present in the actual room with the lecturer,

in a remote classroom, or both.

This research assumes that a remote lecturer per-

forms this conventional lecture with multiple remote

classrooms in real-time. A lecturer’s talk is primar-

249

Kudo N., Kataoka K. and Murai J..

ON OPERATIONAL SCHEME FOR REMOTE LECTURES IN INTER-UNIVERSITY DISTANCE LEARNING PROJECT.

DOI: 10.5220/0003353002490257

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2011), pages 249-257

ISBN: 978-989-8425-50-8

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

ily delivered via video and voice. Other lecture ma-

terials, such as PowerPoint slides, writings on a black

board, or images from a document camera are sent via

video to the viewer’s screen . Gestures of the lecturer

are also included in the video to add more contextual

information, such as pointing to materials, etc. Mean-

while, students send feedback to the lecturer via video

and audio by chatting, clapping, laughing, raising a

hand and/or asking a question.

2.2 Requirement Organization

The distance learning environment is the remote lec-

ture facility within the university, including Internet

connectivity, videoconference tools, and other mul-

timedia communication tools. Distance learning en-

vironment operations are classiﬁed into one of three

categories: (1) maintaining remote classrooms before

and after a lecture, (2) troubleshooting during the lec-

ture, and (3) designing and installing a new remote

classroom to invite another university.

This paper introduces the following three require-

ments to conduct remote lectures: (1) positional

awareness and countenance recognition to ensure

consistent communicationand quality, (2) mechanism

to share one or a small number of skilled operators

among remote classrooms, and (3) engineering to ac-

count for the heterogeneity of remote classroom envi-

ronments and sustain operations. The following sec-

tion explores solutions that satisfy requirements to

these issues.

3 ISSUES ON OPERATION

3.1 Inconsistent Classroom Layout

Classroom layout tends to be inconsistent among re-

mote classes because the layout is not attended as

much as the performance of facility or network con-

nectivity. The inconsistent layout reduces the posi-

tional awareness among remote classrooms and the

countenance recognition in communication.

In Figure 1 the lecturer and the lecture material are

located in opposing position between two classrooms.

If the lecturer gazes to the material screen (the dashed

arrow to upper right), it is natural students at the re-

mote classroom follow the gaze direction. However,

the material is screened at the opposite side in the re-

mote classroom, and thus it may makes the students

in remote feel uncomfortable. Use of relative terms,

such as ”on your right side” to indicate direction, also

introduces the same conﬂict.

Meanwhile, the layout in Figure 1 makes face-to-

face communication unavailable. The lecturer turns

to the remote classroom screen to talks to student (the

solid arrow to upper left). Hence the student in remote

looks at the lecturer from the camera in back of the

room. In this situation, it is difﬁcult to recognize their

countenance with each other.

3.2 Complexity of Operation

Each component of a remote classroom relies on its

underlying facility, thus operating the classroom re-

quires understanding and high operational skill on au-

dio and visual facility, video conferencing tool and

network. For example, if the audio quality gets rad-

ically reduced during a remote lecture, the cause of

trouble should be quickly found and then ﬁxed. How-

ever, the cause may be the hardware trouble of audio

facility, inappropriate conﬁguration of video confer-

encing tool or sudden change on network state possi-

bly in both the classroom in local or remote.

Given that a lecturer and students should focus

their lecture, at least one dedicated operator should

be assigned to conduct a lecture in each remote class-

room. However, in general, it is difﬁcult to cultivate

such an operator in each participating university. Hir-

ing a skilled operator is expensive and not cost ef-

fective, depending on the frequency of remote lec-

tures. These situation indicates that current opera-

tional scheme is not scalable, and distance education

projects will suffer from lack of skillful operators.

3.3 Lack of Sustainability

Heterogeneity and accessibility among remote class-

rooms reduce the sustainability of conducting a series

of remote lectures during a semester or an academic

year. In an inter-university project, the speciﬁcation

or functionality of remote classroom can be different

from each other in terms of facility, video conferenc-

ing tool or network connection. If not all universities

can assign their own operator in each classroom, such

heterogeneity introduces difﬁculty for an operator to

handle another remote classroom by necessity.

