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.

 

Technology

Need to agree on/define important services including those needed to support assessment.

 

Assessment

Assess project itself and learning within project

 

External Review

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)