Asynchronous Voice in eLearning Keith W. Ross Eurecom Institute

Acknowledgements Frank Mayadas Burks Oakley II for the vision passionate talk at Upenn, 1995

Outline Practicality principles Voice in traditional learning Voice in asynchronous eLearning Wimba demos A few words about video and phone

Practicality: principles Online course must be easily accessible to ALL the students in the class Online course must be student friendly Authoring tools must be professor friendly

Practicality: consequences Must pass through 28 kbps modem Must work on PC, Mac, IE, & Netscape Nothing to explicitly download & install No complicated, multi-step procedures for authoring & publishing

Practicality: scanned notes! Professor asks teaching assistant to scan class notes and publish to Web. TA also creates message board for student-teacher interaction.

Online asynchronous learning Text has been the primary medium Both for content delivery and discussion Until recently, most online courses were void of voice

Voice in the f2f classroom Professor lecturing Students asking questions Professor leading discussions Student presentations

Subjects for which voice is essential Language foreign languages ESL Public speaking Poetry Acting Singing Literacy children adult literacy

ESL 1.3 billion people have been ESL students Asia, South America, Europe & US ! globalenglish.com englishtown.com Pearson education

Async language learning with voice Teachers & learners on different continents Learners need to listen repeatedly Learners need to pronounce repeatedly Learners need to converse with others

Subjects for which voice is desirable MBA courses ethics and management management of people at work leadership and teamwork management communication entrepreneurship negotiations Literature Social work Student seminars psychology history political science sociology art history etc.

Voice in asynchronous elearning Online lectures Web pages with voice animations Interaction message boards with voice voice e-mail

Voice message boards: desired features 28 kbps modems; PC and Mac streams upwards & downward voice+text messages threading integration with LMSs

Async voice demo

Asynchronous video in elearning Not for the masses Talking head has little pedagogic value Better to couple voice with graphics, slideshows, animations

Asynchronous learning with phone Telephones are ubiquitous Major advances in speech recognition, text-to-speech and VoiceXML Telephone voice message boards Telphone e-mail

Architecture

VoiceXML example Computer: Welcome to the virtual drink machine! <?xml version="1.0"?> <vxml version="1.0"> <form> <block> <prompt> Welcome to the virtual drink machine! </prompt> </block> <field name="drink"> <prompt> What would you like to drink? </prompt> <grammar> coffee | tea | milk | nothing </grammar> <help> You can say coffee, tea, milk or nothing. </help> <filled> You said <value expr="drink"/> </filled> </field> <submit next="http://www.voiceXml.com/drink.asp"/> </form> </vxml> Computer: Welcome to the virtual drink machine! What would you like to drink? Human: Beer I do not understand. Help You can say coffee, tea, milk or nothing Coffee You said coffee [… form is submitted to web server …]

Summary Let’s bring voice back to the classroom! Let’s voice animate our Web-based lectures Let’s talk with our students Let’s encourage students to talk with each other