Digital Lecture Halls Keep Teachers in the Mood and Learners in the Loop

In the transition from traditional teaching and learning to eLearning, we advocate avoiding disruptive approaches. We claim that many virtual university and corporate university efforts worldwide try to showcase big leaps forward yet lack sustainability, suffer from in-vitro conditions, and leave behind the big mass of teachers. Our Digital Lecture Halls (DLH) project accommodates traditional teaching and learning styles, making them digitally available for computer assistance. It also reaches out to a large variety of computer-assisted methods and to accompanying new organizational and business models. Apart from this nondisruptive approach, DLH also focuses on large venues. In contrast to known electronic classroom efforts that are limited to about 25 local participants, audiences without size limits are supported in DLH. The first implementations support 150 and 1000 participants. The paper describes the general DLH approach and architecture as well as details of the learnersin-the-loop components.