Collaborative Education and Distributed Learning
Proposal for PACI Activities

This activity joins two thrusts together; technology advances enabling the creation of 
networked based learning communities and the increasing need for educational 
institutions to collaborate to produce curricula meeting the changing needs of students 
from K-12 through continuing education and training. This builds on existing initiatives 
of PACI partners such as those with the CILT center, EUFOTTET (Possible European-
U.S. initiative coordinated by NCSA) and the CRPC-NCSU MRA project. 

Distributed Learning Technology Integration and Clearinghouse
In the technology area, the role of PACI could be in identifying and packaging web-based 
education "solutions" (tools) which even for commercial products are typically not easy 
for teachers and educators to identify and use. These tools could include systems such as 
WLS and Tango as discussed in detail at recent MRA San Diego workshop and as well as 
the variety of systems evaluated by OSC (webED) and Prof. O'Keefe from UIUC. We 
will feature both synchronous and asynchronous tools. This activity could either start or 
work with the "clearing house" for such tools advocated by Barbara O'Keefe in her MRA 
workshop talk and in the EUFOTTET charter document. We would work with our PACI 
partners and organizations such as CILT (NSF Center for Innovative Learning 
Technologies) ADL (DoD's Advanced Distributed Learning) and IMS (Educom's 
standard setting activity in Instructional Management Systems) to identify tools, end user 
needs and requirements, and what is needed to integrate existing tools. We will similarly 
identify through partners appropriate "early adopters" who could use and evaluate these 
toolkits. Assessment would be an important component here that would naturally involve 
PACI partners. We will of course work with NCSA ET teams B (distributed systems) and 
C (data and collaboration) for they are working in areas such as Quality of Service, high-
quality digital video servers and collaboration.
(URL's for these technology projects can be found in 
http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/petcandt/index.html.)

Curricula Development
The second activity is packaging innovative leading edge curricula for use with the tools 
identified in first activity. The tool activity is naturally quite broad and even if specialized 
to science and education could impact on education in a wide range of fields. However 
the curricula development should be focussed on those areas that are natural for the PACI 
i.e. computational science and Internetics. The curricula should span the full range of 
educational levels and should aim at spurring the integration of advanced computational 
techniques into the curricula of the core educational institutions. We suggest that 
collaboration among teachers/faculty of multiple institutions is this natural way to offer 
students these new learning choices. As this project will offer material not already 
available, it should be accepted without too many qualms by educational institutions as it 
does not compete with existing classes. So we will integrate the curricula work with the 
first thrust by experiments involving collaboration between two or more institutions to 
deliver these courses. Initially we will produce CD-ROM's and web sites containing 
material but this multimedia asynchronous resource will be used in more interactive 
collaborative experiments using the packaged tools of the first thrust.
Assessment of the curricula will be important and one can use traditional methods used 
by educational institutions. However the electronic delivery systems will offer new 
opportunities based for instance, on logging of student access patterns.
There is opportunity to leverage between training and education parts of PACI and so we 
should encourage collaboration with leading edge and partner service providers.