Synchronous Learning at a Distance:
Experiences with TANGO

Abstract

In the fall of 1997, and again in the spring of 1998, the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University taught a computational science course at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi using the TANGO Interactive collaboratory system. What made this course unique is that twice a week instructors "met" with students online, showing lecture slides and programming examples, and discussing concepts in real time over the Internet. The goal of the project was to investigate the use of TANGO in teaching a traditional lecture-based course in a distance-learning format.

Many academic courses at Syracuse University and elsewhere use technology to enhance the learning experience. For example, course material is often published on web servers, which students are encouraged to access at their leisure (that is, asynchronously). There appears to be no shortage of such course material on the web, although the quality of such material varies greatly. What is clearly missing, however, is a vehicle to deliver educational material synchronously, that is, in real time, using Internet technology. Although some "distance learning" courses use chat tools to communicate synchronously, there appears to be few (if any) systems that deliver real-time multimedia content in an authentic, two-way interactive format.

CSC 499, offered as a JSU credit course, included regularly scheduled lectures delivered via TANGO. During these lectures, an instructor would show lecture slides on a workstation in Syracuse, while the students attended class in a lab at JSU. Each lecture slide would appear on student workstations as the instructor displayed it. The instructor would deliver the lecture via an audio link, and the students would ask questions either through a chat tool or the audio link.

TANGO is a Java-based web collaboratory developed at NPAC. It is implemented with standard Internet technologies and protocols, and runs inside an ordinary Netscape browser window. Although TANGO was originally designed to support collaborative workgroups, in this project it was used to synchronously deliver course materials stored in an otherwise asynchronous repository.

The report gives a detailed description of the distance-learning course CSC 499 and the major technology TANGO. We describe the effects of the networking environment on course delivery and the steps taken to optimize this environment, which include a novel, dual-server architecture with minimal bandwidth requirements. Included in the report is a critical discussion of the lessons learned and the conclusions drawn from this experience. Finally, we examine possible future directions the project might take, and what must be done to achieve these goals.