Contact:
Cass Brunner, UNT News Director, (817) 565-2108; [email protected]
DENTON (UNT), Texas -- A typical visit to a university might include talking with professors, interacting with students and checking out the library -- that is, after you travel to campus and learn your way around. But what if you could do all this from your home or office?
Two University of North Texas computer scientists are working on an innovative way to "visit" a university campus, as well as take classes there, all from a personal computer. Their three-year project, "The Virtual Collaborative University," has been funded by a $223,863 federal grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. The research will develop software and course materials designed to give students in distant locations access to the full range of educational activities available in Cyberspace.
Cyberspace visitors and students may not be able to sample the food at the dormitory, but they will be able to find information and even take courses. And the course design being developed for the Virtual Collaborative University stands to revolutionize the nature of student involvement in classes over the Internet. Dr. Kathleen M. Swigger and Dr. Robert Brazile of UNT's computer science department say that their vision is to create an educational experience that opens the way not only to a different method of conveying course material but also to mentoring students through electronic means.
Their focus is to allow interaction among students and teachers in a more realistic fashion than most current technology allows, Swigger says. Most current communication over the Internet is asynchronous, she explains. That is, one person will work on a project, then e-mail the work to another for review and additions. That kind of communication, however, is not conducive to the kind of group communication and interaction normally associated with the classroom.
So Swigger and Brazile are working to develop means of synchronous communication, which would allow all participants in a project to view what the others are doing as they are doing it. "It's the difference between receiving mail and having a conversation with someone. With conversation, there's an immediacy that you just can't get with any kind of mail, including e-mail," Swigger says. The system would allow students to work on class projects together even if they are miles apart, conduct research jointly and have group meetings among themselves and with the professor teaching the course. It also would allow all the students to see when questions are asked, what those questions are and the professor's responses, Swigger says.
"It really is designed to mimic the classroom situation as closely as possible. Only by doing that are we really going to be able to have effective on-line learning," she says. To read more about the research objectives of this project and view a prototype interface design, go to http://poseidon.csci.unt.edu on the World Wide Web. Swigger may be contacted at her UNT office, (817) 565-2817, or by e-mail at [email protected].
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