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In the mid-1990s, a KMi team led
by Prof. Marc Eisenstadt (then Director, now Chief Scientist) pioneered early voice-on-the-Net experiments for the OU,
investigating the robustness and
potential of synchronous communication for distance learning. From these trials
the Lyceum voice groupware system was prototyped in the late 90s, trialled by foreign
languages students, and deployed on its first mainstream course in 1999. Having
proven its value from experimental trials, Lyceum is now part of the OU's suite
of delivery technologies, being maintained and extended by a team within the OU's Learning
& Teaching Services.
Lyceum is a groupware system providing
students and tutors with voice conferencing and synchronous, visual workspace
tools, all operating over the standard internet via a single dial-up phone
line. Lyceum uses a Java client/server architecture to tackle a formidable set
of networking requirements: multi-way voice
communication with synchronous shared displays, scalable to hundreds of
simultaneous users, running over normal modem connections via unknown internet
service providers, on readily available multimedia PCs.
Lyceum's audio-visual
workspace is summarised in the accompanying figure. Participants can 'break
out' into rooms, screen-grab material from any digital source, and share a
variety of visual tools such as whiteboards, diagrammatic concept maps and
textual documents. They can register votes on an issue to quickly make
decisions, and indicate their wish to speak by raising their ëhandí. Materials
are typically prepared offline in preparation, saved to disk, and then imported
at the meeting. Courses distribute Lyceum digital resources for their tutors
to use, such as useful backgrounds, or key figures from the course materials,
which can then be annotated and discussed in a meeting.
A host of interesting
issues arise in designing voice groupware for learning, such as user interface
design, staff training, and the design of learning conversations for different
contexts (structured tutorial; student assignment; self-help session; 1-1
support). Research across the OU is now investigating these
issues, embedding Lyceum into courses in different disciplines.
Description of Lyceum's rationale,
architecture, and first mainstream deployment:
Buckingham Shum, S., Marshall, S., Brier, J. and Evans, T. (2001). Lyceum: Internet Voice Groupware for Distance Learning. Euro-CSCL 2001: 1st European Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning[www.ll.unimaas.nl/euro-cscl/], Maastricht, The Netherlands, March 22-24, 2001. Also available as: Technical Report KMI-TR-100, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, UK [kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/papers/kmi-tr-100.pdf]
Reports on Lyceum's deployment to
assist the development of fluency in foreign languages at the OU:
Lesley Shield and colleagues have conducted extensive research evaluating Lyceum for teaching fluency in foreign languages: Faculty of Education and Language Studies, Open Univ., UK [http://fels-staff.open.ac.uk/lesley-shield/]
Background and preliminary report (18 April, 2000) on Lyceum's first mainstream deployment at the OU on B823: Managing Knowledge [slide presentation]
Within the OU, there is now an active Lyceum User Group of researchers and practitioners, sharing experiences and discussing future software and organisational infrastructure requirements.
Service Delivery Team -
lts-service-delivery@open.ac.uk