Even if an operator has enough skill to handle

multiple classrooms, access to the remote classroom

in another university may not be available. The oper-

ator has to be granted the network access from outside

to the university and the facility or video conference

tool of remote classroom need to support remote mon-

itoring and control over network. Besides the issues

on operational policy in each participating university,

enabling more monitoring and control functionality

requires a large investment.

CSEDU 2011 - 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

250

!"#$%&"'!

(%)"#*%*!

(%)"#*%+,-"%*.-/!

0%12"%+3/-''*221'!

3-1%*-+

+!"#$%&"'+!

(%)"#*%*!

(%)"#*%+,-"%*.-/!

3-1%*-!

4.*%)52&+26+"7%+8-9%+

"2+"7%+*%12"%+)/-''*221'!

4.*%)52&+26+"7%+8-9%+

"2+"7%+/%)"#*%+1-"%*.-/!

Figure 1: Example of Inconsistent Layout between Two Remote Classrooms.

4 SCHEME DESIGN

This section proposes three concepts to improve the

operational scheme of inter-university distance learn-

ing environments: Layered Architecture, and Cen-

tralized Application Network.

4.1 Layered Architecture

The layered architecture is a method for classify-

ing the distance-learning environment into classroom

components and illustrating the relationships between

each layer. We classify the environment into four lay-

ers according to function: User, Facility, Application,

and Network (Figure 2).

By using this, differences in each layer become

unvisible to users. At classrooms, available network

bandwidth or existing A/V equipment are different in

each case. However, each layer is independent from

other layers, the layered architecture provides a con-

sitent user experience.

In each layer we highlight the factors necessary to

standardize the quality of remote lectures. The fol-

lowing sections describe the design of the architec-

ture’s components.

4.1.1 Administrator and Users

An ”Administrator” is deﬁned as one or a very small

group of operators that can take over the operation

of remote classrooms participating in a lecture. The

administrator is granted access to all layers in the pro-

posed architecture. ’Users’ are deﬁned as the par-

ticipating players of a remote lecture, including: a

lecturer, students and a teaching assistant who is as-

signed to support the lecture at each university. Nor-

mally, users do not operate the remote classroom. One

requirement for users is the capability to communi-

cate with an administrator online. One user is enough

to satisfy this requirement, thus a teaching assistant

is a promising vehicle for this type of communica-

tion, especially in the case of hardware trouble in the

remote classroom. The biggest beneﬁt of this pro-

posed scheme is that a remote lecture can be con-

ducted without an operator in the remote classroom.

This is possible by enabling remote monitoring and

control of well-organized classroom components.

4.1.2 Standard Classroom Layout

The standard classroom layout is deﬁned in the fa-

cility layer to assign the appropriate position of users

and video devicesin each remote classroom. This lay-

out enables both the consistency of direction aware-

ness and countenance recognition between the lec-

turer and students in a remote classroom. In the fol-

lowing scenario, one lecturer gives a talk to students

in the same classroom and the remote classrooms. As

shown in Figure 3, this layout requires three screens

and two video cameras to screen and send videos for

the remote lectures.

Camera 2 sends the video of lecturer’s talk in

the center of the classroom, and the lecturer’s talk

is screened on Screen 2 in each of the remote class-

rooms. Screen 1 is dedicated to screen the video of

the presentation material. Screen 3 screens the video

of students from Camera 1 in the remote classrooms,

so that the lecturer can give the talk or answer ques-

tions face-to-face with students in the remote class-

rooms. In the remote classrooms, Screen 3 and Cam-

era 2 allow students to present in the lecturer’s posi-

tion. Normally, this would not be capable in a remote

lecture involving a lecturer’s talk and Q&As. With

this layout, the consistency of eye-gaze direction and

the face-to-face communication is preserved among

participants.

