Education Technology Research and Distance Education

Investigators: L. Dennis, G. Fox, C. Lacher Fox has developed a significant activity in technology to support education and training as part of his work at Syracuse and this thrust will also be a major research focus in CSIT. We will work with the FSU Office of Distributed and Distance Learning (ODDL) led by Chris Lacher, which has institutional responsibility for implementing an aggressive high quality program in distance education. For instance in 1999, there were 55 courses offered on-line at FSU to a total of 1800 students; this statistic is increasing rapidly and excludes “web-enhanced” courses. The combination of CSIT and ODDL allows one a synergistically partnership between deployment and research in this exciting area. The establishment of three state-funded positions to enable this cooperation and jump-start the research program in CSIT indicates FSU’s commitment to new learning environments. Fox hopes to continue his work with the DoD PET program and its program of course exchange with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). It will be natural add FAMU (also in Tallahassee) to our collaboration with Jackson State and Morgan State where at least one course has been taught every semester for last three years between Syracuse and these HBCU’s. This technology has important synergy’s with the problem solving environments discussed earlier with a Virtual University being considered as an education portal in contrast to a PSE as a computational science portal. In particular collaboration technologies like Tango Interactive from Syracuse can be used to support either the interaction between teacher, mentors and students or between collaborating researchers.

We intend to build a new research education infrastructure with the same advanced infrastructure as our science portals. On top of this general infrastructure one implements a set of special services to support education and training. These must support the special collaborative needs of education and distinctive services such as assessment, performance (grading) support, annotation. There are also distinctive “educational objects” – quizzes, homework, glossaries as well as the curriculum pages with appropriate hierarchical structure. These will need special XML support and here we will adopt local standards as necessary and evolve these as international community efforts (such as IMS and the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee) mature. We will of course pay attention to support for key capabilities such as displaying mathematics on the Web and standards for graphics where we hope to integrate the Power Wall.

This new distributed object based system will be designed to support curriculum material built in any web authoring system and specified either statically or dynamically (from a database). This simple statement is not easy to satisfy, as it requires unification of services such as those for customization, collaboration and events. This is a key research area as such unified services are essential for the basic strategy of allowing components from multiple academic and commercial sources. We will implement collaboration (needed in particular for synchronous lectures or support of “office-hours” at a distance) using the ideas briefly described for science portals. Assessment will be a particular focus where we build on the experience of ODDL and two recent Ph.D. theses from Syracuse.

The technologies described here will be tested in three distinct ways: use in CSIT courses; use by ODDL at FSU and finally use in outside collaborations such as those with NCSA Alliance and the HBCU network. This research thrust will make extensive use of the proposed pervasive infrastructure with the computational resources used for online programming laboratories (in current parallel computing distance classes at Syracuse, all homework is done by Jackson students using Syracuse resources and the VPL (Virtual Programming Lab) interface. As discussed above, we also intend to collaborate with NCSA Alliance to use science portals in education and this feature implies use of the compute resources in computational science education. One interesting issue is the possibility of effectively using hand held devices in classes. Our portals will be designed to allow this to be investigated.