Towards a Virtual University
Amitava Datta
(Institut für Informatik
Universität Freiburg
Am Flughafen 17, 79110 Freiburg Germany
datta@informatik.uni-freiburg.de)
Thomas Ottmann
(Institut für Informatik
Universität Freiburg
Am Flughafen 17, 79110 Freiburg Germany
ottmann@informatik.uni-freiburg.de)
Abstract: We discuss a possible framework for virtualizing the
delivery of university courses. With the advent of new technological innovations
like high speed computer networks and multimedia computers, there is an
increasing awareness that direct face to face teaching is not the only
possible mode of teaching in a university system. There is a demand for
preparing high quality multimedia course materials across all disciplines
which can be used by learners who either cannot attend live lectures or
prefer to study in an off-line mode. Our group at the University of Freiburg
has developed a robust tool called Authoring on the Fly (AOF) for
recording live classroom sessions as multimedia documents and the synchronous
playback of the different media streams in such a document in an off-line
setting. In this paper we discuss the facilities this tool provides for
virtualizing university courses as well as improving the o ering of courses
in a traditional university setting. We discuss the progress we have made
in high quality delivery of lectures through multimedia documents and its
implications for both off-line and classroom teaching. Further, we discuss
our current attempts in virtualizing the assignment submission and correction
process as a follow up of the virtual delivery of courses. We also discuss
the possible implications of virtual delivery of courses and creation of
a virtual university from the point of view of university students, professors
and administrators.
Key Words: computers in education, virtual delivery of courses,
multimedia course materials, mixed mode teaching, virtual university
Categories: K.3.1
1 Introduction
It is a common opinion that networked computers, multimedia, and the
internet will revolutionize university education. Lifelong learning, learning
on demand, anywhere and anytime are a few buzzwords ruling the public discussion.
A large number of publicly and privately funded projects have the goal
of virtualizing parts of the university education using technical means.
Traditional universities have begun to open themselves beyond their traditional
borders and undertaken first steps in order to become at least partially
open universities offering distance education .
So far, in Germany there is just one university specialized in offering
distance education, the Fernuniversität Hagen. No other university
has gained experience in this mode of education in the past, though many
initiatives recently have begun to change this situation. At the same time
traditional teaching and learning is enhanced and improved by the new media.
It is well known that the development of multimedia content of high quality
is very expensive and time consuming. Hence, groups of professors from
different universities but related subjects have started to share their
efforts in developing multimedia modules to be used for teaching and learning
[see Geyer and Effelsberg (1998), Holfelder
(1997)].
In order to structure the vast amount of initiatives a bit, it seems
reasonable to distinguish different scenarios of virtual education: We
may distinguish the synchronous and the asynchronous mode of teaching and
learning. In the synchronous mode a live lecture may be transmitted to
remote locations, either to a remote lecture hall at another university
or to personal computers of students following the lecture at home or in
a student residence. For satisfactory results, this teleteaching scenario
requires high-end technology and a broadband connection. There are other
modes of synchronous instruction with less ambitious requirements using
chat, shared applications, email etc. But the characteristics of the synchronous
mode is that all members of a learning group meet at the same time in virtual
space. A web-course, however, is typically run in the asynchronous mode:
The learners work individually independent of time and space through a
set of linked interactive HTML-pages downloaded from a web-server. They
may consult a teaching assistant by email or any other communication tool,
if they have questions or want to make comments. The production of a web-course
of high quality is usually considered as a challenging task which is different
from the traditional way of teaching at universities. One particular problem
in this context is to enhance the course by assignments which resemble
the usual form and content of traditional exercises given to students participating
in a standard course.
We will report in this paper about a new way of virtualizing university
courses and discuss the technical problems and their solutions occurring
in this context. We will restrict ourselves mainly to the asynchronous
mode of teaching and learning, though we have also gained a lot of experience
in the synchronous mode in several ongoing projects [see Viror
(2001)].
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we discuss
some details of the traditional teaching methods at universities. In Section
3, we discuss the electronic note-taking system Authoring on the
Fly (AOF) and some details of how multimedia documents are generated
using this system. We also discuss the implications of this system for
both professors and off-line learners. We discuss in Section
4 some teaching methods that we are experimenting with using this tool.
We discuss the virtualizing of the assignment submission and correction
process in Section 5. Some technical problems of this
system are discussed in Section 6 and nally, we discuss
some future plans in Section 7.
