Abstract:

Corvid-19 brings not only crises, but also opportunities. This paper talks about experiences on these opportunities when preparing for a bona-fide distance education course. For example, a plethora of emerging software supporting online education/conferencing wouldn’t have become widely used in such a short period of time. Among these “online education software systems”, there are three critical areas. First, online exams and quizzes may be considered fair with the online proctoring tool Proctorio. Second, video recording becomes eminent for remote delivery as an asynchronous or a synchronous mode with the screen capturing software Kaltura and video editing tool Camtasia. Third, distance education can be as accessible as face-to-face delivery with the assistance of web technologies known as Zoom. When we must admit that the list is definitely not exhaustive, these three areas are essential to the development of bona-fide distance education courses.

Despite the fact that these are quite successful and widely used software, it is still quite challenging for an instructor to adopt the emerging technologies for several reasons. Some software systems are limited by the current features; others may even require other “helping software” to “pave the road”. Other reasons may include a learning curve, software stability, user interface/user experiences (UI/UX), and software features. The road to the development of a bona-fide distance education course is indeed treacherous.

When these software systems are constantly updating, this paper shares the engineering experiences of adopting Zoom, Proctorio, Camtasia or Kaltura, and D2L Quizzes for the development of a bona-fide distance education course.
Section 1 talks about the introduction to the general issues confronting an instructor.
Section 2 compares Kaltura with Camtasia for the preparation of course material and activities.
Section 3 introduces the D2L Quizzes for the exam and quizzes preparation. A Python program was developed for simplifying the uploading a pre-existed Exams in Microsoft Word document to Comma-Separate-Value files.
Section 4 focuses on the delivery of course materials with D2L and Zoom.

Finally, the status quo of the Distance Education course entitled “Introduction to Digital Signal Processing” is discussed. As of now, the instructor certification, the course content preparation, and the website development on D2L have been developed and prepared to be publicized online via D2L by the end of year 2020. The future work includes the student evaluation and feedback about the course including the course preparation, the delivery, and the pedagogy.

Keywords:

Distance education software, online quizzes, online proctoring, remote synchronous, remote asynchronous.