Yet Another Virtual Classroom over the Internet

Sam Hsu and Abhi Pandya

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Florida Atlantic University
{sam,abhi}@cse.fau.edu

Rajesh Patel
Motorola, Inc., Plantation, Florida
erp011@email.mot.com

Abstract Due to the wide variety of information on the control mechanism to provide the instructor with the
Internet, students taking on-line courses can be easily capability to call remote students' attention to class and to
distracted by netsurfing onto unrelated sites either synchronize class activities, and an FCFS (Fist-Come First-
accidentally or purposely. This undesired sidetracking is Serve) floor control to regulate participants engaged in
hard to supervise by the instructor in a remote location. We audio conferencing in an orderly fashion.
propose an Internet-based virtual classroom model that The rest of the paper is organized as follows: A virtual
features a centralized mouse control mechanism to provide classroom model is proposed in Section 2. The
the instructor with the capability to call remote students' implementation of a prototype is introduced in Section 3.
attention to class and to synchronize class activities. Also Section 4 concludes the paper.
included in the model is an FCFS floor control to regulate
participants engaged in audio conferencing in an orderly 2. VCOIN
fashion..
We propose a virtual classroom system named VCOIN,
Keywords: virtual classroom, mouse detect, floor control, acronym for Virtual Classroom Over the INternet [8].
VCOIN Figure 1 shows a conceptual view of the VCOIN system
configuration.
1. Introduction
Video
Along with the fast-growing of the Internet we have seen in Editing
Video-On Demand Server Instructional Server
recent years a booming of virtual classrooms that are taking
the advantage of the worldwide networking infrastructure to Digitization and
Compression
conduct education electronically. Various virtual classroom
systems have been developed so far [1, 2]. Each system may
have its own features differing from others. In essence, they Audio/Video
Database
Courseware
Database

all have one common goal – to educate students who are A

motivated to learn but are blocked by their geographical Multicast
routers Routers
locations and/or working schedules. The following are
examples of representative virtual classroom systems: Virtual
The
Classroom at New Jersey Institute of Technology [9], Virtual Internet
C
B
Classroom at Cornell University [3], Saddle Project at Boston (MBone tunnel)
University [6], Collaboratories at the US Department of
Energy [4], Albatross Project at National Chiao Tung
University, Taiwan [5], and Interactive Remote Instruction
System at Old Dominion University [7]. 1 2 3 4 5
Two areas that face almost all virtual classroom systems Student A Student B Student C Student D Student E
that provide real-time interactivity with students over the Unicast Data Flow
Internet but have not been given due attention are a) VCOIN Clients
Multicast Data Flow
A,B,C : Multicast routers
controlled activities for remote students that are out of the 1,2,3,4 : Client Hosts

reach of direct supervision from the instructor, and b)

coordinated interaction among participants while using audio Figure 1: A conceptual view of VCOIN system.
tools for interactive dialogs. In this paper we propose a
virtual classroom model that features a centralized mouse
 2.1 VCOIN features
The major features of VCOIN include the following:
• Uses the Internet as its networking infrastructure for
information distribution.
• Uses existing video/audio conferencing tools for
interactive real-time communication.
• Uses standard web browsers for graphical user
interfaces.
• Employs a mouse control technique to prevent
students from conducting unauthorized surfing in
cyberspace.
• Employs a floor control algorithm that allows the
instructor centralized floor control while students
are allowed to access the floor in an FCFS fashion.
• Introduces the concept of virtual experimenter.
• Provides a chat tool to enable interactive text-based
communications between the instructor and the
students.
2.2 A learning approach in VCOIN
We envision a student-oriented approach towards learning in
a virtual classroom. With this approach, each student has
more flexibility in determining his/her plan for learning.
Typically a student would begin by going through the on-line
course map. Then he/she views the lecture using a Video-On-
Demand (VOD) server. The student could study the topics
covered in the lecture through online courseware. The
courseware includes virtual experimenter as well as
interactive exercises for practicing the material learned. This
provides the student with a problem-specific focus which is
considered very important in all aspects of the process of
learning. The student then has an opportunity to participate in
a live video/audio conference with the instructor to discuss
the material covered in the lecture as well as in the
courseware. Figure 2 shows a typical learning approach that a
student may take using VCOIN. The double arrows in this
figure illustrate the stage when a student has an opportunity
to backtrack and revisit the previous stage in order to tailor
the learning process according to his/her individual needs and
capability. Note that this includes retaking either the entire
lecture or parts of it depending on the student’s needs. This
feature is not available in the traditional mode of classroom
teaching widely followed today.
Take Lecture using
VOD
Use On-line
Courseware
Take Notes
Practice using Virtual
Experimenter
Schedule Conference
Live Video/Audio
Conference
Figure 2: A learning approach in VCOIN
2.3 Centralized mouse control using mouse detect
In a conventional classroom, the instructor can actually
oversee student activities. This situation is quite different
in a virtual classroom. A student can be temporarily absent
or engaged in netsurfing on a totally unrelated Web site in
the case of an Internet-based virtual classroom setting.
VCOIN builds into itself a unique feature of checking and
controlling the student activities at a remote place. This
feature is called Mouse Detect. Consider a scenario in
which the instructor expects all students to pay attention to
what he/she is demonstrating. The instructor will then
request the students to place their mouse in a specific area
on their screen. VCOIN will detect these activities and
notify the instructor of the students’current status
2.4 Floor control:
Floor control is a mechanism that allows the proper use of
a shared resource. These shared objects may include video
conferencing, audio conferencing, or whiteboard type of
applications where more than one participant can have
access at a time. Floor control can be implemented using
many different algorithms. In VCOIN, a combination of a
centralized control (for instructor) and an FCFS (for
students) is employed. The instructor always has the
authority to speak. A student user is allowed to speak only
when he/she is given the permission of floor control by the
instructor. This type of control is necessary to avoid chaos
and confusion in a conferencing environment and it helps
to structure the interaction and reduce the bandwidth
requirement.

