Updated February 2 2000 SoW for Education Project Title: Education Outreach and Training Team - Learnng Technologies Principal Investigator: Geoffrey Fox Organization: Computational Science and Information Technology Florida State University 400 Dirac science Library Tallahassee Florida 32306-4130 Electronic Mail: gcf@cs.fsu.edu Phone:3152546387 Partnership: Illinois(NCSA) Goals Support the mission of EOT by promoting use and development of technologies that enhance learning environments. In particular, contribute to General EOT PACI Goals as follows: 1) Create broad national impact in education, government, science, business and society through systemic, sustainable, scalable programs. This is achieved as our work is at leading edge 2) Demonstrate the use of PACI technologies, resources and methodologies across multiple, diverse audiences by leveraging EOT and AT/ET/PACS thrust/team efforts. This is satisfied as we use ET distributed object and collaboration technologies. Our work is very consistent with and in fact an important part of Alliance roadmap. 3) Increase the participation of under-represented groups including persons with disabilities in PACI efforts and beyond. This we intend to address with specific projects in 00. Further existing distance education testbeds include excellent minority representation. Objectives and Processes 1) Develop learning technologies based on PACI enabling technologies and consistent with roadmap. Identify special features of EOT portals 2) Establish best of practice in all areas of learning technologies and in the standardization activities associated with technologies 3) Keep the PACI and outside communities informed as to best of practice with web pages and tutorials. Use this to integrate activities within PACI 4) Support and evaluate results of testbeds that use PACI or outside learning technologies 5) Evaluate and develop relevant (Internetics) Curricula Outcomes in year 00 1) Improved collaboration with and respect of education research community represented by CILT 2) Several successful demonstrations of EOT Learning Technologies 3) Improved collaboration between and mutual understanding of Alliance Learning Technologies team partners and between Learning Technology and other PACI team members. This will be focussed on identification of special EOT portal features and development of the portals themselves. Note EOT portals have much greater emphasis on "information" related issues and in some sense link issues present both the Alliance Intranet and science portals. Note NPAC is partnering with NCSA to develop both science portals, training portals and Intranet for DoD. We will leverage this for the Alliance. 4) Continued improved understanding of requirements and architecture of Learning technologies 5) Continued development of important testbeds 6) Further study of issues in learning technologies connected to UD/DA team 7) Improved curricula Deliverables 1) Definition of EOT portals consistent with Alliance roadmap; implementation of graduate education portal as an exemplar; tutorials on how to build portals for EOT and AT teams. 2) Attendance at CILT conferences and hopefully projects with CILT community 3) Improve and extend testbeds such as those illustrated by teaching at Jackson State. 4) Several tutorials at meeting organized by variety of organizations -- Alliance, DoD, NSF, Minority organizations (Jackson State and ADMI this year). Tutorials should feature multiple technologies and enhance collaborations and understanding among PACI partners. 5) Continue joint study with Trace Center built around cross disability learning technologies 6) Continue architecture studies and contribute to learned journals and conferences 7) Better Internetics Curricula Metrics The identified metric areas are covered by projects listed above. Numerical estimates will be gotten by explicit counts of event attendees, Web site hits and downloads of software. We have given these numbers in 99 report and expect increases both in downloads (as TangoInteractive becomes easier to use) and web site hits (as portals become more attractive). Attendance at events (measured at about 1000) is likely to be constant as already we participate in over 20 events per year. Budgets Current support is only in Florida State contract and implicitly at least in NCSA education group. It is recommended that this level be maintained and if possible further funds identified to support efforts that are collaborative among team members Risks 1) Technologies are risky in terms of both funding and concept. For instance work on Habanero and TangoInteractive is expected to decline and there is no clear agreed "best of breed learning technologies" 2) Alliance distributed object technology in ET is still evolving and there is no agreed strategy. Distributed objects are at core of learning technologies Partners Further partners are not recommended, as we have not integrated ones we have identified so far. Increased contact with commercial companies in this area would be very helpful. See http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/working/totalltech.html