RE-Tutor: an augmented reality based platform for distributed collaborative learning

Many ICT technologies have been used to develop systems to support collaborative learning. These systems are mainly developed to support interaction between users when they collaborate with each other to learn knowledge and solve a problem. However, there are many situations for collaborative learning in which geographically distributed participants play distinct roles and work together to produce or manipulate physical objects. For example, a teacher in a major city teaches a disabled child at a remote area; a remote tutor provides a tutoring service to a local student at home to finish an art or handcraft assignment; or more often, a teacher guides a class of students online through a series of activities in which physical objects are involved such as drawing a picture using different pens. In these scenarios, traditional learning systems may be limited since students not only need to see and hear their teacher, but also need to interact with their teacher to use or manipulate physical objects. In this paper, we introduce a novel system platform called RE-Tutor that is proposed to support this category of collaborative learning scenarios. In this system, while physically distributed, a teacher is enabled to talk to his students, see what the students are working on, and provide guidance information using hand gestures or annotations which are often needed for physical tasks.