Sept 16 '97 meeting

# Crosstalk meeting on September 16, 1997

# Web-based Environments for Teaching and Learning

## Participants:

- John Williams, Dept of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Nishikant Sonwalkar, CAES
- Yunpeng Wang, EAPS
- Katie Livingston, Academic Computing

John Williams spoke about his project that seeks to institutionalize in a scalable way systematic support of large numbers of courses on the Web. He is concentrating on common elements that are necessary to supporting a course, such as registration, conferencing systems, ability to manage and post large numbers of documents, etc, using Lotus Domino as the underlying database. His project is not concentrating on the ccore ontent of the course.

Related URL's:

- http://rx7/~chidalgo/proposal
- http://monett.mit.edu/124/HomePage.nsf
- http://monett.mit.edu/100/Home.nsf

Yunpeng Wang spoke about the Geosys modules that are used to support 12.550 and the Profession Masters Program in EAPS.

Nishikant Sonwalkar described activities and services offered by the Hypermedia Teaching Facility in CAES

Related URL's:

- http://nish/Slideshow/
- http://curricula.mit.edu/

Katie Livingston discussed what other universities are doing in this area, and pointed to a few departments within MIT that are actively developing Web-based or Web-enhanced courses. She suggested that a group get together to develop a "requirements document" that accurately expresses MIT's needs in this area, to help us decide where resources need to be focussed.

Related URL's:

- Experiences of other universities
- Two comparisons of leading web course environments
  - http://www.ctt.bc.ca/landonline/choices.html
  - http://www.uiowa.edu/~centeach/nTITLE/environments/
- Critical analysis of use of the Web in teaching (questions to ask before beginning)
- What should an electronic learning environment have in it? (Mike Halm, Penn State University)
- MIT examples:
  - Wide assortment of MIT course Web pages organized by School and Department
  - An easy way to get started with help from the Faculty Liaisons
  - 3.091 and Material Science and Engineering
  - Mechanical Engineering
  - Educational Fusiion(6.837)