There is currently an unsatisfied national demand for people trained in information technology (IT) with a minority of the students enrolled in IT programs being female. The proposed project is to develop an educational approach that will appeal to women and provide them with an appropriate learning environment for IT courses. There are four components to the project. First, will be efforts to build upon results of investigations on how to use technology to increase learning and decrease costs as taught within an IT fluency course. Second, will be research on learning styles to provide quantitative evidence to explore the validity of learning styles in general, and the consistency of women's learning styles, particularly, correlations between learning styles, learning environments and performance. Third, will be research on how to improve Web-based collaborative experiences. Fourth, will be the testing of findings through comparisons of learning achieved in a traditional environment with learning in an environment restructured to take into account the project's findings and those of other researchers in the field. The specific application of the project will be the development an a women-friendly information design and technology undergraduate certificate program that is accessible to students of any major. The introductory courses of the certificate program will be designed so that students can move easily into either a traditional computer science or media studies program.
