Lectures For Internet Courses

Many students want an audio/video lecture component with an Internet course and PowerPoint is a good starting point for creating these presentations. Streaming media, using free players, such as RealOne‘ (formerly RealPlayer) provide a method of transmitting audio/video lectures either live, or recorded. Another method is use of Macromedia Director to create individual lecture files which can be downloaded from a website. Director can also be used to create self-loading CD’s to provide students with an entire semester of lectures. This paper explains the use of these methods and lessons learned from the courses. Introduction A lecture-like presentation may be needed to convey information to students in undergraduate Internet courses. Building Internet courses 2 is a difficult and timeconsuming task. This paper discusses the utility and effectiveness of some of the methods available for dissemination of audiovisual material via the Internet. A source of material to assist the higher education community in use of the Internet is the Joint Information Systems Committee and related sites. The methods to be discussed here are: creating PowerPoint audio presentations using WAV files, creating PowerPoint slides with a script, recording audio/video using RealPresenter, preparing audio presentations using Powerpoint, then using Macromedia Director to create a movie, creating slides and audio presentations directly in Macromedia Director, and creating a self-loading CD using Macromedia Director. These methods have been used in several courses at Indiana University Purdue University, Fort Wayne, where WebCT is used for administration of Internet courses. CS/EET 114, an introductory Windows programming course using Visual Basic and EET 205, an introductory assembly language course using the Microchip PICmicro® assembly language, were offered via the Internet during Fall 2000, Fall 2001, and Spring 2002. EET 302, an introductory control system course was first offered, via the Internet, during Spring 2002. The usefulness and desirability of these pseudo-lecture methods will be described and compared. Lessons learned will also be provided for instructors desiring to create lectures for use in Internet courses. Using PowerPoint As a standard business presentation tool, PowerPoint is readily used to create audio lecture presentations using the Slide Show menu shown in Fig. 1: P ge 709.1 Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education Figure 1: Powerpoint Narration In the Record Narration window, shown in Fig. 1, the microphone level should be adjusted for normal sound. The 10-kilobit per second rate, shown in Fig. 1, is the default and is satisfactory for voice reproduction. The principal difficulty with PowerPoint audio presentations was found to be the size of the audio (.wav) files created, even with this data rate. The WAV format is an industry standard audio file, but the files are large (about a Megabyte per minute of recording). The resulting lectures are too large for most students to download at home using 56k modems. In addition to this, the WAV files compress very little using WinZip. The large size of these audio/visual files also makes them difficult for students without cable-modem/DSL service to see/listen-to using streaming media. A solution to this file-size problem using WAV files is to create a screenplay script for each PowerPoint slide and to not record the audio. The script for the audio can be compressed, along with the slides prior to placing the file on a web site for students to download and read. This is satisfactory in many cases and is similar to writing a supplementary book for the course. Many students like to have an audio component similar to classroom lectures that they can watch/listen-to. It was also desirable to use the PowerPoint slides that had already been created for classroom lectures and RealPresenter Plus was designed for this purpose. Using RealPresenter Plus with PowerPoint RealPresenter can be used to create audio/video presentations for streaming via the Internet or an Intranet. One of the RealPresenter windows is shown in Fig. 2. RealPresenter is approximately $200, but provides the capability to stream a presentation to up to 25 users, via an Intranet, from your own computer. RealPresenter also provides the ability to add video, along with audio to your PowerPoint slides. A video of the instructor’s head and shoulders was used for the first few lectures during Fall 2000 but the video was dropped due to high bandwidth requirements. A low-resolution, 2frames/second video increased the size of a completed 50 minute lecture file from 50 to 200 Mbytes. This was unacceptable for low-bandwidth (<=56k) modems, so audio, with PowerPoint slides was used during the remainder of the semester.