Understanding an Online Classroom System: Design and Implementation Based on a Model Blending Pedagogy and HCI

Computer- and Internet-supported education (CISE) has many advantages over the traditional face-to-face education, which has been part of the human cultural heritage for thousands of years. One of the key challenges of CISE systems is to accomplish augmented face-to-face interaction during the whole learning process by providing both comprehensive and well-coordinated functionalities to facilitate the educational activities of geographically distributed participants. In this paper, the online classroom model (OCM) is proposed to guide the design, development, and assessment of online education systems. This model is made up of seven intrinsically linked elements, including four learning theory-oriented components and three that deal with human-computer interaction. The OCM helps system designers to understand what underpins a successful synchronous CISE system from the perspectives of the learning theory and user experiences. An online classroom system (OCS) has been designed and developed under the guidance of this model. The OCS promotes augmented face-to-face interaction efficiently by providing comprehensive functionalities for real-time educational activities, auxiliary asynchronous features, and user interface coordination based on a front channel-back channel partition. An OCM-based quantitative analysis template is proposed and used here to evaluate the OCS and indicate its early success.