2 Traditional Teaching
Let us first recall a few general characteristics of university teaching.
Usually the teaching and learning cycle is clearly structured into three
different phases, the conceptualization phase, the dialogue phase,
and the construction phase. A series of lectures given by a university
professor, sometimes in front of a large audience, is the core event supporting
the first phase in university education. The students learn the concepts
through attending these lectures and studying textbooks. In the dialogue
phase, students consolidate the concepts they learn in the first phase.
Weekly exercises guided by tutors, discussion seminars, and lab exercises
are examples of activities in a university curriculum which support the
second, the dialogue phase in learning. The construction phase is usually
dominant during the second half of a university study and consists of project
and thesis work.
In Germany, lecturing in front of a (sometimes large) audience is considered
as the specific characteristic of university education both in the public
and in the individual consciousness of university teachers. Lectures are
usually of presentation type; they are very little or even not at all interactive
(students in general do not ask questions or make comments in lectures);
they are topical and, therefore, subject to permanent changes; they are
specific both for the lecturer and the subject they teach; sometimes they
are of excellent quality (renowned university teachers are often famous
for their lectures). A further attribute of studying at a German university
is that both teachers and students have large amounts of freedom in organizing
their studies and in the choice of subjects and courses. Though quite often
courses are offered at different universities under the same title, they
are in general not identical. Relying on an established text-book (written
by a colleague from a different university) is not a common way of teaching
a course. The consequence is that traditional university courses have a
clearly noticeable personal favor.
A major aim in our attempts to virtualize traditional university courses
was to maintain as much of the advantages of the traditional way of teaching
and at the same time to decouple the time and space constraints, i.e.,
we do not want to force our students to always meet with the instructor
at the same time at the same place. Our goal is not to revolutionize the
traditional way of teaching through the introduction of new media or through
new pedagogic ideas. Instead we have a very limited goal of facilitating
those students to pursue their studies who are unable to follow regularly
our scheduled classes all the time.
A basic principle of our attempt to virtualize university courses pursued
in two major joint projects VIROR (virtual university in the upper Rhine
valley) and ULI (combined university studies in Computer Science) is therefore
to utilize the experience gained by university teachers in running traditional
classes as much as possible. This has the consequence that we try to implement
the model of three clearly separate stages in the learning cycle : the
conceptualization phase, the dialog phase, and the construction phase also
in running virtual courses.
3 Electronic notetaking
The core idea behind our method of producing multimedia documents supporting
the first phase of the learning cycle is to combine the apparently distinct
tasks of teaching in class and multimedia authoring into one single activity.
Over the last years we have developed and extensively used an electronic
notetaking system, the AOF-system (Authoring on the Fly) which allows to
capture the media streams which occur during a live lecture in class or
even during a telepresentation. The idea of capturing as much as possible
from the classroom experience for later use is not new. Beyond simply videotaping
lectures to be stored on video servers, there are several much more sophisticated
electronic notetaking systems. In [Müller and Ottmann
(2000)], we give an overview and assessment of those systems. The AOF-system
is not just another electronic notetaking system. Instead it fulfills a
number of requirements which allows the automated recording, synchronized
replay and integration of recorded documents into web-based teaching and
learning environments. Using the AOF-system for presentation recording
results in multimedia documents of a new kind: The captured multiple media
streams occurring in a live presentation, i.e., the audio stream of the
presenter, the white-board action stream, the application stream, and possibly
others, are synchronized in such a way that a replay using unrestricted
random access and easy navigation (so called visible scrolling) becomes
possible. The resulting AOF-documents can easily be integrated into web-based
teaching and learning environments or put on CD-ROM for off-line use. We
refer to the paper by Müller and Ottmann [Müller
and Ottmann (2000)] for the technical details of the AOF-system. However,
we would like to highlight two key features of the AOF-system that are
crucial for presentation recording and playback.
First, the different media streams in an AOF-document are synchronized
through a master-slave synchronization scheme. The audio stream
is the master stream and the other streams like the white-board stream
and the video stream are synchronized with the audio stream. Hence, while
playing back a recorded presentation, the current playback position of
the audio stream determines the objects to be displayed on the screen as
part of the white-board display. This was a basic design decision made
for the AOF-system since the lecturer's voice is the most important stream
in a classroom presentation scenario.
