The Digital Lecture Board - A Teaching and Learning Tool for Remote Instruction in Higher Education

This paper presents a novel, integrated teaching and learning tool called digital lecture board which takes into account the requirements of synchronous, computer-based distance education. For almost two years, the TeleTeaching project Mannheim-Heidelberg has been using video conferencing tools for transmitting lectures and seminars. These tools prove to be insufficient for the purpose of teleteaching since they are not powerful enough to support team work, they are not flexible enough for the use of media, and are somewhat difficult to handle by non-experts. We discuss shortcomings of the existing tools and disclose features we had in mind while designing the digital lecture board. Embedded in a teaching and learning system, the digital lecture board even allows for asynchronous usage modes, for instance, the preparation of lectures. Moreover, we cover implementation issues of the current prototype.