Many HCI574 students are enrolled in the on-line version (there is also a on-campus version). Our experience with other HCI online classes suggest that some of the online students will "remotely" participate in a lecture as is it happens (using Adobe Connect) where the can ask questions via voice or chat. However, there seems to be a large part of on-line students who cannot remotely participate during the actual lecture and will watch the video recording of my 50 min. lectures (via WebCT) later (should those students maybe called "offline" then?) Because interaction with this "offline group" will be somewhat limited I've decided to link their participation part of the grade to lecture feedback via a WebCT "discussion" (journal), mostly to have a record of activity.
So far (end of week 1) my experience with providing the online part has been pretty messy. I'm new to this and am still trying to figure out the workflow and responsibilities. Zipping the lecture pdf "slides" and the .py source code and putting this bundle on WebCT helps but I don't know how to deal well with after-lecture updates.
I think we finally got Adobe connect to work for lecture 2 and I was glad to get a couple of live-online questions. I can only hope that everybody was able to watch the lecture in some form (via downloaded or streamed). I've recorded a vodcast (screencast) of an add-on to lecture 2 today, it seemed that it wasn't completely clear how to run the python shell and Idle and showing how to do that on Windows seemed the fastest way. Now I've got to figure out how to give the students access to it.
