Undergraduate instruction drives distance learning

Gregory A. Moses (11K JPG)

Technical applications and innovations that advance distance learning frequently come from grassroots undergraduate initiatives ... often with help from undergraduates themselves.

Case in point: CS 310: Problem Solving Using Computers, a seven-year-old required course for engineering majors. Until this academic year, the approximately 300 students in the class took it in person, via auditorium-sized lectures punctuated with small lab sections.

However, this year's students took part of the course in a digital experiment, "engineered" by students, for students. Instructors replaced the biweekly in-person lectures with streaming video, so students viewed lectures on the Internet.

Last summer, Engineering Physics Professor Greg Moses and John Strikwerda, a computer sciences and mathematics professor, led a dozen undergraduates who had taken the course in its lecture-hall incarnation in reorganizing it around new eTEACH software developed by Strikwerda, Moses, and programmer Mike Litzkow.

"The students shot the video, captured it in digital format and authored the eTEACH presentation," Moses says. "Today, the streaming video lectures are delivered through a Web browser and coordinated with PowerPoint slides, a dynamic table of contents and external URL references."