Online Demos In-class demos now available online

There are a number of benefits from an interactive, educational digital tool that makes available the important parts of an in-class demo for use outside of class. Students and instructors can all benefit, both from the ability to review the demo at a later time and from a level of interactivity above and beyond what is available in a live demo.

Design students will benefit from the ability to review the demo at a later time by being able to:

• Attempt to duplicate what is taught in the demo outside of class, which they do not currently do.
• Avoid dividing their attention during class between taking notes, attending to the instructor, and attempting to internalize the demo.

Students will benefit from the interactivity possible in an online demo by:

• Being able to more freely ask questions of the instructor.
• Having other students’ questions (and the instructor’s answers) archived to refer to later.
• Having access to definitions of needed terms and links to further documentation about particular parts of the demo.

Design instructors will benefit from the ability to review the demo at a later time by:

• Being able to shift their focus from presenting a demo to the entire class to interacting more one-on-one with students, as they will likely have to spend less time going through the demo in class.
• Offering more extensive demos covering more topics than they have had time to cover using live, in-class demos.

Instructors will benefit from the interactivity possible in an online demo by being able to:

• Remind their students of the learning goals for each demo at relevant times throughout the demo.
• Easily see at what points during the demo that students have questions, and answer the questions so that students can see the answers when needed in the demo.
• Encourage participation and receive questions from students who normally would not participate in the classroom environment.

The interactivity possible in an online demo can give students and instructors opportunities that they do not normally have in a traditional classroom atmosphere. First, students often hesitate to ask questions in a traditional classroom due to social pressure and the presence of other students. In the online environment, however, students report that they feel much more free to communicate with the instructor. Online discussions frequently are more elaborate and include students who do not normally participate in in-class discussions.

In the traditional classroom, it would be difficult to conceive of how an instructor could archive students' questions and the instructor's helpful answers so that students can refer to those questions and answers when needed at a later time. However, this is an achievable goal for the proposed online demo tool.

When students ask questions during a traditional in-class demo and then note down the instructor's answers to those question, it can be difficult for them to remember precisely what the instructor was doing that prompted the question. Here again, the interactivity of the proposed online demo tool would allow students to have their questions connected to the relevant part of the demo, so that they can view exactly what the instructor is doing while at the same time viewing their questions and the instructor's answers.