Experiences in Cross-Teaching within a Distance Education Environment

摘要

Abstract Experiences in Cross-Teaching within a Distance Education Environment A project-based course in Robotics was created to serve as anengineering elective for both a US University (USU) and an East-AsianUniversity (EAU). It was implemented during the Spring and Fall 2012semesters with a total of 27 students from both Universities. It wasdesigned around 4-5 projects with lectures and laboratory demonstrationsperformed by the instructors (from both sides) to provide necessarybackground materials for students to carry on successfully with theirchosen projects. The major difficulties were the differences in the startdate and duration of the respective courses at each university andprevented our attempt to synchronize student progress and interaction.The "technical" issues turned out to be easily solved by each side usingsimilar hardware and software. The instructional materials were sharedvia classroom capture and webcasting technologies: recordings of livelectures from either university were re-purposed to accommodate the flowand topical differences in the materials taught and frequency of classweekly attendance - twice a week for USU students and once a week for FEUstudents. We also had found the necessity to change the instructor-student interaction method as EAU students were less comfortable ininteracting directly with the USU instructor. Student surveys at bothuniversities showed strong enthusiasm for the Project-Based Learningapproach. Differences in student motivation and project quality werefound between the 2 universities, perhaps as an unplanned consequence ofthe differences in how each university provided the students access tothe robotic hardware and software components.