Courseware projects in advanced educational computing environments
Mary E. Hopper, Doctoral dissertation, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
During the 1980s, a few forefront academic computing organizations
had invested in computing systems similar to what will become more commonly
available to education later this decade.
[See Chapter 1 Introduction.]
These projects were at a point where they
could be analyzed with hindsight by their participants. Their investments provided
a unique opportunity to study a "sample of tomorrow" today.
One example of such a project was the Athena Project at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT). This project was an experiment designed to provide the answers
needed to insure the success of similar efforts in the future. Project Athena
embodied the following technological, pedagogical, and organizational questions:
- What does it take to design, implement, and operate a fully distributed,
coherent, vendor-independent, academic computing environment for a university?
- How do faculty use such an environment educationally, and which of these
uses prove effective?
- Who should manage the environment, support faculty and student users,
and provide appropriate incentives and financing for academic computing to flourish?
Like all experiments, Project Athena also sought to identify unrecognized
issues, costs, and benefits surrounding advanced academic computing.
(Jackson, 1991, p. 20-2)
A majority of the reports about the computer courseware development efforts
in this advanced computing environment emphasized successes, but some reports
also discussed the challenges that emerged. These reports indicated that there
are a combination of educational, technical and organizational issues that could
threaten the chances of success for future projects in advanced computing environments.
The reasons for nonsuccesses included underestimating the size of the task
(often by a large amount), using an inappropriate pedagogical model, difficulties with
the system, difficulty in obtaining necessary skills for programming (UNIX, C, X-Windows System,
human interface design), and declining interest on the part of the faculty member.
(Champine, 1991, p. 46)
[See also (Stewart, 1989) and (Launhardt & Kahn, 1991).]
Some of the problems that Athena and Intermedia experienced were certainly due to the
experimental nature of the endeavors or manifestations of old problems occurring
in the new environment. Other problems may have been new and unavoidable in the
age of distributed computing.
[See 1.1 Background.]
The purpose of this research was to document how major issues that characterized
previous educational computing initiatives became intertwined with unique new
problems that were a function of new advanced computing technology.
[Also see 1.2 Statement of the Research Problem.]
Distinct educational, technological and organizational themes have emerged during past
educational computing initiatives, but each wave of innovation has produced some reinterpretation
or elaboration of the recurring themes.
[Also see 1.3 Literature Review.]
This study was designed to explore how the layers of recurring themes and the relationships among them were manifest within
the experimental distributed computing environments of the 1980s. This goal was pursued by studying a few small
pockets of experience with educational computing environments similar to those that are becoming more common to other educational institutions.