Effective Collaborative Learning in Large Classrooms via Reconfigurable Virtual Dooms

目前与异地学生互动的机会有限，导致许多教职员工将远程教育视为一个复杂而难以克服的障碍，在这个过程中，异地学生往往感觉自己像是学术二等公民。同样，计算机设备进入传统物理课堂的稳步发展也没有发挥其潜力，因为对经验丰富和成功的教师通常在课堂上采用的各种互动方式提供的支持不足。我们在这项提议中的目的是追求我们未来的教育愿景，以虚拟教室为中心，这是一个物理和电子混合的空间，学生和教师(S)在其中一起学习。有些在同一个房间里，但许多其他的在地理上相距遥远。班级规模可能会很大，但学生们仍然会发现，这里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，而不仅仅是迷失在客观和可怕的未知面孔海洋中的点点。我们将通过开发一个设计会议学习环境(DCLE)来实现这一点，该环境支持多种交互方式，特别是将课堂分成多个问题解决小组的交互方式。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，UC-Davis，以及我们在RPI的合作者)，这样，比方说，远程学习研究生课程的学生可以利用并反过来影响学生在入门编程课程中所做的工作。使用DCLE在本科生和研究生层面进行实际课程教学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。小组成员在双语教育、使各种残疾学生(例如视力障碍)能够使用系统以及严格和正式地评估环境效果方面的专门知识将确保DCLE的广泛和全面的适用性，其软件和工具将免费分发给各机构，供其在其教育环境中使用，这是这项研究的一个具体好处。必须指出的是，这个项目是另一个项目的伙伴，另一个项目目前由另一个司提供资金，赠款为CDA-9634485。这笔奖金已经授予了我们在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.