Is TeleTeaching Tool (TTT) at Technical University Munich really helping students?

Like many of my peers at TUM's Informatics department, I have to rely on online resources. Yes, after my Monday's 8:00 AM lecture on "Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery", I find it really helpful to go on YouTube and listen to Dr. S. Srinath from IIT Bangalore, India, in order to get a clearer understanding of the subject (and also to get my assignments done).

This is nothing new. In fact, the whole education sector around the world is witnessing the trend of "class flipping." If you don't know what class flipping means, in simple words it is the paradigm shift from traditional "class based lectures" to students taking lectures online (at home or at mountain top) and going to university to interact with their fellow students and teachers to get an indepth understanding of the topic.

When we talk about "class flip" we usually think of online education resources like the Khan Academy and Udacity but many well established and prestigious universities like Stanford and MIT are also shifting from the traditional "class-lecture" model. In fact, these universities are using platforms like YouTube and Facebook to educate the next generation of students from around the globe.

So when I asked my fellows at Technical University Munich, which is consistently ranked as Germany's best engineering university, about "our" answer to MIT's OpenCourseWare, I was directed to THIS site. Yes, that's our TeleteachingTool homepage.


What's TeleteachingTool?

The TeleTeachingTool (TTT) is used for platform-mountain ripening recording, transmission or reproduction of live presentations, lectures about, but also multimedia documents with minimum restriction of teachers and largely automated rework.

 In other words, TeleTeachingTool is, sort of, git and moodle combined for online lectures. Sounds great in theory!

TeleteachingTool (TTT) was designed in around 2001. You run TTT inside Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Why IE? Simply because back in the year 2001, Microsoft's Internet Explorer was "world's default" web browser with more than 90 per cent share in the global browser market so it was a good choice to start with IE but unfortunately team behind TeleTeachingTool has stayed in the year 2001. (On a side note, IE's share has come down to around 22% of the browser market as of now.)

I can live with IE, no problem. My biggest issue with TTT is the usability and the user experience. Instead of making the whole learning experience simply and navigation really easy, the service leaves its users lost! Here is how I have to "use" TTT. I go to the "homepage" and click through many links to find the lecture that I was to study. I have to open "audio" in one tab and lecture slides in another. So far not too bad, right? We can live with two separate tabs. Now the major problem with the "slides tab" is that the TTT takes "algorithmic screenshots" with a corresponding audio timestamp. So from time to time I have to click the "audio tab" and check the time and go back to "slides tab" to see if I am on the correct timestamped version of the screenshot! That's really, really terrible. Just to add here, my personal experience with TTT has been much worse. Since my professor (like many other professors) have to "jump" back and forth on slides, this leaves my completely lost on TTT.

Since most of the teaching material (lectures, slides etc)  from Distributed Computing's chair at TUM are openly available, I wonder why not just switching to, say, YouTube?

I am not saying that the teleteaching tool is really bad for ALL scenarios, but it surely doesn't fulfil the requirements of students and this is what I get to hear from most of the students at TUM. So the answer to, "Is TeleTeaching Tool (TTT) at Technical University Munich really helping students?" is a big NO.

My verdict on TTT:

No To TeleTeachingTool.

The TeleTeachingTool, being used at the Technical University Munich, is probably the most pathetic piece of software used by TUM students. In fact, TeleTeachingTool is second worst online service that we use at TUM, first one being TUM's student portal (Campus portal and Moodle).





In the case of Technical University Munich, we don't have a "full class flip" (yet) but we are in the process of getting there. So if you are thinking of ditching classes and going completely "online" with the teleteaching tool here at the Germany's premier engineering university, I suggest you think twice.