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Two-way Audio

Perhaps the most widely advertised interaction method with video is one where the video itself is not interactive, but where phone connections are provided to the central institution for interactive capabilities. Sometimes this is referred to as one way video, two way audio. This strategy, for example, was followed for several of the Star Schools projects. It will soon be possible to use video channels for this two-way communication, but this use may be expensive.

There are at least two variants of this strategy of two-way audio, the on-line variant and the off-line variant.

1. On-line audio interaction

   In the on-line variant the video is being given live, through satellites or cable. Students then in their own homes or in other locations are watching the video but also have phones available. It is possible then to phone the remote location at a given time, and thus receive directly an answer to a question. When this is done everybody watching the program also sees this question being asked and hears the answer to it. It resembles the kind of questioning seen with telephone in standard video, such as the CNN programs of this type. If many students call in, the lecture will proceed very slowly, so problems increase with the number of students involved.

2. Off-line audio interaction

   The alternate strategy for interactive video is the off-line strategy. Here the video and the questions are no longer directly connected. The remote students phone in at any time. The questions are not heard in the video. We do not force everyone to listen to a question that may not be of interest to them, perhaps because they already know the answer. The video can be recorded and viewed many times.

Both of these strategies have major problems as the numbers of students increase. The Star Schools project envisions that programs would be broadcast via satellite over very wide areas of the country, so that thousands or hundreds of thousands of students might be involved in taking a particular course. But the proposers did not develop a clear view of what kinds of resources would be necessary for supplying high levels of interaction, beyond the initial trial projects.

Only a limited type of feedback can be supplied by this interaction method, the kind that comes from students questioning. Students may not understand what their difficulties are. One often hears, particularly in science courses, students say that they understand everything but they just can't work the problems! Socratic methods are more successful in probing what the student is doing, and what the difficulties are. Furthermore Socratic methods allow discovery based approaches. So with both approaches the interaction is of poor quality.