The most compelling advantages of CourseWare are in logistics. Serving lessons over the Web from a central server, the academic departments escape the business of equipping and staffing computer classrooms, and supporting and distributing software. The basic idea is to provide software that requires no learning curve, nor any specific platform, nor software installation or user-side maintenance. This frees the programmers to program rather than support computer classrooms, the instructors to write prose lessons rather than software, and the teaching assistants and students to focus on science rather than the tools. This clean alignment of effort, motivation, talent, and expense can change computer-based instruction from an expensive ordeal to an inexpensive pleasure for all parties.
The challenges in this aren't specific to ecology. Computer classrooms are expensive to equip at state-of-the-art. Professors and teaching assistants can't provide expert support, and technical backup is hard to arrange. Each piece of software, no matter how excellent, is unique - another learning curve for all parties. Customizing software to the syllabus adds another level of expense. Corners are cut, eroding the learning experience. And the deepest concern of all, that having done all this at extravagant expense and choreography, one may have failed to educate, but instead provided shallow edutainment, an adult video game experience.
Yet our faculty has determined to do this. We believe we've found a vehicle to produce and deliver computer-based instruction with costs pared to the bone. With those costs minimized, proper attention and effort is freed in the departments for their proper concern - educating.
This vehicle is dubbed CourseWare. CourseWare is a Java/HTML-based software framework for delivering any science lessons over the World Wide Web, with effectively no student learning curve, to any Ethernet-able color workstation, of any type, anywhere. This includes the dorm rooms of the majority of Yale undergraduates. We expect about 75% of our initiative in developing ecology lessons to fall in the CourseWare realm, fully reusable for any math-based course.
This Community Ecology course is slated for January '98, the first deployment of CourseWare. The simulator at its most basic level is an implementation of Watson & Lovelock's ['83] DaisyWorld simple cartoon demonstration of how positive and negative feedback loops could enable living things to control their environment to their liking. During the course, the models of community ecology (predator/prey interactions, etc.) are developed and presented in the CourseWare, with parameters to explore and plot, "all other things being equal". Hand-in-hand, the simulator allows the student to deploy the models in a multi-species context. In a future course, the students may even explore Fourier techniques for analyzing the system's time series, using the same simulator.
The demo lessons of this set, including buttons infrastructure, simulator, and plots, are available for view on:
The CourseWare investment in student learning curve and computer classroom preparation is so trivial, that it is hoped that courses within a given curriculum, such as Ecology, will collude in using CourseWare for a powerful level of integration and software reuse within that curriculum. That should dramatically leverage the costs of developing custom graphics objects such as our DaisyBall. Hardware and operating system and Web advances are leveraged automatically. The students' investment in their own computing tools is leveraged automatically. Particular platform dependencies are avoided. New software batch tools can be easily integrated. The inherent worldwide visibility of this approach should also invite invaluable feedback and collaboration beyond Yale.
There remains a cost in programming to produce custom courses. To fully leverage DaisyBall CourseWare, an investment in documentation and training for lab producers is needed. To produce variations on existing modules, little software expertise should be necessary. To produce new graphical interfaces of the caliber above obviously requires a skilled programmer, preferably in collaboration with the CourseWare author.
To ease non-programmer production of custom CourseWare labs, two ingredients are critical. First, text-file scenario descriptions to run graphical modules. Second, a subsystem for accessing arbitrary batch software from the CourseWare Web interface. Both of these efforts could be done in about 2.5 months of solid programmer effort. [....]