CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Late-Breaking/Short Demonstrations
The RISE Platform: Supporting Social Interaction for On-line Education
Phil Smythe, Michael Gardner
Advanced Applications and Technologies
BT Laboratories
Martlesham Heath
Ipswich IP5 7RE
UK
+44 1473 644 758
phil.smythe@bt-sys.bt.co.uk, michael.gardner@bt-sys.bt.co.uk
ABSTRACT
We present RISE (Real-time Interactive Social Environment),
a platform supporting data sharing and high quality audio conferencing
under control of a Word-Wide Web (WWW) user interface and making
extensive use of a database to track and support users. We report
the results of our initial educational trial and discuss some
more generic uses for the platform.
Keywords
Audio conferencing, Computer Telephony Integration, On-line education, Databases, Graphical User Interfaces
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
INTRODUCTION
Although web sites are an excellent means for distributing
on-line material they tend to isolate their visitors from each
other. In an office or classroom, users can talk to each other
as they share a viewpoint but on the net this is difficult to
replicate. Audio conferencing, conducted in parallel to web surfing,
is a simple method of overcoming this isolation, but conferences
involving large groups have been expensive to set up in the past
since they required the assistance of an operator. More recently,
internet based telephony and virtual worlds with sound have started
to emerge but these systems often provide poor or unreliable audio
quality over busy networks. We have produced a system which combines
the ease of use of a WWW front end with the sound quality of a
normal telephone call while allowing users to move easily from
one conversation to another.
In on-line education the problem of social isolation
is often compounded by an over rigid syllabus. In a physical classroom
the teacher is free to tailor content to the needs of a group
of students - for example by using material submitted by pupils
or current news items. We have sought to extend this freedom to
on-line groups by allowing work produced by students to be stored
on-line in a database, by providing templates for creating material
rapidly and by allowing any material already on the net to be
easily referenced.
The RISE platform was developed in collaboration
with the Language Institute at the University of Hull. It was
initially intended to support intermediate level teaching of English
as a foreign language to distributed groups - an application of
RISE which was named "Merlin".The
development process involved an examination of class based language
learning followed by the production of storyboards, scenarios
and working prototypes. Merlin has since gone through 10 months
of iterations involving small scale user trials and technical
reviews.
THE RISE SYSTEM
RISE requires each client to have a PC with a web
browser and a telephone nearby. Connection to the network can
be via an ISDN-2 or 2 PSTN lines (with one carrying data and the
other voice) or by a combination of LAN and PBX connections. The
back end of the system consists of a WWW server which is integrated
with a database. This communicates via a socket level connection
to an Aculab Millennium CTTM platform. This is a PC based
device which handles audio conferencing for up to 60 people.
Users log onto the system from a web browser which
then opens up multiple windows. These include 'static' html pages
and forms as well as 'dynamic' information which is customised
for each user and which shows who else is on-line and what they
are doing. Key elements of RISE are the Meeting Place through
which users access and control multi-party audio conferencing
and the Portfolio where user's work is stored and can be viewed.
Original Requirements for Merlin
Language students can get access to written and spoken
material using the WWW with relative ease and they can practise
their written skills using email, newsgroups and text chat systems.
Testing conversational skills and aural comprehension is harder
however: students require a system which provides good quality
audio, which is simple to use and which they can afford to both
acquire and use. There also needs to be a way of recording a conversation
(or an individual's pronunciation exercise) so that this can be
assessed or kept by students for their own reference.
Students using Merlin on RISE complete a large number
of exercises of about 15 generic types ranging from gap filling
to extended compositions. Some of these exercises are marked automatically
and some are forwarded to the tutor for assessment.
Tutors can decide whether or not their students should
be allowed or encouraged to collaborate for a particular exercise.
Tutors can look up both basic information about students (such
as whether they turned up for an online tutorial) as well as the
details of what they have submitted.
