The use of video-taped lectures and web-based communications in teaching: A distance-teaching and cross-Atlantic collaboration experiment

Abstract

We have conducted an experiment to discover how we can co-teach the course 'Engineering Design Problem Formulation' simultaneously at the Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) and at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU, Pittsburgh, USA). We have formed teams that involved students from both countries, and we have experimented with long distance collaboration. In doing so, students would learn to co-operate with people at another (time zone) location with a different cultural background and, in addition, they would help the teachers of the course to develop insights into long distance collaboration. CMU lectures have been recorded with a digital video camera, and a set of PowerPoint slides accompanied each of these lectures. The movies were used by the Delft teachers by running them in class along with the PowerPoint slides and stopping often to discuss the material as the movie progressed. We also made fourperson international student groups. The entire international group met once at the start of the course using video-conferencing. During the course, the groups communicated through phone calls, e-mails and chatting. In addition, everyone in the course used the web-accessible document management system LIRE' (developed at the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems, CMU) to capture, organize and share all documents anyone produced throughout the course. The tools used in the course and the collaboration experiences were evaluated through a questionnaire distributed among the students. The results are presented in this paper.