Effective Collaborative Learning in Large Classrooms via Reconfigurable Virtual Dooms

目前与校外学生互动的可能性有限，导致许多教师将远程教育视为一个复杂而难以克服的障碍，而校外学生在这个过程中往往觉得自己是学术上的二等公民。计算机设备稳步进入传统的实体教室，同样也没有充分发挥其潜力，因为经验丰富和成功的教师在课堂上通常采用的各种互动方式没有得到足够的支持。我们提出这个建议的目的是追求我们对未来教育的愿景，以虚拟教室为中心，这是一个学生和教师一起学习的物理和电子混合空间。有些人在同一个房间里，但其他许多人在地理上是遥远的。班级规模可能会很大，但学生们仍然会发现这是一个友好和舒适的地方，他们是小而有凝聚力的学习团队的一部分，而不是仅仅是迷失在人格化的、令人恐惧的、面目全非的面孔中。我们将通过开发一个支持多种交互风格的设计会议学习环境（DCLE）来实现这一目标，特别是将班级分成多个解决问题的小组。DCLE将允许我们调查一些情况，例如当一对课程以电子方式捆绑在一起时（在这种情况下是加州大学戴维斯分校和我们在RPI的合作者），这样，远程学习研究生课程的学生可以利用并反过来影响编程入门课程的学生正在做的工作。在本科和研究生阶段使用DCLE教学实际课程的实验将使我们能够得出关于未来学习环境的最佳组织的结论。团队成员在双语教育方面的专业知识，在为各种残疾学生（例如视力障碍）提供系统方面的专业知识，以及在严格和正式地评估环境的有效性方面的专业知识，将确保DCLE的广泛和全面适用性，其软件和工具将免费分发给各机构，供其在教育环境中使用，作为研究的切实利益。值得注意的是，该项目是目前由另一个部门资助的另一个项目的伙伴，该项目的授权为CDA-9634485。这笔拨款已授予我们在RPI的同伴团队。

The limited possibilities currently available for interaction with off-site students lead many faculty to view distance education as a complex and difficult barrier to overcome, and the off-site students often feel like academic second class citizens in the process. The steady advance of computer equipment into the traditional, physical classroom has likewise not yet lived up to its potential, because inadequate support is provided for the wide variety of interaction styles typically employed in the classroom by experienced and successful teachers. Our purpose in this proposal is to pursue our vision of education tomorrow centering around the virtual classroom, a hybrid physical and electronic space in which students and instructor(s) come together to learn. Some are in the same room, but many others are geographically remote. Class size is likely to be large, but students will still find this a friendly and comfortable place where they are part of small and cohesive learning teams rather than mere specks lost in an impersonal and frightening sea of unrecognized faces. We will accomplish this by developing a Design Conference Learning Environment (DCLE) that supports numerous interaction styles, in particular that in which the class is split into multiple problem-solving groups. The DCLE will allow us to investigate situations such as when a pair of courses are electronically tied together (in this case UC-Davis, and our collaborators at RPI) so that students in, say, a graduate course on distance learning can make use of and, in turn, influence work being done by students in an introductory programming course. Experiments in teaching actual courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level using the DCLE will enable us to derive conclusions regarding the optimal organization of tomorrow's learning environments. Team members expertise in bilingual education, in making systems accessible to students with a variety of disabilities (e.g., vision impairments), and in rigorously and formally evalu ating the efficacy of an environment, will ensure the broad and comprehensive applicability of the DCLE, whose software and tools will be distributed freely to institutions for use in their educational settings as a tangible benefit of the research. It is important to note this project is a companion to another that is currently being funded by another division, under grant CDA-9634485. This grant has been awarded to our companion team at RPI.