Building Your Own eClass-room

This page is the starting point for all potential users of eClass. It is divided into an overview of eClass which highlights some of its features and capabilities and then into individual sections for students, teachers, system administrators, and developers.

Why eClass?
Much of a student's time in the classroom is devoted to copying some record of the classroom experience. eClass aims to put computers in the classroom to do all of the mundane recording of the class thereby enabling students to spend more time actively listening to the lecture. Think of it as the room that takes notes for you!

What Is eClass?
On the software side, eClass is a suite of Java programs, called Zen-Star that captures a traditional classroom lecture experience. A series of PHP scripts provide a dynamic HTML interface to view these captured lecture nots with audio or video augmentation. On the hardware side, it is a collection of electronic whiteboards, projectors, computers, and audio/video recorders.

How does it work?
At the start of class, the instructor walks up to an electronic whiteboard and finds either a blank screen or, if present, prepared slides. Everything the instructor writes is captured and saved. There are also additional screens present which give the illusion that the whiteboard extends across the entire room. If the instructor wishes, they may show Web pages as a part of their lecture. The pages visited will also be captured and logged.

Ceiling-mounted microphones record the instructor and students, and ceiling-mounted cameras capture the video. A PC in the corner silently encodes the audio/video into Real's streaming format and stores it after class in a central repository for later access with the captured notes.

After class, students visit the class home page and see all of the notes and Web pages visited. Clicking on an ink stroke will let the student see/hear the video/audio that was recorded during the time the stroke was written. If they wish, students can then print out the notes or do a keyword search on the audio of the lecture.

All of the content generation and presentation is done automatically with minimal human effort. At Georgia Tech, we have a central Web page that lists all courses captured to date.

Where do I go from here?

If you are interested in obtaining the eClass system, please contact Gregory Abowd.