Social Model for RISE
At an early stage of development we decided to use
the social model of an ordinary office or classroom as the basis
for audio conferencing. When a user logs on to the system all
others who are connected at this time are notified that this person
has 'arrived'. Users who are logged on can choose to set up conferences
with each other and a number of conferences can take place at
once. These people can be invited into an existing conference
or they can choose to join one themselves. Somebody who is logged
on can indicate that they do not want to be disturbed by invitations
to talk and groups of people who are talking can opt to make their
conversations private so that others cannot join in. Tutors can
move from one conversation to another as they might in a real
classroom or they can go online and wait for students to contact
them with questions.
The Meeting Place
The meeting place is controlled from a WWW browser
window shown on each client. This indicates who is logged on and
what conversations are taking place. It also allows details about
people or conversations to be viewed and permits operations such
as recording of a conversation. Users can also share URLs by typing
them into a form - after a few seconds a link to the URL in question
is made available to everyone they are talking to. Each user's
window is updated by the server whenever an event significant
for that person occurs - such as somebody joining a conference
in which they are taking part.
When somebody indicates that they want to join or
set up a conference - or when they are invited into a conference
themselves - the system will place an outgoing call to that person.
Upon answering their phone they are played an announcement telling
them that an audio conference is being set up. After a few seconds
they hear a short beep that indicates that they have been added
to the conference (others already in the conference hear this
too). To leave a conference the user can either replace the handset
on their phone or press a "log-out" button on their
meeting place window.
All phone calls on the system are incoming to the
user, meaning that people do not have to remember or even know
the numbers of those they talk to. This also allows the system
to be used in cases where outgoing calls are blocked (as they
are in many educational establishments). Users can be charged
on a subscription basis, or according to the amount of time that
they spend on-line. To allow users to move between different machines,
the number of the nearest telephone is stored on each client machine.
This is read and allocated to a user when they log on from a particular
machine.
Conversations taking place in the meeting place can
be recorded on the audio conferencing platform. The resulting
sound files are converted into RealAudioTM format and are
made available via the portfolio (see below) to all those who
took part in the conversation. The use of streamed audio means
that long conversations can be listened to, scanned and tagged
without users having to download large files.
The Portfolio
The Portfolio allows users to collate their work,
and also share and comment on other people's work within their
on-line community. It provides each user with a list of work items
that have been submitted to the system within their user group.
Work items currently can be answers to on-line course exercises,
recorded audio conversations or personal notes. Users can select
different views of their portfolio by choosing items that they
have created themselves, produced as part of a group, or which
have been made public by tutors or other group members. Tutors
can also view their students' portfolios and store comments against
particular work items.
The database
All functions provided by the RISE platform are directly
controlled by a back-end OracleTM database. This database
is used to define all of the data needed by each on-line community
or user-group. It is possible to define a number of such communities
which are entirely independent of each other. Each user-group
will use different data sets according to their needs (for example,
their course structure, completed work, user information). The
process of building new applications (such as particular designs
of portfolio) mainly involves specifying the new database structures
required and does not require any software changes to RISE itself.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
We have completed a successful trial course using
RISE. Our evaluation has raised issues related to the optimum
number of people on such a course, the role of tutors in such
an environment, the learning curve for novice users and techniques
for scheduling on-line meetings. A second, larger trial is planned
to start in early 1997.
We are exploring the possibility of using the platform
for a number of applications in education and training and for
more general communication. We are considering methods for scaling
the system. We are also looking at ways of making the system work
entirely over a single data connection. Further details can be
found at our RISE web site:
http://rise1.labs.bt.com/rise.bundle/public/index.html.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank the staff at the Language Institute at the
University of Hull who have helped us create the system. Thanks
also to all the developers in BT - in particular Andrew Mercer,
Dave Pauley, Neil Finlayson, John Scott, Andrew Claydon, Iain
Richardson and Celia Miller.
CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Late-Breaking/Short Demonstrations