4.1.3 Standard Audio Environment

The audio environment of the remote classroom is

also deﬁned in the facility layer. In addition to the

sampling frequency of audio, suppressing echoes and

sharing classroom environment sounds is a key factor

to maintaining audio quality in remote lectures. Echo

ON OPERATIONAL SCHEME FOR REMOTE LECTURES IN INTER-UNIVERSITY DISTANCE LEARNING

PROJECT

251

!"#$%"&'

(')"#%&"*!

+,,*$-./"#!

0.-$*$%1'

23%4"&5!

673&'

0.-$*$%1'

)*.77&""8'+!

)*.77&""8'9!

+,,*$-./"#!

:$7%.#-3')"88;#$-./"#'

<$=3"!

.;=$"!

>%&3.8$#?':.%.!

+=8$#$7%&./"#'

@"$-3'

('2"$73!

A.*5'

@$=3"'

>%&3.8$#?':.%.!

B,3&./"#.*'

C#%3&D.-3!

673&'

'E3,"&%!

)"#%&"*'

!"#$%"&'

)"#%&"*'

')"#%&"*!

!.%3&$.*'

@$=3"'

@"$-3'

('2"$73!

A.*5'

@$=3"'

!.%3&$.*'

@$=3"'

<$=3"!

.;=$"!

<$=3"!

Figure 2: Layered Architecture Overview and Interaction between Layers in Proposed Operational Scheme.

suppression is an important factor for creating natu-

ral conversation among remote classrooms where mi-

crophones and speakers are active in the same room.

Echo suppression has to be ensured either in this

layer, or the underlying layers. Sharing environment

sounds in each classroom contributes to a feeling of

togetherness among remote classrooms. This sounds

also provides feedback to a lecturer and helps him

gauge his talk according to the students’ reactions. As

long as echo suppression is effective and well man-

aged, additional microphones to catch environment

sounds in the classrooms will have a positive effect.

!"#$%&"'!

(%)"#*%*!

!)*%%&+,+

!)*%%&+-!

./0%*/+,!

!)*%%&+1!

./0%*/+-!

Figure 3: Standard Layout of Remote Classrooms.

4.1.4 Facility Operation

The objective of operations at the facility layer is to

remotely monitor and control the audio and visual

(A/V) facility in each classroom. This paper intro-

duces two methods to achieve remote operation: 1) a

system controller to monitor and control the A/V fa-

cility, and 2) a networked camera to monitor actual

audio and video in the remote classroom. The system

controller needs to support the following operations

remotely: 1) power management of A/V equipment,

2) input selection for the various video and screen de-

vices, 3) output selection for the video devices used to

send video to the remote classrooms, 4) muting and

unmuting outgoing audio, and 5) classroom volume

control. This system assumes remote access will be

performed using the Internet, so that various authen-

ticated devices can control the A/V equipment in an

appropriate manner. The use of a networked camera

helps the administrator to monitor the actual ongoing

audio and video status of the classroom facility. The

system manager only provides feedback regarding the

values of each managed parameter. Through the com-

bination of a system controller and a networked cam-

era, an administrator can monitor and control the sta-

tus of remote classrooms more accurately and appro-

priately.

4.2 Centralized Application Network

The Centralized application network allows the inter-

face to monitor and control the application layer. As

shown in Figure 4, the topology of this network in-

cludes the following components: 1) A center HUB

to aggregate the video conference sessions among re-

mote classrooms, 2) Classroom Terminal to provide

video conference to and from the remote classrooms,

3) Uniﬁed Monitor and Controller to provide an op-

erational interface to the administrator, 4) VPN Gate-

way and Client to create an end-to-end path between

the center HUB and the classroom terminal through a

ﬁrewall or NAT, and 5) a Portable Terminal to install

temporarily in the classroom.

The center HUB extends the number of classroom

terminals that simultaneously join to a single video-

conference session. The Uniﬁed Monitor and Con-

troller provides control and power schedule of spe-

CSEDU 2011 - 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

252

!"#$"%&'()&

!*+,,%--.&

/"%.0#+*!