3. A VCOIN prototype
A prototype of VCOIN has been implemented using various
programming tools such as HTML, Java, JavaScript, Perl,
and C. Several VCOIN trial sessions have been conducted
using multiple computer labs that are interconnected via a
100 Mbps Ethernet-type campus backbone. Figure 3 shows a
screen capture of the instructor’s interface. VCOIN uses
Netscape Navigator for its user interface. Features shown on
this screen include a course outline, centralized mouse
control, floor control and chat board. Each is housed in a
separate frame on the screen.

Browser

Figure 4: A screen capture of VCOIN student interface

VCOIN Website Address

http://www.cse.fau.edu/~sam/thesis/rpatel/instructor.html
Figure 5 below shows two relevant screen captures of
this feature. The instructor’s interface, Figure 5 (a), has a
list of participants, shown by student names, and their
Main Menu
current status. The status of ‘Active’ indicates that the
student has placed his/her mouse in the designated area.
This is interpreted as the student is paying attention to the
instructor since it prevents him/her from netsurfing the
Courseware Web or performing other tasks on that computer. When a
student has moved his/her mouse pointer outside the
specified region, the corresponding entry on the
instructor’s interface will be changed from ‘Active’ to
‘Inactive’ immediately. The instructor can then alarm the
student (e.g. via an audio tool) for not paying attention to
the class.

Figure 3: A screen capture of VCOIN instructor interface

Figure 4 shows a screen capture of the student’s

interface. Features shown in this figure include frames
pertinent to a video clip from a pre-recorded lecture, a virtual
experimenter for performing on-line exercises, a chat board
for interactive dialogs, floor control request, and mouse (a) Instructor’s interface
control.

(b) Student’s interface
Figure 5: Screen frames for centralized mouse control
The floor control algorithm used in VCOIN is an FCFS
algorithm for students and centralized control for the
instructor. To request the floor control, a student has to
submit the request from his/her VCOIN interface. On the
other hand, if the instructor would like to release the floor
control from a student who currently has it, he/she would
have to click on “Release floor” button on the VCOIN
interface. The following diagram, Figure 6, shows the two
different interfaces.
(a) Instructor’s floor control frame
Floor Request Button
(b) Student’s floor control frame
Figure 6: Frame layouts of floor control
The algorithm for implementing floor control is shown
in Figure 7. The users who wish to take the floor control
submit their request to the controller. The controller puts the
request of each user into the FIFO queue. Because the
conferencing application is used in a virtual classroom
environment, initially the instructor must be having the floor
control. Users have three options:
• Request floor control
• Release floor control
• Quit conference
If a user requests for floor control, his/her UserID is
added to the FIFO queue only if it is not in the queue.
When the user having the floor control requests for release
of floor, the controller pops the first element off the FIFO
queue and give the floor control to it. The conference
application will then allow that user to access the shared
resource. If a user request to quit the conference, the floor
control mechanism would remove the corresponding
UserID from the current user list.
FIFO Queue
Controller
Floor Control
User i
User 1 User n Shared
Applications
i=1..N
Figure 7: Block diagram of a FIFO floor control
4. Conclusion
We discussed salient features of a virtual classroom
model that can take advantage of a worldwide networking
infrastructure of WWW to conduct education
electronically. A conceptual overview of this model, called
VCOIN, is presented in detail. VCOIN provides a platform
for a student-oriented learning approach as opposed to the
conventional teacher-centered classroom system. The
paper discusses how a student can exploit the flexibility of
the VCOIN system to determine his /her plan for learning.
However, VCOIN provides several unique features for
retaining the instructor’s ability to oversee student
activities, which is a major advantage in a conventional
classroom. Algorithmic details are provided for the
following: a) A combination of centralized and FCFS floor
control for regulation of audio/video communications of
student groups. b) A centralized Mouse Detect feature for
monitoring and controlling student activities at a remote
place.
The practicality of the VCOIN model was successfully
validated during pilot runs. Several screen captures are
provided to illustrate the performance of the prototype
during these pilot runs using multiple computer labs.
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