Deaf-education departments find new uses for online videoconferencing
In a computer laboratory here one recent afternoon, four high-school students are deep in excited, one-on-one conversations with tutors.
One girl laughs and, a few minutes later, asks her tutor for help with math homework. Two boys mug a bit for one of the tutors.
But each is silent.
They are students at the Delaware School for the Deaf, and their conversations with their tutors, deaf-education students at Valdosta State University, in Georgia, are conducted in sign language, transmitted by Internet videoconferencing.
In the small but comfortable Delaware computer lab, the students sit in front of Dell computers equipped with Webcams while a technical-support staff member hovers nearby. The school’s network is connected to that of the nearby University of Delaware, through which the computers connect with machines on the Valdosta campus, also equipped with videocameras.
Many afternoons, the Delaware students come armed with assignments in high-school mathematics, science, history, or the like, and the Valdosta students help them figure out their homework. On this afternoon, however, most of the Delaware students are simply enjoying face time with their tutors. One pair, for example, chats about March Madness.
The distance-education setup is one of a small but growing number of uses of high-speed Internet connections to aid in instruction for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Online videoconferencing, used for a variety of educational purposes such as translation and monitoring student teachers, provides new opportunities for education students to hone their skills while giving deaf high-school students practical help.
"We’re not ‘just having fun,’" says Vivian Smith, a science teacher at the Mississippi School for the Deaf who relies heavily on online videoconferencing. "Education is happening. Learning is happening."
Such projects also underscore the potential payoff of investment by colleges in advanced networking, such as Internet2’s high-speed network and the National LambdaRail fiber-optic network. But at the same time, technical and bureaucratic problems pose challenges to using the networks effectively for deaf education.
‘A Great Experience’
In the tutoring arrangement between Valdosta State and Delaware, videoconferencing software allows each student and tutor to see live video of one another in one window on their screens and to see themselves in a second window. A text window is available for typed messages between the two.
For tutoring help, the Delaware students fax worksheets from their textbooks to the Valdosta State computer laboratory. Using the worksheets, the Valdosta State students tutor the Delaware students and help them complete their homework.
"It’s a great experience," says Erin Burns, a senior in sign-language interpreting at Valdosta State. "It makes us ready for our professions."
Online tutoring is not the only way universities use videoconferencing to teach future instructors of the deaf and hard of hearing. Valdosta has also tested it as a way to help sign-language students polish their skills as long-distance interpreters.
For example, a deaf college student might bring a Webcam-equipped laptop into a class being taught by a speaking teacher. At a distance, the interpreter watches and listens to the lecture and translates it into sign language, which the student watches on the laptop. The student can follow the interpreted lecture, ask questions, and participate in the discussion.
The technology can also be used to supervise student teachers for the deaf and hard of hearing. The instructors often teach in schools far from the universities where their faculty supervisors work. Sharon Baker, an associate professor of deaf education at the University of Tulsa, works three and a half hours away from the Oklahoma School for the Deaf and four hours from the Kansas School for the Deaf. Such distances make it difficult for her to travel to see her students in the classroom, she says.
But by stationing a videocamera in a student’s classroom, Ms. Baker can see how the student performs, from her office in Tulsa. After a while, the students take no notice of the camera, making it less intrusive than visiting the classroom in person, she says. "I love doing it remotely because I feel I really get a sense of classroom management."
Sometimes high schools collaborate among themselves using videoconferencing, such as with a recent classroom biology experiment about the movement of the human eye. Working with other deaf high schoolers through the Internet gives deaf students practice in communication and presentation skills, says Ms. Smith, of the Mississippi School for the Deaf.
Connecting to others at a distance also exposes students to the diversity of sign language, which varies a little from region to region. For example, people use different signs for "volcano" in different areas, says Ms. Smith.
Faculty members in deaf-education programs also use the technology to build a sense of professional community. There are about 70 such programs in the United States, says Ms. Baker, but most of them have only one or two faculty members.
Nagging Glitches
There are challenges in pairing college tutors with high-school students. One problem is that each institution has its own academic calendar and daily schedule. For example, classes at Valdosta State end in early December and do not resume until early January. During that period, no Valdosta State students are available to tutor the Delaware students.
And the class schedule is different at the two institutions, so the tutors could be forced to rush off to their next class even though the high-school students don’t have to. That problem can be exacerbated if the institutions are in different time zones.
Technology can bring its share of problems, too. One is the increasing penchant for schools to erect fire walls, or gateways to their computer networks that block unauthorized traffic into or out of the school’s network. While fire walls are important for cybersecurity, they can slow down or block videoconferencing.
A fire wall can be configured to permit videoconferencing, but computer technicians need to be told to do so and given enough notice. It is wise to attempt a dry run to see if the fire wall causes any problems, says Richard S. Sacher, manager of research and data-management services at the University of Delaware, which provides the school with part of its Internet connection.
At two schools in Georgia, the videoconferencing won’t work at all, says Nanci A. Scheetz, an associate professor of special education and communication disorders at Valdosta State. That means the students must have broadband connections at their home computers in order to participate in videoconferences. "Fire walls are a big issue," she says.
Bandwidth can be a major problem, particularly on the secondary-school side. Ideally, Mr. Sacher says, every person in a videoconference should have a connection that can carry 768 kilobits per second, or 14 times the capacity of a typical dial-up connection.
But very often, secondary schools have slower connections, using one connection of only 1,000 kilobits per second for all their online activities. Consequently, videoconferencing is often plagued by jerky video and "tiling," or the loss of parts of the image due to interference, which makes it hard for students and teachers to see what others are signing.
In Delaware, the state government is increasing the amount of bandwidth at public schools to 10,000 kilobits per second or more, which relieves the problem, Mr. Sacher says. Thanks to the Delaware School for the Deaf’s high-speed connection to the University of Delaware’s network, the school can reach Internet2’s Abilene high-speed network in Philadelphia, which lessens some congestion problems.
Internet congestion can disrupt videoconferences, especially in the afternoon, when the deaf students and their tutors meet online. At that time, college students are often returning to their dormitories or apartments to use peer-to-peer file-sharing systems to download music or videos.
On one recent afternoon, from the vantage point of the computer room at the Delaware School for the Deaf, the videoconferencing connection to Valdosta State seemed crystal clear, with sharp video and excellent audio.
But even so, glitches cropped up. One computer started rebooting itself for no apparent reason. At another, the video from Delaware suffered from a jerky time lag. Rebooting that computer seemed to correct the problem.
"It takes a great deal of patience," Ms. Scheetz says. "You’ve got to have good technical support."
Nevertheless, she exudes optimism. "This is, in a sense, in its infancy," she says. "I think we’ll only go forward."
By Vincent Kiernan
This article was taken from the Chronicle of Higher Education