!*+,,%--.&

/"%.0#+*!

!*+,,%--.&

/"%.0#+*!

!*+,,%--.&

/"%.0#+*!

1-%$+2*"&

/"%.0#+*!

314&5+$"6+7!

314&!*0"#$!

(#08"9&

:-#0$-%&+#9&

!-#$%-**"%!

;9.0#0,$%+$-%!

<",,0-#&!-#$%-*!

=>"%+?-#&@0+&<0#A*"&

0#$"%B+C"!

Figure 4: Application Network Connecting Each Components in Application Layer.

ciﬁc classroom terminals. This allows the videocon-

ference session of each remote class to be automati-

cally established and scheduled among remote class-

rooms. By applyingthe system controller and the cen-

tralized application network concurrently, the remote

lecture can be scheduled to start automatically with-

out requiring any staff to be on standby in the class-

room.

5 IMPLEMENTATION

We implemented a remote lecture environment

for the Information Technology Specialist Program

(ITSP)(Keio University, 2010). The ITSP is an ed-

ucational collaboration project made up of 5 graduate

schools from 4 universities, 2 commercial companies,

and a NPO. Figure 5 illustrates an overview of the

implementation. Section 5 describes this implemen-

tation. The implementation consists of 5 classrooms,

one in each graduate school, and control and monitor-

ing facilities on the Internet.

5.1 Facility Operation

For this project, we implemented the system con-

troller to control the classroom facilities and acquire

their status. In this implementation, we introduced a

touch panel user interface in the classroom and en-

abled web-based access to an administrator in a re-

mote location, as shown in Figure 6, 7. The con-

troller’s conﬁguration parameters on the touch panel

interface and the web-based interface were identical.

The system controller asks the user to select

whether the classroom is receiving or sending the lec-

ture, so that it can appropriately conﬁgure classroom

facility.

Due to differences in the size and capacity of each

classroom, A/V equipment differs in each classroom.

Even using a different equipment, function and ac-

cessibility is uniﬁed among these remote classrooms.

Networked cameras were installed in positions that al-

lowed the administrator to monitor screens 1, 2, and

3 in each classroom. Through the web interface, the

administrator is able to remotely monitor and manage

audio and video with a camera control (zooming and

moving direction).

5.2 Scalable Video Conference System

and Operation

The centralized application network is implemented

as a H.323 videoconference system, as shown in Fig-

ure 8. The actual equipment we installed in the class-

room are Polycom HDX series, also RMX 2000 is

used for the MCU. The following describes the me-

chanics of how the system works.

1. When connected to the network, the endpoints

are conﬁgured to register themselves to Gate

Keeper(GK)

2. The GK monitors the status of the MCU and the

endpoints.

3. An administrator makes a reservation for lectures

in advance.

4. 10 minutes before the lecture, the GK cinstructs

the MCU to establish the connection.

5. 10 minutes after the lecture, GK instructs MCU to

terminate the connection.

In this system, we used 720p H.264 video, 14

KHz G.722.1C audio, and 720p H.239 lecture mate-

rial with at least a 2 Mbps connection between each

endpoint and the MCU. 720p video has become pop-

ular in the marketplace and is good enough to pro-

vide visibility of shared lecture materials, as well as

countenance recognition. Likewise, 14 KHz audio

has enough quality for students to focus on the lecture

(Rodman, 2003). These parameters (especially the

encoding) may vary depending on the network con-

ditions of the classroom. Weak network conditions

may require the use of SD video quality.

Monitoring the functionality of the application

layer is enabled on the GK. Since it monitors and con-

trols all the endpoints and the MCU, it can acquire

ON OPERATIONAL SCHEME FOR REMOTE LECTURES IN INTER-UNIVERSITY DISTANCE LEARNING

PROJECT

253

Figure 5: The ITSP Remote Lecture Environment.

their status through a single interface. In the case of

ITSP, the administrator received an alert from the GK

when a problem was detected.

