2.1.2 Instructor Tool Overview

By utilizing the E-Class application an instructor has administrative capabilities over all of the tools. If the instructor decides to make classroom presence mandatory the attendance roster tool automatically tracks each student and makes note of whether they attended locally or remotely. This allows professors to enforce a rule effortlessly when normally this rule is very hard to enforce.

Additionally, the instructor can help complement the course curriculum by using the whiteboard tool. The instructor is able to pick a particular layer from a student and present this layer to the entire classroom. This enables students/instructors to share visual concepts to the rest of the classroom which provides a foundation for a reinforced learning environment.
Also, the E-Class offers instructors the ability to communicate with students in real-time. Instructors could begin the class via the chat tool with a greeting followed by administrative announcements that notify the class of all upcoming events at the beginning of the class. This also offers professors the ability to answer questions during a lecture without the difficulty of having the entire class hear the question.

Finally, the main focus of the E-Class is to provide the instructor with the ability to present a lecture easily and efficiently. The E-Class enables the instructor to create, present, and moderate lecture presentations. Lecture creation is very simple for the instructor and functions include basic creation commands such as slide break, insert picture, etc. Students have the ability to navigate the entire lecture so the instructor are able to synchronize the entire class on his current slide. This enables the instructor to choose whether the class follows his lecture slide for slide or whether students have the ability to refer back to previous slides or look forward to upcoming slides. The figure belows the default Instructor user-interface.

Figure 1: Default Instructor User Interface

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