DyKnow is a relatively young educational software company (launched in 2003) based out of Indianapolis. Its two products, DyKnow Vision (collaborative note taking software) and DyKnow Monitor (computer monitoring and control software), are currently deployed internationally in a wide variety of K12 and higher education courses and programs. As noted in a paper by its inventor, Dave Berque, a professor of computer science at DePauw University, who is now a member of the company’s advisory board, "the DyKnow system supports teaching and learning by facilitating four mutually supportive activities: collaborative note taking; classroom interaction; out of class review, replay and grading of classroom materials; and computer monitoring."

For Bostian, adopting DyKnow brought his talented and experienced teaching style into the 21^st century. It was the first time he used any kind of educational media in the classroom, and he "absolutely loved it." DyKnow Vision has become his new blackboard and chalk. Now, however, there is no eraser in his class, nor white dust, as the DyKnow software allows him to electronically display and annotate all of his instructional materials on each of his students’ Tablet PC monitors in real time. Plus, everything is archived on a server that students can access and review whenever they want.

For example, in his pre-DyKnow days, Bostian would spend a fair amount of time physically copying and carefully annotating diagrams on the blackboard for an in-class exercise and lecture on circuit analysis. The students would, in turn, copy the diagrams and annotations into their notebooks - all of which was time-consuming and prone to errors. Now Bostian has all of his diagrams and lecture notes preloaded on computer screens that he automatically distributes and shares with every student in his class. When he analyzes a circuit in class, he annotates it more vigorously than what he used to do in the past, writing down numbers and adding drawings on top of the diagram. "It’s a dynamic process of problem solving," he says. "If you were to see a snapshot of the final result, it would be hard to know exactly how, and in what order, I created it." However, DyKnow’s replay function allows students to review each screen in slow or fast motion, giving them the opportunity to review each step of the circuit analysis.

"I really like the process of them being able to play it all back step by step," Bostian says. "It allows me to pop up complicated diagrams on the screen, as well as bring in interesting graphics [that he could not do on the blackboard]." Additionally, Bostain says he likes another DyKnow function that allows him to pop up a blank screen, if needed, that he can write on and share with his students in conjunction with his analysis. "In other words, you go to class and you are prepared to teach one thing, and you find out that the students are somewhere else. Right then you can change direction and go where they are. I love that about DyKnow. It’s just like having a blackboard except that it’s making a recording, and you can bring in more things."

This notion of bringing more elements into the classroom to enhance teaching and learning is really what DyKnow is all about. For instance, some of the other DyKnow functions are more interactive and include the ability to collaborate on a shared whiteboard; conduct class polls; broadcast screens of student work among each other to facilitate special collaborations, including groupings, and the sharing of information; and more.

Director of Instructional Communications and Professor in the Department of Arts and Sciences at the Albany College of Pharmacy, Andreas Karatsolis, uses the DyKnow "demonstration" option in his Principles of Communication course, where students are taught how to write reports, proposals and reviews. In this case, Karatsolis gives individual students an assignment whereby they are required to broadcast to their peers in class their early workings of a literature review on herbal supplements, along with the sources of information they have dug up for composing the review. "They can do this very easily because I have given them the floor," Karatsolis says, adding that this exercise has opened up discussions in which newly discovered online medical library databases were exposed to students who were previously unaware of such databases.

Karatsolis adds that every student at the Albany College of Pharmacy is required to purchase a Tablet PC through its Mobile Computing Technology Program. Since adopting DyKnow in a variety of classes, students have been mentioning it in course evaluations as a tool they would like to see utilized in more of their classes, resulting in an increased adoption rate among faculty.

DyKnow President Laura Small says that DyKnow adoption rates on campuses frequently start out with a small number of faculty using it, and then it grows virally through students. "As students get exposed to it they will ask ‘why are we not using this in my Japanese class, my mathematics class,’ etc. Students often encourage expansion either within a department or across departments."

In further discussions about how expansion efforts are implemented across any given campus, DyKnow Chief Technology Officer Dan Sanders explained that many prospective DyKnow customers typically want to know more about the scalability of the DyKnow system. Sanders says that 50 to 60 percent of the questions that come in to his department are related to what kind of hardware and infrastructure are needed to make anything from a single classroom, to a set of classrooms, to an entire campus, DyKnow compatible.

"We designed this system to scale to any size," Sanders says. Customers have the option of buying into a DyKnow Application Server Provider (ASP) offering or running their own DyKnow server(s). "If you need one DyKnow server, that will work for a few classes, or you can put DyKnow on six or seven servers and run a large campus. So, we can size to almost any infrastructure," Sanders continues. "The other piece is that we generally will run on any infrastructure that is already in place when it comes to communications. DyKnow is a pretty low bandwidth application for what it does. When you see it in action, you think ‘Wow, that’s probably pushing a lot of traffic over the Internet.’ But we architected it so that it works great over wireless connections; it works great over the Internet."

As noted in the company’s literature, "the system architecture is designed to enable scalability and fast transmission over the Internet. The server infrastructure and end user installation, combined with standard Web protocols, make this possible. Using a central server also assures dynamic access to DyKnow Vision notebooks from any computer connected to the Internet, regardless of location."

The company’s current statement on pricing is as follows: "Pricing for DyKnow Vision and DyKnow Monitor is calculated per machine. All licenses are perpetual, allowing customers to use the software year after year. Support and upgrade fees are optional after the first year and can be low as 20 percent of the original software investment. When purchased as a bundle (Vision and Monitor), prices ranges from $25 to $90 per license, based on the number of licenses purchased (there is a volume discount). Vision and Monitor can be purchased separately. Such purchases are also eligible for a volume discount."