Virtual Classroom Design
Georgetown University approached my team with what, at the time, seemed like an impossible challenge. The McDonough School of Business wanted to offer online degree programs without sacrificing the core of their pedagogical identity, which was the “case method.” Every week, students join a case discussion with their professor. Students must read the case in advance and come prepared to offer insights, solutions, and defend their positions. Professors “cold call” on students who must extemporaneously perform in front of their peers. Needless to say, in pre-pandemic America, this type of web conferencing experience was not only not common—it was virtually impossible given the tools available at the time.
One of my personal adages is that “Nature is the best designer.“ This is based in the fact that the human brain is one of the most, if not the most, elegant and powerful designs in the known universe. It came about through a process of what Darwin called “Descent with modification”, which we now refer to as “Natural Selection.” This means that, in order to produce the most effective design, the best approach is:
Take something that is already proven to work well
Combine it with a small change (preferably from something else that already works well).
For example, the eukaryotic cell evolved from a symbiotic relationship between two prokaryotic cells—two systems that already worked well enough on their own combined to create an emergent system whose complexity and benefits exceeded the prior system. Nature designs not by “innovation”, as matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. Nature designs by remixing, for lack of a better term. So, when given a design challenge to bridge the gap between the physical classroom and the tried and true case method and the emerging digitization of educational delivery, we took a page from Nature’s playbook.
Much of my work for the prior decade had involved the now nearly defunct Adobe Connect platform. Unlike any other web conferencing tool, Adobe gave admins the ability to control end user devices as a result of having been built on Flash player (now deprecated). I was acquainted with a company called Refined Training whose genius founder Terry Shane had built, among many other interesting things, a set of Adobe Connect “pods”—lightweight applications that could run inside the Connect web conferencing experience. One of these pods was called “Talking Stick”—it allowed meeting hosts to control end user microphones and cameras, to toggle on or off. This nifty tool gave a web conferencing hosts the sorts of flexibility typically only available to a producer in a TV truck. “Turn on Camera One, switch to Camera Two”, etc.
Refined Training also had a proctoring tool that would allow Adobe Connect hosts to run a web conferencing session to monitor student cameras in order to detect possible academic honesty violations. This tool included face-tracking and similar tools to automate the proctoring process. So, taking a page from Nature’s book, I asked the team, “What if these technologies were not three separate, unrelated things, but were actually one coherent system?”
The meeting host could, as a result:
Launch interactive presentations using native meeting platform tools
Control media presented to the session, including end user cameras, mics and presentations
Have real-time attention tracking to show the professor a heads-up display of who was or was not engaged
The result was “Vantage Point”, a virtual classroom tool that was about a decade ahead of its time. Above you can see some early photos as I produced Vantage Point sessions for MSF Live in the old studio that we had on the first floor of the the Hariri Building at Georgetown. This technology is still in use today at Georgetown’s world-leading program. It was also the inspiration for the Harvard Business School’s HBX Live studio, a multi-million dollar project to build a dedicated physical space to accomplish what my team and I were doing for a small fraction of that cost using technology that was portable.
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