From: On Campus Projects To: Remote Projects

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From On Campus Projects To
Remote Projects
Jan Helbo, Aalborg University, 2000
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Why This?

• 25 years of experience in project organised
  problem based learning
• 10 years of experience in distance course
  oriented education
• Project work has proven to be very successful
• Merits Increased motivation, Improved
  collaboration, Improved responsibility,
  Industrial related projects

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Transfer of AAU model to new Master
educations(MII)

• The MII offers specializations in
• IT in Industrial Manufacturing
• IT in the Building Process
• IT in Control Engineering
• IT in Distributed Real Time Systems
• IT Network Maintenance

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Students (start 34)

• Already hold at least a bachelors degree or
  equivalent
• Are employed
• Have almost no spare time for studying
• Want to work innovatively with information
  technology in their professional life
• Have varying level of IT-skills

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Students

• Constitute an inhomogeneous group of people,
  regarding
• Age (25 56 years)
• Former education (B.Sc. in Electronics
  Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Building
  Construction, Architects, School teachers and
  others)
• Residence (from most parts of Denmark)
• Professional career

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Aalborg University model

• Courses 50 Half Study cources
  Half Project cources
• Project 50
• The Glue Seminars

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Interaction

• Distance education is normally one-way
  communication and self-study
• The project study form is based on collaboration
  and dialogue/discussions

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Pilot Project

• Make a Web site for your group, to present your
  projects and the group members
• The objective was to get experience with project
  and group work in distance education, and to test
  relevant communication tools (2 month)
• Learning approach
• Learning form

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Learning approach

• Very importent to reflect and correct
• The Cowan diagram has been followed

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Learning form

• Starting seminar (2,5 days)
• Reflection seminar one month later
• Evaluation and conclusion seminar at the end.
• Outputs
• Web site
• Project report (10-15p)
• Process report, very important(5-10p)

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Technology and Collaboration Methods

• A commecial program LUVIT platform for
• Course development and on-line courses
• Document handling for projects
• Collaboration Methodes
• Asynchronous communication
• Synchronous communication
• Face to face seminars

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Teaching Courses
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Course - Structure
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Course - Activities

• For each learning block

• Motivation (Carrots, literature, tools etc.)
• The lecture (the teachers words)
• Reading (books, online)
• Examples

• Problem solving
• Text (result delivered to teacher)
• Hints (the teachers help)
• Solutions. (on request)

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Course Implementation.....

• First i FrontPage
• Then upload copy to distance learning tool.like
  LUVIT.

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Teaching Courses
Teaching Projects
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Projects The problem

• Project room activities
• Discussions
• Documents bring up, review, approval
• Time planning
• Social affairs
• IF no physical group room
• THEN create a virtual one.

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Projects

• Development
• Document storage
• Version method
• Review tool
• Discussions
• Chat, Net meeting, News, Phone, email.
• Time manager
• Status for every document
• Deadlines
• Responsibilities.

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File manager

• Claus has reviewed V1

A person has released a new version V2
Claus has reviewed V2
? Overview, participants, deadlines ! Status
document.
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Time manager-status doc.
Document
Group members

• Online updating this status document.

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Consistency Problem

• 2 asynchronous operations when changing a
  document
• File manager upload operation
• Time manager update operation
• Solution
• Synchronized atomic operation
• Upload document including status information in
  one go
• Find or develop such a tool presented in this
  conference.

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Experiences with Pilot Project

• Divided into
• Distance group work experiences
• Project work experiences
• Technology experiences
• Seminar experiences

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Distance group work experiences

• Chats
• Very time consuming
• Difficult to structure
• Needs agenda and strong leaderchip
• Fora
• Difficult to keep the overwiev
• Concentrate on one or two fora/poject
• Mail, Telephone and now both white board, audio
  and video.

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Project work experiences

• Project work is a unique learning motivator
• Project work enhance peer collaboration
• Very lonely
• Nearly impossible to plan per distance
• Tasks plan, subtasks plan, time plan

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Face-to-interface and face-to-face meetings

• Face-to-interface can not stand alone
• Complexe and difficult parts of the project at
  face-to-face seminares
• Face-to-face seminares pushed the project work
  ahead and were very essential for the discussion
  and planning

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Technology experiences

• Chats are tiring and slow
• Netmeeting Chat better then LUVIT Chat
• Sound and white board extent the joy
• No system has an automatic document
  version/time/plan tracking possibility, this is
  needed in project work
• Internet need more bandwidth

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Conclusions

• Project work is a unique learning motivator
• Project work enhance peer collaboration
• Face-to-interface meetings must be combined with
  face-to-face meeting
• Virtual group meetings require a strict planning
  and control

• End Session