System for Interactive Online Instruction

摘要

Remote collaboration, particularly synchronous collaboration, between parties in separate locations can be enhanced by providing the opportunity for both parties to “write” on a paper medium or other surface. This is particularly useful in an instructor/student tutoring session. Both the student and instructor may have workstations with video conferencing and screen-sharing capabilities. Advantageously the student station can take advantage of a mobile communication device with a camera for imaging an object that the student may write on, for example, writing on paper with a pen. The instructor station may have an interactive whiteboard and a projector. Video conferencing capabilities are used to transmit an image of the student writing to the instructor which image may be displayed to the instructor through projection onto an interactive whiteboard surface. The interactive whiteboard allows the instructor to “virtually” mark the projection of the paper using for example a stylus and an infrared sensor. Annotation software at the instructor's station creates a representation of the instructor's “writing.” The annotation software also may add the representation of the writing to the instructor's projection. The representation of the writing and the representation of the image are provided to the student station by the screen-sharing software and the combined document image and annotations may be displayed to the student creating the effect of the remote instructor writing on a paper locally imaged by the document station.