Sponsors: Purdue University, Intel, AT&T, IBM
We have started a distributed learning research and development
effort to design technology solutions and methods which support
collaborative learning any time and any place. This project is
referred throughout as
Purdue-On-Line (POL) and it is currently
supported by Purdue University through a reinvestment grant and
corporations such as Intel, AT&T and IBM, and the Department of
Computer Sciences. The main research goal is to develop and
integrate the educational technology with supporting services
needed to enable existing courses, to design and deliver "virtual
courses" and to meet the growing demand for distance education. Our
first target area is freshman education and specifically courses
that involve large numbers of students currently taught in a
lecture-recitation mode.
We are currently designing and delivering a computer-programming
course (CS158a) for engineering and science students. The
associated material under development is multimodal and
customizable for the individual student. We are developing and
testing a learning paradigm and environment associated with this
course that i) puts the responsibility of student performance to
the instructors, ii) improve student performance, iii) decreases
the time to learn by at least 30%, iv) makes the course material,
produced in consultation with the best instructors in given subject
area, available in multimedia form on CD-ROM and Web "anytime" and
"everywhere", and v) delivers the course in direct, studio,
telepresence, and distance-learning mode.