The second key feature of the AOF-system is that the dynamics of the
lecturer's annotations on a slide are preserved during the playback of
a lecture. The annotations that the lecturer makes are not static screen
shots. The annotations actually appear on the screen as the lecturer made
the annotations during the lecture. In other words, during playback of
a recorded lecture it looks as if some invisible hand is making the annotations
on the screen. Hence, the dynamics of the overall presentation is preserved
through synchronized audio and annotation as in a live classroom session.
3.1 Presentation recording
Presentation recording requires that the lecturer uses an electronic
substitute of a blackboard or overhead projector, the electronic white-board
that runs on a computer. Most presenters nowadays use PowerPoint as a presentation
tool. However, this tool does not have the desired recording facility and
does not support its users optimally. On the other hand, we are well aware
that Power-Point and Word are widely used, occasionally also and . Hence, the integrated presentation and recording tool should
at least offer import filters for documents produced by these standard
tools.
We now sketch as a specific example, how content acquisition in Computer
Science is currently carried out. Part of the activity concerns the joint
programming of animations and simulations to be used both during live presentations
in class and for inclusion into web-based teaching material to be used
in simulation mode by students. Here, in particular, collections of animations
and simulations for the areas of Algorithms and Data Structures,
Computer Architecture, Computer Networks, and Multimedia
Systems have been produced. This material has been used partially in
live lectures at one of the participating universities which have been
recorded using the AOF-approach. The AOF-system has been used to record
quite a number of whole courses (on Multimedia Systems, Network Technology,
Algorithm Theory, Algorithms for Internet Applications, Algorithmic foundations
of Bioinformatics, and others). The recorded documents are nally put on
CD-ROM and distributed to students. Moreover, a series of lectures by experts
in various elds (Computer Science, Archeology, Biology, Medicine and others)
have been recorded; some of them are bundled together in a new kind of
multimedia textbook on Algorithm Design Principles, [see Ottmann
(1998)]. So far we have recorded about 500 hours of live lectures,
mainly on topics in Computer Science.
3.2 The lecturing experience
We decided early in our project that the best way to produce multimedia
documents on university courses is to record live classroom lectures. Though
it is possible for a lecturer to give a lecture just for the multimedia
recording, from our experience most lecturers present their best lectures
when there is a real audience in front of them. Hence, we recorded the
live classroom lectures that are presented to our students on campus.
It is possible to produce multimedia documents from live lectures if
the lecturer finds the tools easy and comfortable to use. Moreover, the
tools should provide some advantage over traditional teaching tools in
order to make this mode of delivery of teaching materials attractive for
the lecturer. If the tools are difficult to use or they provide little
or no advantage in presenting the material to a live audience, very few
lecturers would prefer such tools.
The AOF-system is a very attractive alternative to the usual teaching
through transparencies or through a tool like PowerPoint. The slides for
a lecture can be prepared either using the AOF tool itself or by using
standard text processing software like latex and dvips.
Once the slides are loaded
in the AOF-system, a list of all slides with their titles appear in a window.
This gives the lecturer the facility to access any slide randomly. Moreover,
when the lecturer usually annotates the slides during the lecture, all
the annotations are stored on the image of the slide. Hence, the lecturer
can show all previous annotations on the slides when a slide is chosen
from this list. The AOF tool provides excellent support for annotating
a slide including free hand drawing, erasing facility, different fonts
and colors. In particular, the free hand drawing facility is extensively
used by most lecturers for writing on the slides and drawing diagrams.
The lecturer can introduce new slides into the AOF document and add new
materials on these new slides through free hand drawing. The new slides
are included in the index of slides instantaneously. This facility is lacking
in presentation tools like PowerPoint as it is not easy to introduce a
new slide in an appropriate place in the existing document. The presentation
screen of the AOF-system is shown in Figure 1. Hence, the AOF-system provides
the lecturer with an attractive tool for presenting a standard classroom
lecture.
Figure 1: The presentation screen of the AOF-system. A list
of all the slides appear at the left and the toolbar is at the top.
From our experience, the quality of all the presentations that we have
recorded are extremely high due to the fact that the lecturers are comfortable
with the AOF presentation tools and they prefer to present lectures to
a live audience in a real lecture.
