ELECTRONIC DESIGN

November 8, 1999 Issue Table of Contents

Ever have one of those professors who talks too fast and scribbles on the blackboard, leaving you confused? Well, Georgia Tech doesn't have to worry about them anymore.

Students at the Atlanta school have the new Classroom 2000 system. Developed by the university's College of Computing (CoC) and Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center, it promises to make old-fashioned notetaking obsolete. Its integration of audio, video, and computer technology records lecture material and stores it on the web, letting students access and review it more thoroughly later.

Much like any other class, professors stand at the front of the room, lecturing and writing notes on a whiteboard. But the whiteboard is electronic, capturing all of the material the instructor writes on it. A computer program then saves the material, streamlining it for future compilation. Meanwhile, the lecture itself is recorded through commercial speech-transcription technology. Other tools, like elcetronic annotations, audio, video, and even web-browser activity, are recorded as well.

Once the class is over, the Zen-star post-production subsystem weaves these elements into a set of standard web pages. Later on, students can go to the site and look at a timeline of the lesson, broken up into its key points. Clicking on these brings up the lecture's audio, and video of the notes from the board. Users can click their way to any web sites that were mentioned, too. Word searches are available in case students need to sort specific terms and topics out of the lesson. Entire lectures can be played back as well.

The benefits are obvious. In many lectures, students are too busy scribbling to actually think about what's being said. Classroom 2000, however, lets them focus on the professor instead of their notebooks. Also, students now have more time to ask questions and participate in class discussions. This kind of interaction promotes better understanding of the material--and it's also much more interesting.

Statistics prove it's working. Surveys say that 56% of Classroom 2000 students spend less time taking notes during lectures. Additionally, 63% pay better attention to what's going on, since they know they can go get the notes later. Most importantly, perhaps, 71% agreed that the classes were more interesting and engaging.

Over 100 undergaduate and graduate computer science, mathematics, and electrical engineering courses have been captured by the system. Kennesaw State in Georgia, Montreal's McGill University, Brown University, and Georgia State are developing Classroom 2000 systems, too.

Students may actually start looking forward to class...maybe.

For more information, check out www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/c2000.–RG

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