Teaching styles

We have examined several common teaching styles with respect to the challenges they present for multimedia capture and access. One of the main distinguishing features of a teaching style is the form of materials, if any, that are made available to students, either before or after the lecture. If material is made public, then we can augment it (using audio or video links, for example) with information captured during the lecture. If no material is made public, then we can only augment information that is produced as part of the lecture itself. The styles we have so far identified are:

Presentation

The teacher prepares a set of slides (the presentation) before class, and the lecture proceeds similar to a prepared talk at a conference. The slides are displayed during the lecture, and copies of the slides are available to students before or after the lecture. During the lecture, the teacher may make annotations on the slides to emphasize or clarify certain points.

Public notes

The teacher prepares the content of the lecture before class, but in the form of a paper or set of organized notes. These notes are available to the students before or after the lecture. The teacher lectures to the class, using the notes as a guide, and may also use a whiteboard to write down certain points. It is the difference in the format between the discrete slides of the presentation style and the continuous notes in this style that impacts the capture and access problem.

Private notes

The teacher prepares only a private set of notes as a means to prompt the lecture, but this material is not made available to the students at any point.

Discussion

The three previous styles emphasized a didactic approach to the lecture in which the teacher is the principal speaker, interrupted occasionally by questions or comments from the students. In this style, the classroom session is more of a discussion in which all participants contribute more or less equally to the speaking. There may be a publicly available agenda for the class discussion that serves to highlight the topics that will be discussed.

We do not suggest that this is a complete categorization of teaching styles, and we also recognize that some teachers may choose to combine teaching styles within a course or even within a single class session. Attempting to provide support for each of these teaching styles in simultaneously developed prototypes allows us the opportunity to identify general features of an ideal system that can support all classes.

Future Computing Environments
College of Computing at Georgia Tech University