3.3 The off-line learner
We now discuss what the off-line learner may experience as a user of
the multi-media documents. The AOF-system is designed to facilitate the
learning process of an off-line learner and takes into account two key
points : (i) an off-line learner of the system should get the experience
of a live classroom lecture and (ii) the off-line learner should
be able to browse through a lecture in the same way she1
browses through a book or printed material.
Figure 2: The AOF playback screen. A list of all the slides
in the module appear at the left. Each slide has an AOF icon below it.
The off-line learner can click on the icon to jump to any slide.
1We refer to a student as well as a lecturer
in the feminine gender to avoid repetitions of the term he/she.
When the AOF player is launched by an off-line user for viewing a lecture,
all the slides of the lecture appear in a separate window to the left of
the screen. Each slide has an AOF icon below it so that the learner can
directly jump to that slide if she wishes. There is also an audio control
window which can be used to start or stop the audio or to go back and forth
through the audio stream.
Figure 3: The actual playback of the same slide as in Figure
2 is shown with the audio control. Note that some of the annotations
have not yet appeared at the time when the screen shot was taken.
The first requirement is satisfied through the synchronized playback
of the streams in the multimedia lectures. The usual AOF document contains
only two streams, the white-board stream and the audio stream. Since the
important parts of a lecture are the lecturer's voice and the slides and
annotations on those slides, it was decided that the video image of the
lecturer is not an essential stream for the multimedia document. On the
other hand, it is possible to record the video stream and include it into
the AOF document at the cost of a larger multimedia document. When the
off-line learner plays back a multimedia lecture, playback area audio control
the white-board stream appears on the screen and the lecturer's voice is
heard synchronously.
Hence, the experience of the off-line learner is almost the same as
the experience of a student who attends the corresponding live lecture.
All the annotations that the lecturer makes on the slides are exactly synchronized
with the lecturer's voice. The playback screens of the AOF-system are shown
in Figures 2 and 3.
The second requirement of the facility to browse through a document
is implemented in the AOF-system at the slide level. In other words, the
learner can directly jump to a particular slide whenever she chooses to
do so. Since the audio stream is synchronized with the white-board stream,
the learner can listen to the lecturer's description of the slide directly.
Hence, this facility gives the learner an opportunity to review any part
of a lecture as many times as required and learn the material at her own
pace.
4 Teaching methods
We have earlier emphasized our point of view that the AOF-system is
not based on any pedagogic ideas, rather it is a tool to facilitate virtualizing
university teaching and it can be tuned to the specific needs of a university
teaching scenario. However, we have experimented with a few ideas in order
to use the system to the maximum bene t of the lecturers and the students
at our university. We will discuss a few of these ideas below.
4.1 Mixed mode teaching
The AOF-system not only facilitates teaching of courses in a distant
education mode, but it also helps organizing and offering very high quality
courses in a traditional university setting. From our experience, a lecturer
spends a lot of time for the preparation of a lecture even if she is offering
the course several times. On the other hand, if the lecturer uses the multimedia
course material from a previous offering of the course, she can put her
e ort to improve the course in two different ways.
First, the course can be offered in a mixed mode using part of the previous
recordings and partly through live lectures. The lecturer will have the
choice of retaining a part of the course which she thinks was well presented
in a previous offering. She can concentrate on adding new material through
live lectures in order to improve the overall content of the course. The
second advantage is that she can devote more time to prepare high quality
tutorial materials.
Hence, a series of recorded lectures on a certain subject opens a new
way of teaching a course: Instead of teaching the whole course again, one
may switch to a hybrid, partially virtual mode. Only those parts are presented
in a live lecture in class which di er from the previous presentation.
The unchanged part is distributed to students on CD-ROM and/or made available
in the local computer pools for self-paced study. The presentation is accompanied
as usual by (weekly) tutorials and exercises. In this way we have run the
course on Computational Geometry already once.
4.2 Modularizing a lecture
The second idea we are currently experimenting with is the breaking
up of the material in a lecture into small self-contained modules. From
our experience, students can learn materials well in a live lecture if
the material is presented in a modular fashion. It is easy to keep concentration
and understand the ideas in a smaller module instead of a long lecture.
Figure 4: The web pages for the course Parallel Algorithms
and Applications. This page shows the overall structure of the course,
title of each lecture and the modules in a lecture and links to individual
lectures.
This is also very useful for an off-line learner as she can concentrate
on a small multimedia document for learning a few key concepts before progressing
to the next document.
