For more information
Geoffrey Fox, gcf@npac.syr.edu
Many courses at Syracuse University--where Geoffrey Fox is a professor of physics and computer science and director of the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC)--use technology to enhance the student learning experience. Commercial textbooks include CD-ROMs complete with databases, online resources, utilities, and hot links to related materials on the Web. Mailing lists and bulletin board systems are commonly used to make timely course-related announcements and as mediums to facilitate group discussions and administer technical forums. "All of these methods, though," says Fox, "support asynchronous learning. A significant majority of students require regular and sustained interaction--or synchronous learning experiences--involving teachers and other learners, in addition to asynchronous learning materials."
Fox and other researchers at NPAC developed Tango, a Java-based Web collaboratory that supports interactive distributed learning. The tool has been used in graduate computer science courses at Syracuse, and to teach other graduate students enrolled in two universities in Mississippi. Currently, the EOT-PACI-supported Education Center on Computational Science and Engineering at San Diego State University is making Tango available to faculty there who wish to use it for online education.
Tango is implemented with standard Internet technologies and protocols, and runs inside an ordinary Netscape browser window. The primary Tango window is called the control application (CA). From the CA, participants have access to many tools, including Web Wisdom, a presentation environment; Shared Browser, a special purpose browser window that pushes Web documents onto remote client workstations; a white board for interactive text and graphics display; 2-D and 3-D chat tools; a "raise hand" tool used to signal one's desire to ask a question; and Buena Vista for two-way streaming audio and video.
Tango's true test came in 1997 when it was used to deliver a "Programming for the Web" course to graduate students at Jackson State University (JSU) in Mississippi. The course was the equivalent of a class taught at Syracuse in traditional lecture-based format.
To keep the lecture component, the JSU lectures were delivered via Tango by a professor at Syracuse. Each lecture slide appeared on the student workstations as the instructor displayed it. The instructor delivered the lecture via an audio link, and the students asked questions through the Tango chat tool or over the audio link.
To help students better comprehend the material, also included the course was online mentoring by instructors at Syracuse, with help from two JSU supervisors who monitored student progress. Students were given weekly homework assignments, which they submitted via the Web. Grades were checked by using a password protected online grading system.
"The fast pace of technology research and development presents a challenge to education," says Fox. "Frequently, there are only a few experts in a given field, and content in that field is changing rapidly. In that situation, many universities find it hard to maintain up-to-date curricula. Novel learning technologies such as Tango allow these experts to interact well with students at a distance."
Tango was featured at the "Third NSF MRA Train-the-Trainer Workshop," held at SDSC in June 1998. The workshop focused on advanced network-based education and training, with special emphasis on parallel, high-performance, and network computing and scientific problem-solving. Participants included professors and deans of universities, education board officials, representatives of K-12, and distance training educators, who convened to discuss effective technologies for distributed education. Fox discussed teaching at JSU over the Web using Tango, and demonstrated the software for educators and system administrators.
"Distributed education has great potential," says Fox. "Tools like Tango will help make the virtual classroom a reality."