Discussion March 9 00
Dragovitsch Fox Lacher Tallahassee
Recent Contributions
Synergy with Initiatives of James Turner: African Continent and Mathematics
National Curriculum Remarks from Nancy McCracken
SURA University Learning Systems Interoperability Working Group from Joe Thompson
Letters that would be useful -- Discuss in kind contributions
Alan Mabe -- mention Fox role in FSU Distance Learning
Chair CS: FAMU and FSU
Chairs CS/Math -- other HBCU or MSI (Minority Serving Institution)
St. Petersburg Community College
Harris Corporation?
Oracle/IBM/Publishers?
International
Connection: Special Section of ITR
James Turner Initiative
GCF Teaching to China
ODDL Connections to South America
Education Issues
We need to show that our work is aware of and synergistic with work of schools of education. Suggest expanding discussion of assessment to "Educational Issues" with two sub-bullets -- Learning Models and Assessment. Show how our work relates to scholarly work in field.
LSI (Learning Systems Institute) at FSU relevant
Ian Douglas has background in Cognitive Science.
Carole Hayes in Assesment.
"Florida Test Bed"
We had a lengthy discussion of how to position work of ODDL. We decided that community colleges were part of the equation but currently community college and FSU curriculum were largely orthogonal. Community colleges like "Seminole" north of Orlando could claim to be better than FSU In many respects for early "CS" (Cisco/Microsoft certification) instruction.
So we decided that good focus was "Flexible Education" for students who took early jobs; internships and more generally needed lifelong learning. St. Petersburg community college was a good example of this model.
Curriculum
Here we discussed
· National Activity
· Mathematics
· Ian Douglas
· FSU/Open University Approach
In general, we suggested viewing our effort as producing modules that were typically smaller than a full course. These would be placed in an “educational object warehouse” which is a multi-license (from open content courses to proprietary) repository described later.
In proposal we need to define
We discussed the new FSU curriculum, which differs from a conventional “start with algorithms and write programs” approach. Rather it has an “objects first” approach with design, distributed systems and software engineering thread.
Educational Object or
Component Framework
Fox described the "napster informal distributed database model" – adding a hierarchical structure to this (napster/winamp/RealJukebox/MusicMatch) “MP3 infrastructure” appears an interesting model for education.
The SURA working group is interested in this area.
We will only use material compliant with either formal (IMS, ADL/SCORM) or local XML standards. The material can be HTML fragments, Java applets, SMIL multimedia nuggets. In general prefer “raw” formats (wav or mpeg) to low bandwidth (proprietary) codecs like RealAudio/Video.
Need to agree on/define important services including those needed to support assessment.
Assess project itself and learning within project
ODDL has a mechanism like “review of scientific papers” where one or more individuals is asked to evaluate a given course. Maybe we could do this systematically and budget travel and honorarium for this.
We suggested an external board – maybe we should get a chair to tentatively agree. Suggestions were Adele Goldberg (Industry) and Richard Tapia (Rice)