The AOF-system is ideally suited for breaking a lecture into such smaller
modules. The lecturer prepares the slides for each module separately and
once a module is presented, the recording can be stopped and started again
for the next module within a short time. Also, the lecturer can prepare
exercises for each module separately and this allows the students to learn
the material in a module thoroughly and test their understanding through
attempting the exercises based on that module. The splitting of a lecture
in smaller independent modules is shown in Figures 4
and 5.
Figure 5: The web page of Lecture 4 for the course Parallel
Algorithms and Applications. There is a brief description for each module
and links to the AOF document, PDF le and exercises on the WebAssign system.
In summary, the AOF-recording technique may open a new and cost effective
way of utilizing the teaching and learning experience of university professors
for establishing a time and space independent way of learning. The next
step will be, not only to virtualize the first phase of the learning cycle,
the conceptualization phase, but also the second phase, the dialogue phase,
i.e. to run also assignments in off-line mode. We have already made some
progress in achieving this goal as we discuss in the next section.
5 Virtualizing assignment submission and correction
In a traditional university teaching scenario, when a student masters
a teaching module, she solves assignment problems based on the material
and understands the material more thoroughly by comparing her solutions
with that of the lecturer. We call this as the dialogue phase of the university
learning cycle. We are currently attempting to virtualize this phase as
well.
Figure 6: The front page of the WebAssign system. The page
shows links to various submission and management pages.
In a traditional distance education scenario, students submit their
written solutions for the exercises by mail. Then a tutor corrects the
submissions and sends the solutions back to the students with comments.
This cycle of submitting and correcting assignments obviously has a large
amount of latency. Also, for a course with several hundred students enrolled
in the distance education mode the management of the assignment correction
process is a formidable task. It is much better to have a tool that supports
electronic submission and correction of assignments. It is still better
if the tool manages all the submissions and stores the marks for the submissions
in a systematic way.
The WebAssign system developed at FernUniversität Hagen is an excellent
tool with all these facilities integrated into a single web based system.
A student can remotely submit assignments as text or postscript documents
once she has access to the system by acquiring a login and password.
She can view all her submissions and marks anytime. The tutors have
similar access to the system through a web browser. A tutor can correct
an assignment, add comments, assign a mark and publish the corrections
on the web. Each student can access the corrections and check the marks.
There is no extra work on the tutor's part for managing and storing the
submitted assignments. The front page of the WebAssign system is shown
in Figure 6.
We are currently using the WebAssign system for assignment submission
and correction in two of our courses, Geometric Algorithms and Parallel
Algorithms and Applications. Though all our students are enrolled as
regular students and they attend lectures in campus, we are experimenting
with the system for integrating it into our overall framework for virtualizing
the delivery of university courses. Right now, the web pages for these
two courses are organized in a hierarchical fashion. At the top level is
a page with descriptions of the course content, links to various contact
details for the course and a link to a page with the teaching materials.
The page for teaching material has a link to the multi-media document for
each lecture. There are several multimedia modules for each lecture and
there are links to the PDF les, exercises in the WebAssign system and the
multimedia documents for each of these modules. Hence, the students can
study each module and attempt the exercises following the links. We plan
to use the same structure of the html pages in the CD-ROM for the course.
An off-line student will be able to connect to the WebAssign system in
the same way.
Hence, the WebAssign system is a possible tool for virtualizing the
second phase of the university teaching, the dialogue phase. From our experience,
an assignment management tool like this is essential in virtualizing the
assignment submission and correction cycle.
6 Technical problems
Using the computer as a means for teaching and presentation of content
is fairly obvious for lecturers for whom the computer is the standard everyday
working tool. This is true for computer scientists, physicists, and many
others, but certainly not for most colleagues from the humanities. We have
tried to encourage people from nontechnical areas also to participate in
(synchronous) teleteaching experiments and recorded their lectures using
the AOF-system. A large rear-screen interactive white-board has been used
as a presentation tool. While experienced users are able to master the
variety of the available tools, it turned out that the human-computer interface
is by no means ideal for such an application. Moreover, the role of an
accompanying video of the speaker (talking head) is different when teaching
a technical subject like Computer Science and a nontechnical subject like
Archaeology.
Our experience with the AOF-system shows that this tool is very robust
and suitable for presentation recording from a live lecture. However, we
would like to improve the system further to make it more user friendly
and attractive for university professors to use it.
