Articles, Papers, Videos Related to Distance Learning by Faculty and Staff

Bridging the Hardware/Software Divide

Jonathan Bachrach, University of California, Berkeley

We are entering the beginning of a parallel programming crisis with no shortage of processors but no obvious efficient, simple and intuitive way to program them. In short, we need to figure out how to best program and design parallel and distributed computers. Against this backdrop, one thing that is clear is that software programming and hardware design have a lot to learn from each other. For example, software needs to be parallel by default and hardware needs to be abstract by design. Since 2004, I have built a number of hardware/software systems that exhibit some of the best of both worlds' qualities. In this talk I will touch upon three of these systems in order of increasing complexity: Gooze, a streaming multimedia scripting language, Proto, a language for amorphous computing, and Snap, a language for programming asynchronous logic automata (ALA). The scope and details differ but the model for each is wiring together and producing hardware structures using procedural parameterization, and the goal for each is to increase the abstraction of design without greatly sacrificing the efficiency of the runtime. My talk is based on fruitful collaborations with Jacob Beal on Proto, Scott Greenwald on Snap, and the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms on ALA. Watch the colloquium....

Sharing Your Screen in Skype

Mark Dehus give a short tutorial on how to share your screen with Skype. Watch YouTube video....

VNC Over SSH Tutorial

Mark Dehus demonstrates how to use VNC over SSH using port forwarding in PuTTY. Watch YouTube video....

Using Windows Journal

Mark Dehus gives a quick introduction to using Windows Journal as an alternative to a whiteboard or other annotation tools. Windows Journal will also allow you to save your notes so that you may reference them later. Watch YouTube video....

NapoNet

Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering Department Professor Alan Mickelson, ATLAS faculty member Revi Sterling, and Interdisciplinary Telecommunications master's student, David Espinoza recently traveled through the Napo River basin in the Peruvian Amazon to better understand and facilitate technical community development needs. They will spearhead an e-education project fall 2010 involving three communities and expanding to several others. The initial team is looking for interested students and sponsors to participate in NapoNET. Watch the YouTube video and visit the NapoNET webpage....

Using Camtasia Relay to Make YouTube Videos

Mark Dehus give a quick demonstration on how to use Camtasia Relay to make and upload short instructional videos to YouTube. Watch YouTube video....

Engineering Links to the YouTube Age
Camtasia Relay at University of Colorado-Boulder

Daniel Foster

Mark Dehus helps engineering professors at the University of Colorado at Boulder discover new technologies and use them effectively in teaching graduate-level distance education courses. When his department adopted a PC-only lecture capture solution, it created a problem. Many of their students, who are working professionals in the engineering field, use Macs. So Mark went looking for screen recording software capable of capturing Mac-based applications. Read more....

Building a Continuing Education Program for Embedded Systems with Labs and Distance Support

Sam Siewert and Mario Vidalon

In spring 2000 the University of Colorado Electrical Engineering department and CAETE (Center for Advanced Engineering and Technology Education) launched an Embedded Systems Certificate program with two new courses taught by two adjunct professors from industry. Since this time the program has become self-funding, has added three additional courses, and has built out a shared lab for embedded systems using funding from the CU Engineering Excellence fund and grants from local industry. This paper reports on how the successful certificate program was built and innovative new approaches being investigated for distance lab support in a fifth class added this spring 2007, Real-Time Digital Media and Control Systems. The approach taken and lessons learned at CU are reported to assist other institutions designing similar programs. Read more....

Student Demand for Streaming Lecture Video: Empirical Evidence from Undergraduate Economics Classes*

Nicholas Flores and Scott J. Savage

Real-time lectures recorded on video and streamed over the Internet are a useful supplement to non-classroom learning. However, because recording confines the instructor to the podium, the classroom experience is diminished when there is less social interaction. This study uses choice experiment data to estimate economics students’ willingness to pay for streaming lecture video and instructor movement away from the podium. Results show a divide between students who like the flexibility of catching up on missed classes with video and students who do not. For this former group, video enhances the learning experience and students are willing to pay an additional $90 per course for video. An important source of streaming lecture video’s value to students is its impact on performance. Knowledge equation estimates show a positive correlation between students’ use of video and their cumulative final grade. Read more....

The Effect of Information Technology on Economic Education

Scott J. Savage

The author evaluates the effect on student performance of using a new information technology (IT) enhancement that permits students to participate in the recording of lectures that can be downloaded later from the Internet. Two sections of the same Intermediate Microeconomics class were compared. The sample students were observed to be representative and any differences in student characteristics between the comparison and test groups was accounted for in the empirical model. Model results show that students exposed to the IT enhancement performed about two percentage points better in their final exam than comparison students, however, the difference is not statistically different from zero. In conclusion, it appears that the use of IT did not have any substantive influence on student performance. Read more....