The Multimedia Online Collaboration Architecture: Tools to Enable Distance Learning

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1 The Multimedia Online Collaboration Architecture: Tools to Enable Distance Learning J. Peden, W. Burleson, C. Leonardo Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Massachusetts at Amherst Amherst, Massachusetts USA ABSTRACT MOCA is a suite of Internet multimedia tools to facilitate groupwork in a distance-learning environment, built using standard Java utilities. MOCA s original aim was to allow several users to work simultaneously on multimedia documents using a multimedia whiteboard. But now MOCA supports both asynchronous and synchronous collaboration models. Tools for asynchronous multimedia presentation, annotation, surveys, and HW have also been developed using the same basic framework. To enable synchronous collaboration sessions between students, TAs and instructors, we have developed a scheduler tool. The system is being piloted in an advanced VLSI chip design course which allows multimedia collaboration between design teams distributed at academic sites at UMASS/Amherst, ENST/Paris, Pusan South Korea and industrial sites at IBM, Intel, AMD and Motorola. 1. INTRODUCTION Development of the Multimedia Online Collaboration Architecture began as an effort to create software that would facilitate an abstraction of traditional "Office Hours" meetings between students and professors in an online environment. This was originally meant to allow students taking courses via prerecorded videotape and DVD-based lectures to have a higher level of interaction with the professor or TA of a course. Currently, the most widely used method of communication in such a situation is electronic mail. In order to provide a richer and more interactive means for this type of communication, it was decided that a combination of a shared-whiteboard tool and text-based chat would be an ideal solution. Many individual tools for text-based chat and sharedwhiteboards were examined, however, none of these tools could be integrated tightly enough to give an efficient solution. Development began on the two tools with the initial requirements of supporting online office hours. However, during the development of the prototype version of MOCA, it became evident that these tools, while helpful in a one-to-one student-teacher communications scenario, also had great potential for aiding interaction between groups of students. This evolution of MOCA has led the project to where it is today. Currently, we are further developing the two aforementioned collaborative tools with an emphasis on student-to-student interaction, and are completing development of an entire suite of tools which would group-enable courses under this online framework. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 examines the ties between MOCA and its parent research program, the UMASS DVD project. In Section 3 we discuss the suite of tools provided to students and faculty, along with an example usecase scenario. In Section 4 we describe the software component and network architecture of MOCA, as well as implementation level details. Finally, we outline our plans for future development and deployment. 2. UMASS DVD and MOCA The UMASS DVD project [1] is led by 7 faculties in the Computer Systems Engineering area within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The DVD group is developing a set of integrated instructional tools and curricular innovations, which are unified by the common theme of multimedia systems. The approaches to this problem consist of: Multimedia instructional modules using web-linked Digital Video Disks, Multimedia communication utilities to facilitate student interaction, and Multimedia component design. Extensive multimedia archives, source code, demonstrations, modules, authoring materials and project details can be found at the DVD project web-site: MOCA is being developed as a general foundation for multimedia communication between students, teaching assistants and professors. It is also being considered as one of several possible multimedia presentation systems for DVDbased instructional modules. 3. MOCA Tool Suite The Multimedia Online Collaboration Architecture aims to implement enterprise level communications and information sharing methods tailored to the requirements of engineering education. We are trying to achieve this by leveraging the same technologies used in enterprise software development. MOCA

