Bringing off-campus students to the digital classroom environment: the design and use of MSIE system

Distance education has been around for a while and allows students and professors from different geographic locations to share and learn from each other. This paper proposes a prototype mobile synchronous instruction environment (MSIE) that allows remote clients to connect to an existing digital classroom environment (DCE). We explored different scenarios of using our MSIE and DCE systems and conducted a simple preliminary evaluation in a Masters level course. Some of the challenges and issues faced were discussed. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a gateway for outside sources to connect into the existing DCE classroom.