CASE STUDY
Growing Student Enrollment & Tuition

USING REAL TIME COLLABORATION
Fall 2004
By Larry Tuck
Elearning!

With state tuition revenues falling by 50%, a german college had to attract more students while reducing teaching costs. “Our data showed that most of our students came from within thirty kilometers of campus. To extend our reach, e-learning was the logical solution,” says Dr. Herbert Müller Philipps Sohn, Head of education at FBD Bildungspark GmbH (FBD).

FBD’s vision was of an interactive, customized e-learning system that integrated with its existing IT environment. The solution needed to enable students to learn and share ideas, regardless of where they were located. Under the auspices of the German government’s LERNET project—FDB and BTB reviewed various e-learning solutions including NetMeeting. “We narrowed the choice to IBM pretty quickly.We wanted to create an interactive environment similar to our real classrooms and Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing offered us a highly customizable interface with rich functionality,” says Dr. Müller Philips Sohn.

CREATING THE E CLASSROOM
Today, Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing powers classroom sessions in which students see whatever is on the instructor’s screen—whether a presentation, a document, an applications, web site or whiteboard- interactions are conducted in real time. This capability together with instant messaging enable the instructor to conduct a class that closely simulates the traditional classroom. With instant messaging, instructors can poll students on a questions or issue, just as they would with a show of hands. During whiteboard sessions, the instructor can hold an open discussion, enabling students to annotate thoughts. Classes proceed in an orderly manner with the software’s built-in hierarchy giving the instructor the authority to pass control of the discussion to another. For instance, if a student has a presentation to give, the instructor can temporarily pass control of the virtual meeting over to the stu- dent, and the class sees what is on that student’s screen. The instructor can resume control after the presentation.

ONE INFRASTRUCTURE
FDB did not want two different infrastructures, one for e-learning and another for administrative applications.

For an application server tomanager both, FBD reviewed portal solutions, as well as IBM WebSphere Application Server. They chose IBM WebSphere Application Server-Express along with IBM Web Sphere Studio Application Developer fordevelopment environment. “It provides functionality to fully support the applications for the virtual classroom at a price the not-for-profit organization can afford,” reports Peter Groth, CEO at BTB.

FTB now enjoys an end toend e-learning solution that allows instructors to leverageteaching tools such as presentations, live software demonstrations, discussions and tests.

THE OUTCOME
Just months after deployment, FBD is seeing program success. While reducing teaching costs 30%, the campus is able to offer more courses online with fewer administrative resources and to more students further afield on a schedule that is more convenient. Several Russian towns, for example, are looking to FBD’s real estate and other types of training.

As students enjoy lively interaction online, FBD continues to look for ways to enhance its educational programs. “We’d like to add new tools, for example, to provide students informal forums and study groups,” says Dr. Müller Philipps Sohn. For more information, visit www.306.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/csp/bemy-64fuuj

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