Carnegie Mellon Online: Web-mediated education

Abstract

Distributed education, Web-based instruction, virtual classes-these are all trends in applying technologies to education and learning. One effort at Carnegie Mellon to explore Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) has been through a system known as Carnegie Mellon Online. Online provides a technical infrastructure to deliver materials to our students both on and off campus. It is designed to deliver educational content and assess student competence in support of courses across the University's curriculum. The focus has been large, core, academic courses. We have built a course-neutral, database-driven, student-centered infrastructure that supports both Web-based course delivery and course management. In addition to delivering conventional Web-based hypertext and other media, the system generates customized content (e.g., assessments, feedback) for each individual student and tracks the student through a course while enforcing course specific rules and policies (e.g., topic prerequisites, time and place constraints for exams). The system is designed to be scalable to handle large numbers of courses and students. We describe our work to date, including our pedagogical motivations and our technical approach. We conclude with a discussion of how our approach differs from other uses of the Web in education.