One of the features we would like to introduce in the system is a facility
to edit a multimedia document easily. It is only human on a lecturer's
part to make some wrong statements in a live lecture. All lecturers would
like to edit their multimedia lectures in order to remove such mistakes
from their presentation recordings in order to provide a correct and polished
version of their lectures to an off-line audience. Currently the AOF-system
allows one to edit a multimedia document, but the process is slow and tedious.
This is due to the fact that deleting a part of the audio stream makes
the white-board stream asynchronous with the audio stream. Hence, it is
necessary to edit the white-board stream carefully to make it synchronized
again with the audio stream after such deletions.
A simple and easy to use tool would make this editing simpler and then
if necessary, a lecturer would be able to edit her recordings with relative
ease. We are currently working on incorporating such an easy editing facility
in the AOF-system.
7 Future plans
The ultimate aim of virtualizing university courses is the creation
of a virtual university. The students will be able to choose their courses
for study from a wide range of available virtual courses to complete their
curriculum. However, the creation of a virtual university of this kind
is by no means easy. Though we are convinced that students would like to
have a facility to study off-line and to choose their courses according
to their interests, there are several issues related to university teaching
and administration that need to be changed. This requires a rethinking
of the way present day universities and professors teach their courses
and give credit to the students for passing a course.
If a student takes a course not from her own university where she is
enrolled, she must be certain that she can use the credits earned in the
course for her academic record. Currently, this is no problem, because
either courses are purely local (though they may incorporate multimedia
material produced by a colleague from another university), or they are
offered under the joint responsibility of several university teachers,
each one responsible for the accreditation of the course at her university.
However, for a virtual university evolving from traditional universities
to be accepted by students, it is absolutely necessary to assure that credits
students earn at some university are accepted at the others in comparable
curricula. This requires a consequent modularization of studies and the
implementation of concurrent tests instead of punctual examinations. The
principle `who teaches also takes the examination' has to be implemented
and accepted, a principle which is at least partially against the German
university tradition. That is, a university teacher has to accept that
a student has the freedom to choose from different offerings for the same
course; she cannot force a student to take her own course simply because
she will take the (final) examination.
We noticed that the exchange of lectures in the synchronous teleteaching
scenario is not widely accepted. Teachers see an imported course as a competition
for their own offerings and they want to avoid this competition.
Therefore, the exchange of courses between universities seems to work
without any problems only in those (rare) cases where they contribute to
an enlargement of the spectrum of courses at a site where no local competent
teacher for the respective subject is available. Students, on the other
hand, appreciate this possibility of enlarging their spectrum of courses.
They are willing to accept even technical deficiencies in the transmission
technology, if this is the only way of acquiring the desired knowledge.
Joint research seminars, however, are a widely accepted form of inter-university
cooperation in teaching. The preferred method to run such a seminar is
the synchronous teleteaching scenario. Our experience shows that it is
mandatory to explicitly introduce the participants of such a seminar into
the tools and, furthermore, to formulate the appropriate way of using the
available tools explicitly as an additional teaching and learning goal
of such a seminar.
The development of multimedia modules of relatively ne granularity (like
a single animation or simulation, a few interactive web pages) makes slow
but constant progress. Our project partners in other German universities
share the experience that the production of multimedia content of high
quality is fairly time consuming and takes much more effort than estimated.
Most of the project partners plan to contribute to a repository of such
modules (stored in the ARIADNE knowledge pool system) which then can be
used by all members of the universities during their (traditional) lectures.
The method of recording whole courses by a note-taking system, like the
AOF-system, will probably be restricted for the near future to computer
science and closely related areas. We have done the first serious experiments
to teach a (recorded) course in a hybrid manner, that is as a mixture between
live lectures and tutorials accompanying recordings distributed to the
participating students. So far students mainly take the recordings of lectures
as a very convenient way to prepare themselves for the final (punctual,
oral) examinations. We recommend the reader to check the list of recorded
lectures and to install some of them locally in order to get an impression
of what is already available [see Viror (2001)].
It seems to be clear that any change of the traditional teaching and
learning method at German universities into the direction of time and space
independent, teacher independent, self-paced learning requires a change
in the teaching and study behavior of university professors and students
alike.
Acknowledgements
This work was done when the first author was on study leave from the
Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering, University of
Western Australia and working as a visiting professor at University of
Freiburg. The first author's stay at University of Freiburg was supported
by a grant from DAAD.
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