23rd course on Disaster Management

CSIM and ITB organised a distance course for the 23rd training session on Disaster Management, organised by ADPC in AIT.

The lecturers were in Bandung, Indonesia, while the 25 attendees were in CSIM, room #211.

The course was organised using two parallel computer connections, one for the course material and one for dual way audio and video communication. The idea that lead to split the connection into two is that more and more teachers are using PowerPoint presentations or similar tools.

While in a regular class, attendees can look at the screen to see the course material and look at the professor in real, in a distance learning class, the student need to look at the course material and at an image of the teacher. PowerPoint and other tools are using full screen pictures. So we need a separate connection for the teacher image.

The course was set-up to use the high bandwidth available between AIT and ITB through AI3 project.

There is one major thing that could be learned from this experince:

Rehearsal was put up with not enough delay so the audio could not be adjusted properly. The quality of the audio link is primordial, espacially when addressing non native English speakers.

The setting of the equipment was as follow:

(blue lines are for computer network, red lines are for audio, green lines are for video)

PC for Audio and Video

This machine was used to send and receive audio and video.

Pentium 133 Mhz, 16MBRam
Video Blaster, SE 100, video capture card
Windows'95
NetMeeting 2.04b

The setting for NetMeeting were as follow:

Video: large image, good quality, slow frame rate
Audio: reorder the compression algorith to use high bandwidth algorithm first, full duplex sound

Bandwidth used for transmitting audio and video from AIT was approximately 50Kbps. This is primarily due to the setting of the machine with 256 colours only, that reduced the size of the image and allowed a better compression.

PC for PowerPoint

This machine was used to receive the course material (under PowerPoint) from the teacher.

Pentium 100 Mhz, 16MBRam
Windows'95
NetMeeting 2.04b

There is no specific setting for the software. The display should be set-up to reflect the setting at the source of the course material. Usually setting will be 800x600, 16bit per pixel.

It is recommended that the PowerPoint presentation is made as simple as possible:

do not use sound, as they are not transmitted over the network
use solid colour back ground, preferably dark colour for better lisibility;
do not use transitions when they are not needed, due to the speed of the network, most of the transitions would not be visible;
do not use icons, clip-arts, graphics, pictures when they are not needed.

Video Projector for Audio & Video

A standard video projector was used to display the teacher picture on a screen, so that the students could see the teacher speaking.

While image of the teacher does not bring much information to the classroom, it is less disturbing for the students if they can see who is speaking.

Video Porjector for PowerPoint

A standard video projector was used to display the contents of the course material.

Microphone

Good quality microphones are prefered as they permit to get a better sound.

Quality of sound is very important as the voice of the teacher will carry most of the information. When most of the audiance is not native English speaking, clear voice is necessary.

Audio Equipment

Public addressed audio equipment, one amplifier and a couple of loudspeakers.

Quality of the audio equipment ensures an easier understanding for the students, allowing a better learning.

The sound input in the amplifier must be coming from the PC as the PC is the only point where sound from both the local and the distance rooms can be found.

Line Attenuator

This important, home made gadget, allows to adapt the level and impedance of an audio line-out (from VCR, preamplifier, audio mixer, etc.) to the level and impedance of a microphone. This allows to connect the line-out to the microphone entry of the sound card of a computer.

This device had to be developped after we noticed that many video conferencing software will only accept audio input from the microphone, they could not be set-up to get imput from the line-in connector of the sound card. That limitation was not permitting to use several microphones, via an audio mixer for example, or to feed the sound from a video tape.

Audio Mixer

Public addressed audio mixer, with 6 channels:

4 microphones and 2 lines-in, or
2 microphones, one phono input and 3 lines-in.

Equalizer function can be a plus, but it needs fine tunning.

The audio mixer is used in mono mode as only one sound channel is feed to the computers.

Camera

Public addressed camcoder, 12x zoom, 0.4 Lux sensitivity, built in LCD screen for easy use by the cameramen.

This page is maintained by Olivier Nicole