1. Asynchronous Voice in eLearning
Keith W. Ross
Eurecom Institute

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

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

4. 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

5. 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

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

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

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

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

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

11. 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

12. 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.

13. Voice in asynchronous elearning
Online lectures
Web pages with voice animations
Interaction
message boards with voice
voice

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

15. Async voice demo

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

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

18. Architecture

19. 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="
</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 …]

20. 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