2 is powered by the Java platform, which gives the advantages of being hardware-independent, highly networkable, scalable, and object oriented. MOCA is organized as pairs of client/server modules, unified under a common application framework. Currently, the modules consist of a set of collaboration tools, a surveying component, and a multimedia presentation component. Also under development are various time and workflow management tools. 3.1 Collaboration Tools At the heart of the MOCA project is a set of tools for enabling real-time multimedia based communication. Currently, we have implemented shared whiteboard, text-based chat, and shared document-editing modules. The collaboration tools use a channel-based model where users can create new channels, or join group members on a pre-existing channel. Within each channel, users can create multiple instances of each type of tool, in order to communicate with each other. These tools keep a full history across user sessions. Therefore, not all users need to have joined a channel for communication to occur, as they can log in at a later time and view all events that occurred while they were not online (i.e. asynchronous). Initial Discussion: Each assignment would be contained within a single channel. Students would start discussing the project and their goals within a chat. As students formalize their ideas in a free-form brainstorming session, this initial discussion would come to an end. First Draft Design: After initial discussion, a first draft of the design might be presented by one student to the others in the group. This would be done by posting a GIF file of the block diagram and floor plan to the whiteboard. Other group members might find faults in this design, and pinpoint them using the annotation tools. Figure 2: Screenshot of MOCA multimedia whiteboard discussing RAM core design in a Huffman coding chip. First Draft Design Discussion: As there might be comments on the design, which require more discussion than simple annotation, another chat pane might be created to further discuss this first draft, and how the group wishes to continue with the project. Successive Drafts: This process of design and commenting would continue until the group feels it is appropriate to move on. Some members of the group might also work side by side on other aspects of the project while being able to monitor the progress of their group members. Figure 1 : Use-Case diagram for main module types in MOCA To more fully explain how the current tools are intended to be used, we present here an example scenario where a group of students working on a project would collaborate with each other. A VLSI Senior Design Project course in Spring 2000 will be the first full MOCA courses offering, so we will use a mock version of such a project as our example. The course will be offered at UMASS/Amherst but will collaborate with students, faculty and working engineers at 7 different sites worldwide. Analysis: For a VLSI Design project, students would also post timing simulations and waveforms, and team members would comment on whether they fit specifications and how they might further need to modify the design. Teacher Interaction & Grading: Throughout this process, a professor or teaching assistant would be able to check on the progress of the group, and provide feedback to the students. A final design review might also be conducted on the materials, allowing the professor to see not only the final results, but also the process involved, and to what extent each student participated in the project.

3 For situations where the chat, whiteboard, and shared-document tools would not be appropriate for group communications, MOCA also includes a custom and message forum client. MOCA automatically creates message folders for each defined group of students, as well as private message folders for each user of the system. The group message forums are intended to be a place of discussion on topics such as issues raised in lecture, or homework items. The MOCA messaging system also allows for file attachments, so that users may share files that are not directly supported by MOCA with other group members. 3.2 Survey/Homework/Quiz Module One of the more recent additions to the MOCA suite of tools is a module, which will allow professors to present a multimedia survey to a group of students [4]. These surveys fall into three categories: a generic, anonymous survey; a homework assignment; and a quiz or exam assignment. Faculty can create a set of questions (true/false, multiple choice, short answer, or general media types) and assign this set to a group of students. Upon login, students are presented with a list of surveys, which have not yet been completed. The module is designed to have three distinct user interface components (creation, presentation, and tabulation) and a server component module. The creation component allows the administrator to distribute the information to specific users by selecting the various types of questions included in the survey (true/false, multiple choice, short answer, or media types) and then entering questions via dialog boxes. These questions can be straight text or text with multimedia attached. Figure 3 is a pre-test for a UMASS course in Distributed Java Applications that developed MOCA tools. administrator. These categories can be selected via menus and cascaded so as to view different categories simultaneously. The server component limits the access of the information in the system by providing limits on the ability to view and generate sensitive information. For example, students can be restricted from creating quizzes. It also serves as the junction to send the information back and forth between users and administrators. Finally, the server provides access to the database, which stores all the information in the module [3]. 3.3 Presentation Module Another recent addition to the MOCA framework is a tool, which accommodates multimedia instructional modules contained on a server or on DVDs. It provides an environment to view and browse each specific video-based module. A search function enables searching through entire courses for topics and keywords. Like a Web browser, the media player will first try to access a local copy of the video segment, or acquire the segment from the web if one is not available. Figure 4 shows a screenshot of the media player with course browser on the left pane and a QuickTime player on the right. Figure 5 shows a more advanced format which includes a document display along with the playback of multiple camera angles synchronized and controlled by a single tool bar or individual player toolbars. Figure 4. Screenshot of MOCA video presentation tool Figure 3. Screen shot of MOCA survey presentation component [4]. The presentation component presents the information created by the administrator to the user and creates an environment for replying to the questions. It also receives files from the server enabling the dynamic (as opposed to CGI forms) creation of the user interface for each specific survey/quiz. Upon submission, responses to each question are being sent back to the server. The tabulation component accepts the file returned by the user and displays it according to categories specified by the The system can present multiple videos, related multimedia content and hyper-links all synchronized to a common timeline. User control of the timeline playback allows students to navigate at their own pace. When the synchronous presentation (i.e. video) is paused, students may take notes, visit software demonstrations, fill out quizzes and surveys, pose questions on MOCA chat or whiteboard, and browse related links [4]. Random access of the video allows quick searching and navigation through video-based curriculum. Curricular modules can be selected by the student based on their interests, their performance on quizzes, or other criteria. Thus truly customized and flexible curricula can be developed by using the same basic instructional materials.

