The limited possibilities currently available for interaction with off-site students lead many faculty to view distance education as a complex and difficult barrier to overcome, and the off-site students often feel like academic second class citizens in the process. The steady advance of computer equipment into the traditional, physical classroom has likewise not yet lived up to its potential, because inadequate support is provided for the wide variety of interaction styles typically employed in the classroom by experienced and successful teachers. Our purpose in this proposal is to pursue our vision of education tomorrow centering around the virtual classroom, a hybrid physical and electronic space in which students and instructor(s) come together to learn. Some are in the same room, but many others are geographically remote. Class size is likely to be large, but students will still find this a friendly and comfortable place where they are part of small and cohesive learning teams rather than mere specks lost in an impersonal and frightening sea of unrecognized faces. We will accomplish this by developing a Design Conference Learning Environment (DCLE) that supports numerous interaction styles, in particular that in which the class is split into multiple problem-solving groups. The DCLE will allow us to investigate situations such as when a pair of courses are electronically tied together (in this case UC-Davis, and our collaborators at RPI) so that students in, say, a graduate course on distance learning can make use of and, in turn, influence work being done by students in an introductory programming course. Experiments in teaching actual courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level using the DCLE will enable us to derive conclusions regarding the optimal organization of tomorrow's learning environments. Team members expertise in bilingual education, in making systems accessible to students with a variety of disabilities (e.g., vision impairments), and in rigorously and formally evalu ating the efficacy of an environment, will ensure the broad and comprehensive applicability of the DCLE, whose software and tools will be distributed freely to institutions for use in their educational settings as a tangible benefit of the research. It is important to note this project is a companion to another that is currently being funded by another division, under grant CDA-9634485. This grant has been awarded to our companion team at RPI.
