The Classroom 2000 Project: A Personal View of What the Past Tells Us About the Future

Abstract

The Classroom 2000 project is part of an $800,000 grant from the PEW Foundation to Drexel University designed to capitalize on Drexel's previous software development efforts. The plan is to utilize past successes—and avoid past shortcomings—to implement technologies that can effectively contribute to new classroom teaching, learning, and research strategies like remote, distributed, computing, video conferencing and video exchange, and peer interaction. The objective is to promote excellence in science education, to establish collaborative and distance learning capabilities, and to further develop faculty use and curriculum integration of appropriate technologies. As one of the largest courses on campus, MacLaboratory for Psychology was selected to serve as a pilot project and model system. Tens of thousands of students, thousands of researchers, and a number of clinicians and neurological patients worldwide, have used MacLaboratory software in undergraduate and graduate curricula, in professional research-grade protocols, and in clinical interventions. This personal view represents the abstraction, which was sometimes empirically based, upon which we are making our initial plans for the Classroom 2000 project. This paper represents an early iteration of a multi-year dynamic iterative design process. It considers what makes successful and viable teaching software and identifies factors that have contributed to notable failures in concept, implementation, or delivery. As a personal view, this paper does not purport to be either comprehensive or scientific but rather represents a series of more or less naturalistic observations. Keywords: psychology, computing, instructional technology, video conferencing, MacLaboratory, Classroom 2000.