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Case Study
VoIP for Synchronous Learning
3/1/2007
The challenge facing every online instructor and every university that supports an online curriculum is creating engaging materials that make online courses more than glorified textbooks with links and e-mail. Adding personality to our classes and drawing students into articulate and considered conversation on an academic topic is an ideal we all strive for, whether the discussion is in a discussion thread asynchronously or in the classroom face to face. At the University of Advancing Technology, bringing new technologies to education, whether online or on campus, is encouraged and experimentation in new teaching technologies is supported by the IT department.At UAT, a new challenge has emerged. One of the faculty was delivering a pilot course in leadership using a commercial Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) and wanted to use VoIP technology to talk with her students during the "in game" portions of the entirely online course. As a small university, it is often easier to use commercial solutions than to design our own in house software. And it was certainly true in this case. As time was short, UAT opted to let the faculty member choose her own interim solution, specifying that it be hosted outside the university’s technology department for the moment.
Here is what she discovered.
There are essentially two general applications out there supported commonly by the gaming community that use VoIP technology. Normally these technologies are used to support large groups of gamers (typically 20 or more) that are simultaneously "raiding" and need more communication and coordination than can be afforded by text based chat channels. The first application is TeamSpeak (www.goteamspeak.com). TeamSpeak (TS) is a free VoIP application available for download for gamers who are using it for non-commercial purposes. Teamspeak provides both server and client software for download. For the University, Teamspeak would very inexpensive, approximately $0.14 per user per month for up to 1,000 users. With TeamSpeak, a decent sound card on the client machine, solid Internet connectivity with the server, and a good headset/microphone combination, VoIP was easy to achieve for the course in question. However, as the course was being hosted remotely, and students were using their home machines, a quality sound card could not be guaranteed, and therefore clarity of sound on Teamspeak seemed to suffer.
Based on this, the second inexpensive VoIP solution, Ventrilo (www.ventrilo.com), emerged. Ventrilo is free to non-commercial users who wish to support less than 8 users at any given time. Unlike Teamspeak, Ventrilo (Vent) already supports both Macintosh and PC users. Both server and client software are free to download. However, the course supported more than 15 students, so the free version of Ventrilo was not an option in this case even though the faculty member was supporting her own TS and Vent servers. However, space on Vent servers can be rented with a high-quality sound connection for 50 users available through a commercial server site for only around $10 per month (
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