What Used to Be

There are number of students queuing up for consulting with the lecturer to clarify doubts before the exams and tests. As the questions and answers in subjects like physics and maths involve writing lots of equations and drawings, students and faculty preferred face-to-face sessions. Some solutions need to be progressively developed in collaboration.

Problems We Identified

• Replying to student questions by mail/in forum involving equations is very time consuming.
• Current tools that partially address the issue requires installation of bulky software, have steep learning curve, are not available on all platforms.
• There is no good tool to collaboratively develop a solution involving writing of equations.

What We Did

• Develop a whiteboard system that runs in browser (pc, laptop, tablet, phones…) without requiring any plug-ins to be installed.
• Keep the system simple yet allowing whiteboard drawing, recording, basic editing in a time-line and exporting to video.
• The system features both off-line collaboration and real-time collaboration.

How This Helped

• Very effectively reduced the number of students aproaching a lecturer before exam and long waiting hours for their turn for personal consultation.
• Effectively reduced the face-to-face sessions of project group presentations in our courses. Group presentations were done through showntell and shared with the TAs/lecturer for grading.
• In addition, it is used to record presentations and collaborate during e-learning weeks where classroom setting is abandoned.