Dr. Bruce L. Walcott and Dr. Michael A. Marra recognize that the traditional engineering student is no longer the tradition. At the University of Kentucky, more than half of the undergraduate population falls under the category of non-traditional (i.e., students who have prior or current work experience, who may have families, who rnay commute). This trend has steadily increased over the past ten years and will more than likely continue through the next millenium. Also, physically handicapped and place bound students do not share equal access to education/laboratory experiences as do their non-handicapped counterparts. Dr. Walcott and Dr. Marra have already developed autonomous laboratory experiments to enhance their undergraduate signals/systems and controls courses at the University of Kentucky. However, these experiments still require for the student to be physically present in the laboratory. With many state governors (including Kentucky's) and the President espousing the virtues of virtual universities, it is important that the faculty make efforts to create the necessary infrastructure to enable effective low- cost education via the Intemet or intranets. Consequently, this proposal seeks the funds to enable signals/systems and controls experiments to be conducted via the Internet. The successful implementation of this system will enable Drs. Walcott and Marra to give their engineering/science/math High School seminars at any school that has access to a browser and the Internet, thereby stimulating the interest of future engineers and future engineering educators.
