Hybrid Virtual Environments For Education

These environments enable people remote from each other to participate together in a rich variety of real-time learning activities.

We provide such benefits as:

• special enrichment at a rural school with a single gifted child,
• groups of corporate knowledge workers to maintainonline contact and collaborate in the electronic medium,
• graduate students in academic centers tutoring inner-city children in distant locations,
• More productive Technical support centers - one technician is able to service 2 or 3 clients at once,
• remote tutors taking students on virtual field tours,
• remote consultants engage clients directly, instantaeously exchanging ideas and feedback.
• children interactively performing virtual experiments too dangerous or costly to perform otherwise.

Our hybrid technology provides verbal interaction in the text-based screen of a hybrid virtual environment with graphics-based interaction on the participant's browser screen.

It looks like this...

The text-screen (above) shows the instructor's perspective. The students' screens would show the same material worded from their perspective. Everyone will see the images as the instructor puts them on the "projector."

The hybrid text/graphics interface version presents several text and graphics screens in the same browser window....like this:

Online Teaching Tools

Our virtual "slide projectors" display HTML images and documents anywhere in the world (including from files stored on a user's CD-ROM) in the browser-window of everyone who is tuned into that "channel". Image change automatically whenever a new image is put on the projector - no user intervention is needed - exactly like a real slide projector. (No special clients are required.)

This hybrid approach facilitates a natural interplay between dialogue and graphic presentation. It permits questions and answers, commentary on slides, and other activities natural to conventional educational interactions.

Our environments contain interactive, programmed objects to facilitate discussion and demonstration; e.g., virtual whiteboards on which anyone in the room may read or write, and which will email a copy of their current contents to anyone in the room on request.

Laboratory rooms may have interactive experiments which respond to students with both text in their virtual environment screen and graphics in their 'Web-Projector" screen.

Libraries let students browse materials, or download copies for local printout. Private offices let instructors meet with students, create and edit materials for virtual instruction, and store materials securely.

These capabilities (and more) all contribute to significant productivity gains. A recent experiment at California State University demonstrates this. Edupage recently carried this excerpt:

EXPERIMENT SHOWS STUDENTS DO BETTER ONLINE

A sociology professor at California State University at Northridge conducted his own experiment to test online learning, randomly dividing his statistics class in half, and teaching one half by lecture and the other half by Web assignments, online discussion groups and e-mail. The students who'd been banned from the physical classroom scored an average of 20% higher than those who'd attended in-person. "The motivation for doing this was to provide some hard, experimental evidence that didn't seem to exist anywhere," says the prof, who plans to expand his research to determine whether the online students performed better because they spent more time collaborating with their classmates, or because of the online format of the class. (Chronicle of Higher Education 21 Feb 97)

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