CEWES NPAC Project

Distance Education for Curricula Enhancement at HBCU's

Vision: Distance education is likely to be revolutionized by the growing power of high speed networks and Web Software for delivery, preparation and teacher-student/student-student collaboration components of education and training. This impact will be important at all levels of education K-12, undergraduate, graduate, continuing education and institutional training as in the DoD. Currently there is very little experience as to what features of both hardware and software are important and it is probable that there is no one answer but different applications will have different requirements and varying success.

NPAC Positioning: NPAC has in TANGO and WebWisdom leading edge collaboration and dissemination technologies. Further the Virtual Programming Laboratory is a good prototype Web lab environment. Further we have substantial experience with computer Science graduate and undergraduate classes, Physics 105/106 undergraduate class, Living SchoolBook at K-12 level and Cornell virtual workshop collaboration for training in the use of the Web for education and training in many areas.

PET Projects: It seems clear that transfer of NPAC's Web based education expertise to the DoD fits the PET mandate and would be a natural PET wide project. The application of NPAC technology can impact both asynchronous (self study by student) and synchronous (teacher delivery) modes. Further it can be used both in MSRC training and education as well as in programs with the partnering HBCU's. The MSRC applications could be a model for much broader scale DoD training and so lessons learnt could be of profound importance. Again the HBCU applications are a model for how knowledge(from "leading edge research" Universities) in rapidly changing fields can be transferred to the curricula of educational institutions which are not so strongly coupled to research in these fields and so find it hard to keep their curricula up to date. Thus impact includes education in community colleges and similar institutions and will have broad national importance and not just confined to a few or all HBCU's.

Collaborations: Locally there is important collaboration with the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University as well as with university continuing education DCESS unit. We also suggest involving the Cornell Theory Center whose Virtual Workshop is currently best known model for asynchronous learning for HPCC technologies.

HBCU Project: Here the goal is not just to educate a few students better but to leave a lasting impact on the institution in terms of a better curricula and more knowledgeable faculty equipped with better Web based tools. This implies project must have committed involvement of HBCU faculty. The project involves three components

• Installation of appropriate networked multimedia PC's at HBCU's in full classroom configurations (at least 24(12) machines with one(two) students per node). Smaller clusters with identical base hardware should be present at CEWES, NPAC and other relevant places. These systems should be linked by high speed networks supporting interactive video conferencing as well as multicast of educational videos served from a digital video server.
• Ongoing enhancement of Tango, WebWisdom (and if involved the Virtual Workshop) to support the selected distance learning experiments.
• A set of distance learning experiments with sophisticated assessment task so that we can evaluate different strategic approaches as well as the technical details of the implementations. These experiments should start with Syracuse and CEWES and then involve the HBCU's as soon as inevitable technical glitches have been worked out in relatively low profile initial experiments. Once HBCU implementation starts, we suggest several different approaches could be tried with perhaps the different universities choosing to tryout different learning models. Important issues to explore include:
  1. Tradeoffs between synchronous and asynchronous delivery
  2. Role of professors at "client" site (i.e. HBCU) could vary from traditional synchronous deliverer to being a mentor for students with remote University (e.g. NPAC) delivering material.
  3. "Train the trainers" (i.e. professors at HBCU) versus "Train the Students" implementation.
  4. Importance of the exploratory aspect of learning which is naturally supported by Web-based approach.