OpenRCT Home

The Open Remote Collaboration Tool (OpenRCT) is a multidisciplinary effort to enhance collaboration - between students working together, between students and instructional staff, and between researchers who are not co-located in time and space. OpenRCT is an Open Source platform-independent, multimedia tool that supports synchronous and/or asynchronous communication. It can be used for group discussions, collaborative assignments, collaborative research, and distance communication.

At the class level, users can view course content, which can be dynamically managed by an instructor to control which items are to be viewed. A user can also create a temporary "Group" as described below. Two types of interaction are possible: "Team" or "Group." In both modes, users can engage in live discussions involving multilingual text dialogues in any language supported by UNICODE; attachment of replayable sound messages; invoking a Web browser with a predefined URL on all screens; using a collaborative writing tool called Textpad for creating and editing text documents; or transferring any type of file for downloading.

In the "Team" mode, the instructor assigns users to a team. A Team member can join the team to participate interactively, either synchronously (If more than one team member is on line at the same time). or asynchronously, in which case the user can view archived records of all previous interactions. Temporary "Groups" can be created by any user, who then has control over who will join that group. This option allows for private conversations. Interactive options are as described for Team members, but archived material is not available for Group members (even though an instructor can review this material).

Features currently available in OpenRCT are summarized in the Features page, which also lists a number of features that are under development or in the planning stages at this time.

Current uses of OpenRCT include support of second language courses, group discussions in teacher training classes, virtual office hours in several disciplines, and extended discussions between administrators in several state agencies in California. Plans are being made to utilize OpenRCT in collaborative research involving large databanks of medical images.

Support for this project has been provided by the University of California, the US Dept of Education's Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), the US Army Defense Language Institute, Monterey, CA, and through equipment donations from Apple Computers. Other funding is pending.

The principal investigator of OpenRCT is Dick Walters, a professor in the Department of Computer Science. Working with him are Thomas Amsler, staff programmer for the project, several other students in computer science, faculty in several language departments as well as the UC Davis Schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, and members of the UC Davis Information Technology Laboratory Management group. For further information, send email to walters@cs.ucdavis.edu or tamsler@cal.berkeley.edu.