Differences

Meetings and classes in the LBD online environment are different from those in traditional meeting rooms and classrooms in many ways and offer a new type of learning experience.

The instructor doesn’t monopolize the conversation. Anyone can speak – even when the instructor is presenting material.

The ensuing parallel conversations produce rich and complex interactions among the participants.

There is no limit to how much a person can say. As a result, more information can be exchanged in a LBD online session than in a face to face meeting. During a course of several sessions, the participants become more skillful and the rate of interaction increases.

When the participants break out into small groups, the instructor can monitor in interact in all of them, breaking another physical law.

Archives of the sessions are stored on a server and available for review.

People are less shy about participating. Everyone’s voice is equally loud.

Higher efficiencies

Spoken information is limited to about 150 words per minute. In the LBD Environment, at the same time as participants view text and graphics, they can type responses. The posts are listed in the order in which they are received by the server software. The time stamp on the post is to the minute.  It is not unusual to receive 20 to 30 posts per minute of any word length.

An example of time compression is shown below. The figure represents messages exchanged in 30 minutes in the LBD LearningRoom. The portion that could have been spoken in a face to face session corresponds to the area colored red.

At a speaking rate of 150 words per minute, it would take 76 minutes to have the same number of words exchanged in a face to face session. The missing 46 minutes are represented by the blue area of the figure.

Efficiencies Increase with Practice

Writing, Reading and Comprehension increases over time for the group. As the two curves show below, the group as a whole can, over time (ten weeks in this example), increase the total content of their online discussion.  Analysis has shown, they become better readers by the end of the course, their writing improves, and their comprehension rate increases.  The net result is participants become more literate as they spend more time in the large groups interacting with other participants in the LBD environment.