Extension Online Teaches Data Communications With Streaming Media

Carin Johnson, a distance learning design editor for UW Educational Outreach, is using streaming media to supplement a UW Extension Online course on data communications.

"Our goal," says Johnson, "is to provide an alternative to the text-based materials we currently provide students. We felt it would be particularly helpful to students who learn in ways other than just reading text."

The topic chosen for the test project was TCP/IP addressing, partly because the instructor believed it to be one of the more complex in the class.

"Students definitely need to both hear the explanation and see the diagrams to understand how the concepts relate to each other," says Johnson. "So we decided the topic was a perfect candidate for streaming media."

In the finished product, the one-hour lecture has been broken up into 14 segments. In each segment, the instructor's voice explains concepts while text and diagrams appear in a RealPlayer® G2 (version 6 or later) window. A student can stop the presentation, skip ahead or back, or change the volume at any time.

UW Extension Online uses a streaming slide show--with sound, visuals, and diagrams--to teach the details of TCP/IP addressing to students.

A Streaming Slide Show

"SMIL is great," says Johnson. "If you are familiar with HTML, you can pick up SMIL in ten minutes."

The slide show approach also works well with slower modems. The encoded audio file and the graphics are much smaller than a video file that would show the same thing.

"We specifically decided not to have a video of the instructor--a talking head--because we felt students would quickly lose interest," explains Johnson.

The course had been taught many times, so the content was already well organized. The instructor prepared an outline of the important concepts, which was developed into a script that the instructor recorded at a sound studio. The sound file was then converted to digital format and edited with Sound Forge®. Johnson used RealProducer™ to encode the digital sound files, and created the graphics with PhotoShop®.