Charms for e-learning: a case study

In this paper we describe the testing activities carried out to evaluate the benefits that the digital educational format implementation ILIADE (“Insegnare L’Informatica A Distanza Efficacemente”, Distance Teaching Computer Science Effectively) provides. The purpose of the ILIADE format is to enable the synchronous delivery of real-time lessons and multimedia contents - provided by one or more teachers - to a virtual classroom. The virtual classroom is the set consisting of both physical remote classrooms - hosting student groups – and individual stations (which are connected to individual students with their own computers). The setup of the virtual classroom allows the learning by doing approach to directly involve students: each student can intervene during the lesson, both dialoguing with the teacher and with his fellow students and share his/her experience with the rest of the class. The collaborative approach in the virtual classroom emphasizes the concepts expressed by the teacher, allowing the participants to improve the understanding and learning of the explained subjects. In ILIADE, multiple technologies are merged to enable real-time interaction between teacher and students, with the opportunity for participants to deal directly with the teacher, even in case of large-scale (large number of participants). This means that the virtual classroom is based on the distribution of audio-stream real-time video of the teacher station to learners, who can send questions to the same by means of a chat class (that is shared among all participants). In the ILIADE format, the subsystem CHARMS is responsible for the delivery of the A/V streamed lesson to all participants, organized into a cooperative overlay for the relaying purposes. This work is part of the project EDOC@ Work3.0.