This project was funded through the ARPA ITO (information technology office) from May 1993 through June 1997.
Principal Investigators.
Objective. Developing and testing Internet based training and education technologies in support of DoD distributed training initiatives continues to be the overall focus of the contract. We have tested the technologies in DoD training situations and made the results available for other DoD training efforts, college and university curricula, and K-12 schools. The experience from all parties involved is very positive.
Refresher Modules. Working closely with Defense Acquisition University (DAU), we designed two CNE tutorial modules for refreshers in high-school mathematics and college statistics. DAU uses them to deliver, to the desktop of those who are signed up for DAU cost accounting courses, refresher information on high-school subjects about which they may have become rusty. Each module contains clear statements of the educational objectives of each segment. Although many examples are taken from cost-accounting, the modules are of general interest to anyone wishing to verify his recollections of important high-school material. The modules are in the public domain. They contain self-assessment tests to to assist the student in assessing progress.
The modules can be found at http://cne.gmu.edu; select the "modules" button. This site receives between 4,000 or more "hits" per week. The site received an (unsolicted) 3-star rating from the Magellan rating service.
Module Authoring Systems. One of the objectives is to make the modules technology available to course instructors. The central concept for navigating a module is the subway map; the map organizes all the files in which module segments are stored. We are developing a subway map editor that allows an instructor to (a) draw a map representing the conceptual structure of the domain, (b) create sensitized icons representing subway stations that are linked to files for the corresponding module segments, (c) arrange the lines, stations, and colors for a pleasing and usable appearance, and (d) perform a consistency check on the links connecting the entire set of files constituting the module.
Testing and Assessment. Beginning September 1996, we concentrated our attention on technologies for testing and assessment. We built a subsystem including these parts: (a) an editor that allows instructors to prepare templates for test questions using both correct and incorrect algorithms, (b) a program that processes a template into a particular exam by substituting numerical values for parameters and computing results according to algorithms supplied by the instructor, and (c) a database containing all templates and student records, Even when tests are used for self-assessment, the database will record a student's progress and can give the instructor information about strong and weak areas of knowledge both for individuals and for an entire class, (d) a concept map editor that allows instructors to organize the concepts of a course into a network of interrelated concepts. The concept map is also used as mechanism to report on the progress of students.
CNELink. We completed the CNELink portion of the project in May 1996. CNELink was a set of 14 regional K-12 schools connected by ISDN with GMU as the hub to Internet. The schools used Internet facilities in their classrooms at an affordable $40/month ISDN rental fee, after the initial $1000 hookup. This task was performed in cooperation with the Community Learning and Information Network (CLIN). Once the schools were trained in the use of Internet in their classrooms, we assisted them to transition to commercial ISP's.
Milestones. Summary of Objectives for Spring 1997:
Principal Investigators.
Objective. Create hyperlearning modules that can be used in class to help engineering students learn about the design of complex systems or subsystems, and test the effectiveness of the modules.
Status. A library of eight CNE modules on various computer science topics has been created at http://cne.gmu.edu. The modules contain text, graphics, demos, and workbenches. The library of workbenches is also available stand-alone at http://cne.gmu.edu. The modules on virtual memory, interprocess communication, system performance modeling, and networking are used in classes. The workbenches on process synchronization, mutual exclusion, and producer-consumer relationships are used similarly. They have allowed the instructor to spend less class time on the topic of the module but give more sophisiticated homework problems over the material; students find the information and workbenches they need in the module.
Current Work. In summer 1996, a group of students started to develop a set of workbenches as Java applets. The workbenches, which illustrate various aspects of distributed operating systems, were used as teaching aids in several CS courses during Fall 1996. Constructing workbenches as Java applets is a major improvement; the previous approach was to run the workbench as a separate application in a separate window, possibly on a separate server.
In Fall 1996, some of the students worked the testing and assessment software, since we found that self-assessment tests are a powerful way to help students using modules assess how much they have learned and whether they are prepared for a formal test over the materials.
Overall Conclusion. The original purposes of the project were met by the termination date at the end of December 1996. We demonstrated that we can teach students concepts and principles from complex systems using on-line hyperlearning environments. We found that instructors can use the modules to augment class discussions, decreasing the amount of class time required on those topics and increasing the students' capacity to solve complex homework problems. We found that the self-assessment tests are a powerful aid to student learning and incorporated them as a standard part of every new module.
The workflow module continues to receive positive comments. Most of the comments come from industry people who are trying to learn more about workflow technologies. We are in the process of installing the new Action Technologies Metro system and for use in our offices and possibly our classes. One of our master's students, Sudhanvshu Pethe, completed a master's project in which he tested the Action Workflow Metro system (which provides workflow management from web pages) as a means to permit students of the CS department to register for graduation on-line.
The Sense 21 course was modified and approved as a general engineering course for seniors, ENGR 490, "Human practices of engineering design". As part of this course, students define projects that would produce innovations in their selected domains. Students work closely with a customer in that domain and design a software tool to support the proposed innovation. The purpose of the project is to demonstrate that innovations can be purposefully designed using methodologies discussed in the course. The student group Sense 21 consisting of the alumni of this course in the past have been active in e-mail conversations about topics of interest to them and in reading provocative new works about design.