Robert Devaney, College of Arts and Sciences Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Adventures in the (on-line) chaos club

Visit the The Dynamical Systems and Technology Project.

Tanya Zlateva, Metropolitan College Computer Science Department

Web-Based Graduate Certificate for IT Professionals - Design Choices and First Evaluation Results

Eric Braude, Metropolitan College Computer Science Department

Longitudinal Course-Based Learning Communities: managing asynchronous mutual support contributions by students and faculty across sections and semesters

This project attacks two problems that affect students and faculty, particularly part-timers. The first problem is the lost opportunity for mutual learning encountered by students who either live distantly from each other, or take different sections of the same course. The second problem is the need for part time faculty to maintain consistency and share teaching experience among different sections of a course, given by different instructors, during different semesters. The solution is to establish a contribution system based on the syllabus, organized so as to systematically accumulate knowledge about the substance and delivery of the course. The XML technology is exploited to provide the context of each contribution.

View presentation slides.

Hannelore Vanderschmidt and Ascher Segall, School of Public Health Department of International Health

Experiences teaching an online course, Design For Learning

Design For Learning, a course consisting of both face to face and online elements, provides the basis for this presentation and discussion by the course's creators, Hannelore Vanderschmidt and Ascher Segall. They will discuss their experiences and will demonstrate how they have maximized interactive learning on the Web via student-content, student-instructor and student-student interactions.

Drs. Vanderschmidt and Segall are currently in the process of modifying Design for Learning to be an entirely Web-based instructional program. Their vision is that the course will be valuable both to traditional students and to faculty members with teaching responsibilities. All students enrolled in Design for Learning receive frequent, timely suggestions and feedback on the Web or by e-mail. They are guided to design, deliver and evaluate their own competency-based course or courses. For more information, visit the course overview site.

David Whittier, School of Education Graduate Program in Educational Media & Technology

Sampling distance education theory, research, and course design

The Powerpoint slides used in the presentation are available online.

Jennifer Teig von Hoffman, Office of Information Technology Scientific Computing and Visualization group

The Access Grid and Synchronous Training

Presentations focused on the use of synchronous, Internet-based training technologies. First, Jennifer Teig von Hoffman (at Boston University) and Lisa Childers (at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois) spoke about the Access Grid, an ensemble of resources for group-to-group interactions over high bandwidth networks such as Internet 2's Abilene network and the vBNS. Leslie Southern and Steve Gordon then spoke (from the Ohio Supercomputer Center) about their experience with V.O.I.C.E. technology, a synchronous training technology for use over the World Wide Web.

All presenters' Powerpoint files, as well as references to other web sites and documents noted during the talks, are available on the Web.

The Access Grid Conference Facility at Boston University has been used for conferences, workshops, tutorials, lectures, and meetings. Opportunities exist for University faculty and staff to use the facility. Jennifer suggested that anyone interested in exploring novel uses for the conference facility should send her e-mail.

John Wiecha, BUSM Department of Family Medicine, and Kathy Schilling, Alumni Medical Library

HEAL (Heuristic for Electronic Asynchronous learning): An Instructional Design Model Applied to an Online Clerkship in Family Medicine

Jim Lengel, College of Communication

Building An Online Course

Jonathan Adams, College of Communication

Webcast Archival Project

Jonathan's and Jim's presentations were Webcast live and have since been archived. Visit the COM Webcast archival site and select "Et cetera/Special Events" to view the presentations. (The audio is a little shaky at the start, but quickly improves. Be patient)

John Ebersole, Metropolitan College

Teaching and Learning with Technology: Some Lessons Learned

View archived Webcast (requires RealPlayer version 8 or later; click here to download the free RealNetworks player)

Some notes on development of the streamed presentation (from Marny Lawton, the Director of the College of Engineering Office of Distance Learning): knowing the presentation would be about an hour and a half of straight discussion, the recording was encoded (compressed) and only a few key still images captured from the live video (this was also the reason why there were no special effects such as panning and zooming). Using only the captured images, as opposed to the entire video, cut the overall file size by about half, from 60 Mb to 20 Mb for the audio alone. When possible, this approach improves the necessary bandwidth required to play, and subsequently the amount of time it takes for the file to buffer (or load), on the user's computer. Instead of streaming the straight file, the audio and images were wrapped in .SMIL code thus allowing explanatory graphics and text. Using SMIL code means each component of the streamed presentation is itself streamed separately (images, slides, audio, video, and text) and the bandwidth that each requires has to be considered. The still images captured from the original video were high quality but too large in either JPEG or GIF format to consider streaming. GIF was selected as an image format as it is generally smaller in size than JPEG. The file size was then lowered further by optimizing for 16 colors for each image. Limiting the number of colors also lowers the image quality. Download time is then compared with image quality to arrive at an overall acceptable image quality.

Rob Schadt, SPH Office of Teaching Learning and Technology

Teaching With CourseInfo at SPH

Richard Mendez, Office of Information Technology

WebCT & CourseInfo Update