Funding is requested to create We Think!, a collaborative learning tool for distributed education. The tool will harness the bandwidth of Internet2 to enable multiple, concurrent, in-class collaborative learning exercises among pairs of students in distributed classrooms (or other non-proximate settings).

The design objective is to enable pairs of distributed students to perform collaborative learning exercises as effectively through personal control of voice, video, and data sharing as students who are physically sitting beside each other. Depending upon class size, there could be 15-40 or more of these concurrent student sessions at any given time, which will require the capacities and latency control capabilities of high performance networks (HPN) such as Internet2.

Inter-institutional courses offer obvious economic, academic, and strategic appeal for leading universities. HPN are creating technical feasibility, but new course support software is critical to bridge the technical possibility with the inter-institutional vision. The We Think! application bridges that possibility and vision.

The project will develop a student client (Figure 3), an instructor client (Figure 4), and server software for the We Think! collaborative learning tool. We Think! will serve as the founding tool for a suite of Internet2-based classroom-support tools. These new tools are needed for the Internet2-based Learning Environment for Global Electronic Commerce project (I2EC) (see I2EC Project Proposal Document) and the Graduate Alliance consortium initiative among leading public schools of business.

Students will benefit most when We Think! facilitates their interaction with students in another country, culture, or academic discipline. They will also benefit from their first-hand experience of taking a course that is pedagogically intertwined with a HPN.

Given that collaborative learning exercises are a widely used pedagogy in many areas of Indiana University, the tool will hold high potential for diffusion to other faculty and disciplines. It can provide faculty development opportunities as they learn how to migrate effective practices from traditional classrooms to distributed learning via HPN.

The project represents a pioneering software development effort for applying Internet2 to collaborative learning among distributed classrooms. While the underlying concepts of cable-quality video and shared editing presently exist, We Think! will embed them within the structure of a comprehensive collaborative learning process. It can serve as an Indiana University demonstration vehicle for showing how Internet2 initiatives are making real the vision for a world of inter-connected courses and students.