Multi-Mouse Project ("A Mouse on Every Desk")
Neema Moraveji (MSR-Asia)
November 01, 2006
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This project is the first collaboration between MSR-Asia and MSR-India.
Started with the idea of helping schools in Tibet -- rural schools
that would benefit from learning resources at urban schools in Lhasa.

For scalability, it's much more efficient to teach the teachers rather
than teach the students.

Goal is to make real-time distance education:
- lightweight
- cheap
- scalable

No big benefit from showing teacher's video ("talking head") -- it may
help to cut down on bandwidth requirements, if avoided.

Context: Teacher and students are not in the same location; teachers are in urban
schools, while students are in rural schools.

Pedagogy: teacher asks rhetorical questions and gauges student level of
understanding based on the responses and the timing and participation of students.

Software intended to model standard ways of classroom communication: raising hands,
teacher getting ambient (audio) feedback, etc.  Teacher gets audio feedback when
students "raise hands", even when they move their mouses (indicating some activity).
Teacher sees the responses of all students.  At the same time, the teacher can 
trigger audio responses to student answers, equivalent to encouragement, grading 
responses, etc.

An underlying design principle of the current systems is that the students see exactly
what the teacher sees.  (This is even though in a real classroom there are things that
a teacher sees but students don't, or at least many of them don't.)

Another assumption is that the teacher designs the material ahead of time -- so
spontaneity of creating lecture material during class is not supported.

On the same machine, multiple students (or groups of students, if many students control
one mouse) can respond to questions at the same time, using one virtual (displayed)
keyboard on which they type.

There is a provision for anonymity, by hiding cursors -- and students choose one of
several possible answers by navigating to the respective corner on the screen (A =
upper left; B = upper right; etc.).

An interesting observation was that in this system raising hands by students was
used a lot -- unlike other systems offering such a feature, in which students didn't
bother raising hands but just answered.
One clue may be that students got direct feedback from the movement of the teacher's
cursor (a dark black) -- letting them know that the teacher had her attention on the
item pointed to by the cursor.  So, students wanted to attract the teacher's attention
by signaling with their mice.

Open questions include:
- free-form input (that is hard to do with a mouse)
- interactive, education TV
- collocated scenario

Q&A:
- Other input devices (besides mice) have not been considered yet.

- The use case of the system is mostly targeted to review sessions or sessions in
  which use of multiple-choice questions was effective.

- Evaluation was based on first reactions, usability, listening to comments from
  students -- much of it by observation and video recording in the classroom.

- Relative to the Digital StudyHall, the cost of this system comes from the monitor,
  a dozen or so mice and hubs, and -- which is important -- a real-time Internet 
  connection.  The latter assumes that rural schools are "wired," which is true for
  some schools but not for others.  (Historically, this project started as a "What if"
  question -- what happens when schools in Tibet become wired, which was happening.)

- A phone may be a good alternative to a transmission device -- from instructor to
  students and vice versa.  Part of the decision would depend on the country and how
  education issues are managed -- very top-down in China, while quite unstructured and
  inconsistent across various states in India.