ENSC 805 Advanced Digital
Communications
Guide for Distant Students
This Is An
Experiment
Running ENSC 805 in distance
format is an experiment. No doubt we’ll
find better ways of organizing ourselves as a classroom or as a discussion
group as we work through the course.
Here’s what I see at present (before the course has begun).
What You’ll Need
1. A
headset with earphones and a microphone.
You should have a headset with earphones and a microphone to plug into
your computer. Make sure you have a
microphone – without it, your only way to ask or respond to questions is by
laborious typing in the chat window.
You’ll also need the headset for working with other students outside of
classroom times.
Another possibility is to use
the built-in speaker and mic in your laptop (although
those mics aren’t very good). If you do, you’ll have to set WebEx for push-to-talk (press <control> to talk) by
selecting “Desktop or laptop speakers” in the WebEx
tuning wizard.
2. Skype. Get a Skype account, so
you can work with other students. Skype allows the equivalent of conference calls, which is
useful for group discussions, and sharing of documents. I haven’t tried these features yet.
3. Microsoft
NetMeeting. Microsoft Netmeeting 3.01 is free and it’s a great conferencing
tool. Audio, shared documents, and
whiteboard – the whiteboard is very useful for technical discussions. Download
and install it. Common technical
questions are answered at support and there’s a good tutorial available. NetMeeting isn’t available for Vista, but it
works well in
4. Optionally, a stylus and tablet. To use
the whiteboard in WebEx or NetMeeting effectively,
you need either a tablet computer or an external stylus and tablet, like the 4x5 Graphire
from Wacom.
I’ve used a Wacom tablet for years, and I love
it. As a side benefit, you can use it as
your mouse, and say goodbye to sore wrist or forearm from mousing
too much. Drawing and writing with it
takes a little practice, though.
Using WebEx
Our lectures and discussions
will be webcast with WebEx. It has
become an industry standard, because there are no hassles with firewalls or WiFi access. It’s
also IT-staff-friendly, and is in use at dozens of major corporations. Links to get into the webcasts
are on the ENSC 805 front page – you just click the link, provide the password,
and you’re in.
For the first lecture, get
into the class about 10 or 15 minutes early, to let the WebEx
client install on your computer. There’s
no delay in future lectures, unless WebEx has a new
release.
How do you use WebEx? I prepared
this “One
Minute Guide” video for our webcast seminar
series, but it’s pretty much the same for ENSC 805. You’ll get used to it quickly, in any case.
Two specific suggestions:
o
If you use the
Chat window for comments or questions, make sure you send to “All
Participants,” not “All Attendees.” The
latter does not include the Host – that is, your instructor!
o
If your display
seems not to be following what the rest of the class sees (e.g., you can’t see
the presentation, or you know the instructor is referring to something not on
your screen), then go to the menu and click View > Synchronize my display.
Speaking of the webcast seminar series, you may be interested in our
biweekly series SFU Webcasts in Communications. Research topics, tech updates and tutorials,
all in communications and signal processing.
Submission of Assignments
Typing your assignment
solutions is, in my view, a waste of your time.
If your handwriting is legible, just scan your solutions, make a PDF,
and email it to me. If you don’t have
Adobe Acrobat, here’s a free way to make a PDF (thanks to Sarah McKee for the
suggestion):
(1) download
Open Office Writer from: http://www.openoffice.org/;
(2) scan pages of
assignment;
(3) start a new session
of Writer and import the pages of the assignment as picture files;
(3) Use the
"export as PDF" feature of writer to create a PDF.