Figure 6: System Controller Overview.

Figure 7: System Controller: Touch Panel User Interface.

5.3 Temporary Classroom

To add temporary classrooms, a VPN Gateway and

Client are used to mitigate the difﬁculties caused by

networks, such as ﬁrewalls and NAT. Also, preconﬁg-

ured equipment set which is made up with following

components are made.(1) an endpoint (2) VPN Client,

(3)required cables, and (4)instruction for user instal-

lation.

5.4 Network Connectivity

Our remote lecture environment used a commodity

network, which is maintained by each participating

university. Operation of the remote classroom also

uses the commodity network.

Basically, the administrator’s role in the applica-

tion layer is to monitor the connectivity, and contact

the network operator of each university to manage

troubleshooting activities if and when needed.

Compared to the remote classrooms, bandwidth

requirements for the MCU are high. This is because

all the trafﬁc from the remote classrooms comes into

the MCU, and the aggregated trafﬁc is then sent back

out to them. For example, HD 720p connection over

H.323 requires at least 2Mbps. In order to accommo-

date the MCU, we installed a gigabit Ethernet uplink

directly to the campus network backbone. The band-

width required at the MCU will differ depending on

the number of classrooms being connected.

To monitor the end-to-end connectivity of each

remote classroom, we use the ping-monitoring tool

to capture the state. It sends a ping message once a

minute to all network connected equipment. If conse-

CSEDU 2011 - 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

254

Figure 8: H.323 Based Application Network.

cutive failures are detected, an alert message is sent

to the administrator. When the source of a failure is

located and needs to be inspected inside the partic-

ipating university, the administrator contacts the lo-

cal network management division of the university for

trouble shooting.

5.5 Sustainable Operation

We designed the operation scheme to be operated

remotely by an administrator. The system is capa-

ble of operating fully by remote management. This

includes the monitoring of actual video and audio,

which is played in the classroom to conﬁrm the sit-

uation. However, when the number of classrooms

becomes large, the administrator’s load becomes too

high. For example, checking the actual video and au-

dio in each classroom may take too much time. After

the classroom is connected automatically, communi-

cation between the administrator and TA just before

the lecture starts can reduce this time. If a problem is

detected, then the TA can immediately ask the admin-

istrator for support.

6 DISCUSSION

6.1 Lessons from ITSP Lectures

Through this system, we have operated more than

600 remote lectures from 2007 to 2009, and continue

to use the system today. Some of these lectures are

not limited to the original 5 ITSP classrooms we de-

scribed, and share lectures with additional universi-

ties.Therefore we have opened upto 6 points remote

lectures. From the operation of the ITSP environment,

we have learned three major lessons.

Having a TA Present in the Classroom is effec-

tive in maintaining the quality of the environment.

When remotely operating the classroom environment,

a TA can verify the facility’s operations, and quickly

respond to troubles in the classroom. Also, the TA

can provide additional support to the administrator

on speciﬁc operations that cannot be performed re-

motely. This is critical when administrator cannot ac-

cess the equipment remotely due to network or equip-

ment failure.

Backup is Extremely Important. If a lecture is

cancelled due to technical issues, scheduling make up

classes and so forth can cause a great deal of irritation

and disruption to all users. To avoid such problems,

it is important to implement system redundancy. For

example, in the event of an MCU failure, the ITSP en-

vironment has an alternative MCU instance at one of

the endpoints. With support from the administrator,

the system may continue working. The ITSP environ-

ment also provides video archives to participants, al-

lowing them to view past lectures that they may have

missed, or wish to review.

The Administrator Took Care of Multiple Class-

rooms. In ITSP environment, single administrator

was enough to take care of 5 remote classrooms. This

is a promising step towards improving the scalability

and sustainability of remote lecture environments, es-

pecially when compared to the legacy way of having

5 dedicated operation staff for each classroom.

