Remote IT education for senior citizens

Information technologies (IT) have great potential to improve the everyday lives of senior citizens, but their lack of skills prevents them from exploiting the possibilities. Skilled seniors can effectively teach unskilled seniors based on their deep understanding of the barriers and needs of their generation, but skilled seniors are scarce. Distant learning methods could be a solution, but their unfamiliarity with IT and strong preference for face-to-face learning are challenges. To make the distant course closer to the face-to-face experience, we developed a remote education system with real-time gesture visualization integrated with multiple audio and video streams between the teachers and learners. In this paper, we will introduce our remote course system and the course design, and then report results of the trial remote course approach.