Undergraduate education drives distance learning

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

Case in point: a seven-year-old required course for engineering majors, Problem-Solving with Computers. 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 in the course are taking part in a digital experiment, “engineered” by students, for students. The biweekly in-person lectures have been replaced with streaming video — viewing the lecture over the Internet.

Last summer, computer sciences and mathematics professor John Strikwerda and engineering physics professor Greg Moses 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.”

Another innovative bit of software is taking UW–Madison instruction far beyond the classroom, to the very heavens, in fact. An on-campus learning tool for undergraduates became a singular asset for pilots pursuing professional development, according to Sonya Brown, project assistant for instructional technology, distance learning and outreach in the College of Letters and Science.

The Weather for Pilots course, taught through the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, originally began as a series of interactive computer modules to supplement classroom teaching. Students were able to study and manipulate weather patterns and weather-related phenomenon on computer, and receive feedback on what they’d done immediately. This so enhanced their ability to integrate and process complex meteorological concepts that the modules became the one-credit online Weather for Pilots course, Brown says.

About 60 people have taken the class since it was re-introduced with the software last fall, says instructor Steve Ackerman, professor in the department and director of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. “Most of them are non-commercial pilots, but we’re pursuing the possibility of working more closely with commercial airlines and the Experimental Aircraft Association” in Oshkosh.