Moreover, the portable terminal package allows

remote lecture projects to be ﬂexible both in the short

term and long term regarding changes to which uni-

versities are participating and how many. This feature

also contributes to the improved sustainability of in-

teruniversity distance learning projects.

6.2 Consistency of Communication

Our remote lecture environment can share a lec-

turer’s eye gaze, and enable face-to-face communica-

tion among class rooms. We have conﬁrmed the fol-

lowing: (1) When a lecturer is speaking to a student

in a remote classroom, eye contact is made between

ON OPERATIONAL SCHEME FOR REMOTE LECTURES IN INTER-UNIVERSITY DISTANCE LEARNING

PROJECT

255

the lecturer and students. (2) When a lecturer gazes

at his/her lecture material on the screen in the class-

room, students can follow the direction of their gaze

in the remote classroom.

However, we have noticd the current videoconfer-

ence systems has a latency problem which is coming

from a encoding and decoding of Audio/Video and

network transmission. In general, when round trip

time for conversation becomes more than 500 msec,

it becomes hard to have heavy interaction such as

counting numbers mutually or playing ”rock, paper,

scissors game”. We have observed that when playing

the game, a person in remote is delayed in showing

his/her gesture in our implementation.

Since we use this environement mainly for lec-

tures with Q&As style teaching method, we didn’t

face too much problems regarding to the latency.

However, a professor who gave lecture for ITSP feels

uncomfortable when having discussion with remote

students. We have learned that, it is important to con-

sider latency when giving a lecture.

6.3 Scalability and Sustainability

Our concept of a ”Centralized Application Network”,

allows the implemented remote lecture environment

to be scalable. We have conﬁrmed that our portable

equipment set is easily added to the environment, and

that it is possible to easily add more classroom ter-

minals (Endpoint) to the environment. Since Cen-

terHUB (MCU) is able to handle additional capacity,

network bandwidth is the largest concern in adding

a classroom. Bandwidth being the only limiting fac-

tor, as long as the network allows, the environment is

scalable.

Figure 9 shows an example of temporary class-

room in Kaetsu University. A portable equipment

set is installed in the classroom with existing A/V

equipment. Even such conﬁguration, the layout of the

screen and camera is consistent.

Figure 9: Classroom at Kaetsu Univ.

7 RELATED WORK

The School on Internet Asia (SOI Asia) project

provides real time remote lectures to the Asia re-

gion(Mikawa et al., 2008), (School Of Internet

Project, 2010).

Participating universities manage their environ-

ments individually. SOI Asia provides operators

with practical skills through remote workshops us-

ing virtualization-technology(Patcharee et al., 2008).

Their DokoDemo SOIAsia provides a similar mecha-

nism to the temporary software based terminal in our

implementation.

Since SOI Asia is using a multicast based applica-

tion, it is easy to add new locations. Internet2 Com-

mons (Internet2 Commons Project, 2010) provides

vender free scalable H.323 video conferencing ser-

vices to its members. This project does not deﬁne a

standard classroom facility and AV equipment. To as-

sure the quality of distance communication and oper-

ation, the Internet2 commons trains the operation staff

to be gcertiﬁed site coordinatorsh. Site coordinators

are trained and have knowledge about video confer-

encing. At each location, they construct and support

video conferencing activities.

There is a large amount of research on shar-

ing eye gaze or eye contact in distance communi-

cation. Eye gaze sharing has an educational im-

pact in remote lectures (Yatagai and Sakai, 2006).

Tele-presence solutions that have eye gaze and eye

contact functions are now becoming popular in the

enterprise market. Currently, Cisco(Cisco Systems,

2010), Polycom(Polycom, 2010), HP(HP, 2010), Lif-

size(Lifesize, 2010), and other vendors are releasing

solutions and products that provide remote operation

and automation.

