North Dakota State University
Federal Relations Team Sponsored Project - One Page Prospectus

Title: The World Wide Web Instructional CENTER (WWWIC)

Executive Summary: The NDSU Worldwide Web Instructional Committee (WWWIC) has recently been awarded over $2 million in federal funds for research into virtual environments for education. WWWIC now proposes a complementary initiative to form a center establishing North Dakota and NDSU as national leaders in this area of innovative research and development aimed at education and workforce training. This inter-disciplinary, cross-college faculty proposal addresses issues on the technical horizon. Specifically, we propose a center for research and development of advanced educational media; pedagogical systems that are hosted on the Internet and are role-based, goal oriented, immersive, exploratory, spatially described, and highly interactive.

The challenge is to create educational systems that deliver principles and teach important content in meaningful ways. The need for such learning systems is increasingly obvious, as the value of "active" versus "passive" learning becomes increasingly clear. Virtual environments help solve many of the problems now faced in educating the current workforce: learner diversity is better accommodated (both in terms of learning styles and life styles), and the curriculum becomes more self-paced and "learn by doing" rather than "learn by listening."
We foresee a day when courses are taught in both real and virtual laboratories, and where students take virtual field trips to prepare for the real thing, and for their future job responsibilities. By employing "time shifting" and "place shifting," we capitalize on the affordances provided by virtual environments to: 1) control virtual time and collapse virtual distance, 2) create shared spaces that are physical or practical impossibilities, 3) support shared experiences for participants in different physical locations, 4) implement shared agents and artifacts in support of pedagogical goals, and 5) support multi-user cooperation, collaboration and competition.
WWWIC proposes to administer a center for the design and implementation of virtual educational worlds for workforce training and life-long learning, such as just described, with additional goals to include the development of mechanisms for assessment, tools for virtual software development, teacher training, and eventual software publishing. Further, the center will capitalize on the national Internet2 initiative by sponsoring highly graphical and simulation-intensive educational research applications involving massive genomic and geophysical datasets, and satellite imagery. Finally, we propose to introduce an interdisciplinary graduate program in Virtual Distance Education, in order to train new scientists.
The World Wide Web Instructional Center will be managed by a steering committee composed of active researchers, with a director elected from the committee, who will report to the NDSU Vice President for Research, Creative Activities and Technology Transfer. Staff will include a half-time faculty director on departmental release, four research associates, and one half-time administrative assistant. Budget is also requested for student hiring, equipment, travel, and a blue ribbon panel of advisors who will meet to consult with WWWIC on an annual basis. Steering committee members will be responsible for evaluating, managing, and assigning resources to projects. Projects will be staffed primarily by students who will participate in both design and implementation as part of their academic training. Support will be provided to enable faculty to develop their research ideas during the academic year, in addition to a summer stipend program. In exchange for this support, faculty will be required to actively pursue external funding.

Principal Department(s): Biological Sciences, Computer Science, Geosciences, Plant Science, Business/MIS and Sociology/Anthropology.

Project Contacts: The WorldWide Web Instructional Committee (WWWIC) Brian Slator, Paul Juell (Computer Science), Phil McClean, Chair (Plant Science), Bernhardt Saini-Eidukat, Don Schwert (Geosciences), Alan White (Biological Sciences), Jeff Clark (Sociology/Anthropology)

Project Duration: Ten Years

Funding Request: $1,065,000/year.

Targeted Agency: The United States Department of Labor: Employment and Training Administration (ETA), a $54 million program.


Last Modified: December 11, 2000. Contact: slator@cs.ndsu.edu Further information on WWWIC is available at http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/wwwic/