4 Figure 5: Screenshot of MOCA media module with two camera angles and slide viewer 3.5 Time and Workflow Management Tools Also currently under development are modules which attempt to increase productivity by simplifying workflow management practices. These modules deal with tasks such as group meeting scheduling and course registration. By integrating these modules into the MOCA system users are presented with a channels. Thus, the client application is neither a thin-client nor a thick-client instead, it is more of a medium-weight distributed application client. This is due to the fact that some functionality resides on the client, however all data or state information is stored remotely, allowing transparent access to the system from multiple locations. The application server tier coordinates the activities of all clients. It provides security control, application logic, and data and state storage operations. The application server tier unified point of access for all required distance-learning tasks [5]. 4. IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS The Multimedia Online Collaboration Architecture is a threetiered Java based distributed application system. Built from the group up to support communications and group work over a heterogeneous network environment, MOCA relies heavily upon several key remote communications APIs. Communications between the client tier and application server is accomplished using a combination of Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) [6] and the Java Shared Data Toolkit (JSDT) [7]. The two protocols allow for both direct client-server control information exchange and multicast delivery of multimedia data across a collaboration channel. The client also uses the JavaMail API framework [8] with a custom protocol implementation to handle the private mail and message forum applications. The video presentation system is able to stream video via HTTP, RTP and RTSP connections from external video servers. On the client side, the user interface has been built using the Java Foundation Classes (JFC) Swing graphics toolkit. By extending the swing classes, we are able to implement the desired functionality to enable communications with other clients and the server, while maintaining a standard look-andfeel, which adheres to User Interface Style Guidelines [9]. Based upon user interaction, the MOCA client will format data for transfer to the server, or for multicast through collaboration communicates with an embedded database server tier through JDBC. The use of JDBC allows us to easily migrate the MOCA server system to other commercial database server products in the future. 5. SUMMARY MOCA provides collaboration tools which enable group work and cooperation between students and professors and eventually, working engineers. By including integrated support for various types of media such as audio, video, text and pictures, the learning environment is enhanced. The MOCA suite of tools is now in its third stage of development. Future development of MOCA will involve the integration of the uncompleted modules into the system by January In Spring 2000, the system is being piloted in an advanced VLSI chip design course, which allows distance learning and multimedia collaboration between design teams and mentors distributed at academic sites at UMASS/Amherst, ENST/Paris, Pusan South Korea and industrial sites at IBM, Intel, AMD and Motorola. This work was supported by NSF EIA REFERENCES [1] 1999 Frontiers in Education Conference. Puerto Rico, [2] Burleson W., Ganz A., Harris I. ``Educational Innovations in Multimedia Systems". Frontiers in Education. Puerto Rico, 1999.

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