8 FUTURE WORK

8.1 Audio Environment

In this paper, we proposed the sharing of environmen-

tal noise from remote classrooms to the lecturer as

means of the lecturer obtaining feedback from his/her

students. However in our implementation, this mech-

anism did not work successfully due to the difﬁculty

in balancing volume between classrooms. It was use-

ful in catching questions from students without the

need for a microphone; however, the audio sent to the

local classroom was too loud for feedback. Discus-

sions regarding methods for volume control and other

ways of sharing environmental noise information is

CSEDU 2011 - 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

256

still on going. Discussions on audio and video syn-

chronization where the video camera and audio input

devices have different encoding delay were not cov-

ered in this study. The gap of delay between audio and

video may bring discomfort to the conversation and

experience of the remote lecture environment. Filling

such gaps is necessary when the encoding delay is not

regulated between audio and visual devices.

8.2 Evaluation of Distance

Communication Environment

The sharing of eye gaze and eye contact between

classrooms was observed in our environment. How-

ever, we have yet to ﬁnish evaluating the quality of

this distance communication. Correcting data on lec-

turer and student’s eye gaze tracking maybe needed

to evaluate the environment from the view point of

communication. Also, the method to measure the ed-

ucational impact of distance learning has been under

discussion.

9 CONCLUSIONS

This paper proposed an operation scheme to solve

problems with, (1) Inconsistent classroom layouts, (2)

the complexity of operation, and (3) the lack of sus-

tainability in distance learning environments. Our so-

lution enables (1) positional awareness and counte-

nance recognition, (2) reduction of the number of re-

quired operators, and (3) sustainable operation.

Our design focused on standardizing both the op-

erations of remote lecture environments and the facil-

ity’s layout. We implemented our system for the ITSP

inter-university distance-learning program, which has

been successfully operating on our design since 2007.

This implementation proved that a dedicated op-

erator is not required in each remote classroom. Al-

ternatively, a single administrator may remotely man-

age operations for multiple classrooms. Moreover, a

teaching assistant with no training or experience is

able to operate our system through a simpliﬁed user

interface, if and when necessary.

We also proved that a portable equipment pack-

age is a ﬂexible and effective way to smoothly extend-

ing the remote lecture environment to underequipped

classrooms. We conclude that our operation scheme is

effective in reducing operational costs and contributes

to the sustainability of conducting remote lectures.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The ITSP is supported by Ministry of education, cul-

ture, sports, science and technology Japan. This re-

search is worked with Global Studio Project of Re-

search Institute for Digital Media and Content, Keio

University.

REFERENCES

Cisco Systems (2010). Video collaboration solutions.

http://www.cisco.com/telepresence.

HP (2010). Hp halo telepresence and video conferencing

solutions. http://www.hp.com/halo/.

Internet2 Commons Project (2010). About internet2 com-

mons. http://commons.internet2.edu/.

Keio University (2010). The Information Technology Spe-

cialist Program Web Page. http://itsp.keio.ac.jp/.

Lifesize (2010). Lifesize conference

technology hd telepresence system.

http://www.lifesize.com/telepresence.

Mikawa, S., Okawa, K., and Murai, J. (2008). Sustainable

education collaboration architecture on digital infras-

tructure. Keio SFC journal, 8(2):77–93.

Patcharee, B., Mikawa, S., Basuki, A., and Okawa, K.

(2008). An educational development on learning

paradigm of region-wide it hands-on workshop. Keio

SFC journal, 8(2):59–75.

Polycom (2010). Polycom Real Presence Experience

(RPX). http://www.cisco.com/telepresence.

Rodman, J. (2003). The effect of bandwidth on speech in-

telligibility.

School Of Internet Project (2010). About soi asia project.

http://www.soi.asia/.

Yatagai, M. and Sakai, S. (2006). Analysis of education

effect among eye-contactable or former-type of dis-

tance learning through video conferencing systems

and face-to-face learning. Journal of Japan Society

for Educational Technology, 30(2):69–78.

ON OPERATIONAL SCHEME FOR REMOTE LECTURES IN INTER-UNIVERSITY DISTANCE LEARNING

PROJECT

257