The project is a collaborative effort involving Texas Tech University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and University of Texas - Pan American. It is developing a suite of multimedia educational materials and supporting mechanisms to create a knowledge-centered learning environment for the undergraduate instruction of stochastic processes and applied probability that seamlessly integrates into the curriculum. This project is creating high-quality video clips that challenge students to solve real problems from industry in collaborative settings. These videos are being posted on a project website along with other supporting material consisting of wiki-style tutorials and problem-solving software. A Facebook page for the project is being created to support a "wall" where students may collaboratively work on active problems and tangentially develop professional skills, such as teaming and communication. The investigators are anticipating that students at other location, even without their instructors directing them, will visit the site and will learn through the knowledge-centered aspects of the wiki-style resources, "wall" discussions, and review of active and archived problems. The team is making sure that students from underrepresented groups are featured in the videos in an effort to increase the interest among these groups of students. The project is using a few external faculty members as a design review team to provide guidance, and an experienced outside evaluator is using surveys and tests to monitor progress toward the learning outcomes and data on website and Facebook visits to monitor participation. Broader impacts include the dissemination of the project's products through the website postings and the use of social networking and the focus on broadening the participation of underrepresented groups.
The goals of this research project were to develop a set of 12 high quality vidoes that present real world problems to be used in solving stochastic modeling techniques and incorporate these videos in web-based learning environment that included computational tools and social media support of stochastic modeling. The project website is available at www.stochasticchallenge.org and a Facebook page is available at www.facebook.com/StochasticChallenge. The project website contains a set of web-based computational tools for solving common stochastic problems as well as a student-developed wiki containing information about stochastic modeling and the use of the stochastic challenge analytical tools. The project website went live on 11/2/2012 and at the time of the final project report (August 2013) had receivedd 4,653 page views including 3,146 unique visits, 2,391 first time visits and 757 returning visits. Visitors' IP addresses spanned the globe and the leading countries viewing the project website were 1) USA, 2) India and 3) Mexico. The project Facebook page received 138 likes. Positive feedback from 20 professors at other institutions were received praising the work as well as positive feedback from students for which this work was developed. Even though this work was focused on Industrial Engineering applications, a large number of electrical engineering faculty viewed the project poster at the ASEE NSF Grantees poster session and expressed a strong interest in these tools. This interest from another discipline reinforces the need for further development of the Stochasti Challenge
