Harrelson News–2000
Online Math Courses at NCSU
Since the fall of 1997 more than 400 students at N.C. State have registered for math courses taught over the Internet. Most of these have enrolled in the finite mathematics course MA 114, the first online offering in math which has now been available every semester since fall of 1997. In the spring of 1999 the precalculus course MA 107 became the second online course offering in mathematics.
These two courses were designed by Prof. Lavon Page who in the spring of 1997 chaired the university committee that guided the development of the first generation of online courses to be developed at N.C. State. That effort was instigated by Provost Phil Stiles and was known as "Project 25" since the goal was to have 25 courses online for the fall semester of 1997.
Prof. Page says he developed the online courses as a natural outgrowth of his experiences in the classroom.
"I had already begun using my laptop to present visuals in my MA 114 classes as an alternative to writing everything on the blackboard," Page says. "Having already created the visuals it seemed natural to put them on the web as a resource for the class, and once that was done it occurred to me that if I could find a way to add a sound track I'd have a pretty good set of online lectures."
The online courses have evolved considerably since the first offering in fall 1997. Presently the tool that Prof. Page relies most heavily on is QuickTime. QuickTime is an Apple product that works very well in both the Windows and Macintosh environments for presenting the kind of "talking slide show" presentations that Page uses. To support Unix users Page has relied on the Real Player technology from Real Networks.
"At first I was always frustrated that I couldn't point to details on the slides the way I use my laser pointer in class," Page says. "But now I have a good way of incorporating a moving pointer in the online lectures, so I'm in the process of redoing them to incorporate this feature."
Other features now included in Page's courses are Javascript-based interactive tutorials that students use for practice, heavy use of WebAssign (developed at NCSU) for electronic submission of assignments, and online databases for student-teacher interaction.
"The first twenty years I taught math at N.C. State I didn't have to make many changes from one semester the next," Page observes. "Now that I've gone completely online the one certainty is that no matter how well I'm doing things now, there will be a better way available a year from now."
A big challenge in delivering multimedia information online is the bandwidth limitation imposed by the desire to support modem users. "Lots of my students have only modem connections," Page says. "So I have to dig deeply into audio and video compression schemes that let me deliver the content in such a way that modem users don't have to wait through long downloads. I've been pleased that virtually everything I've offered so far has been almost as satisfactory for modem users as for students on campus with ethernet connections."
Page's thinks his next project may be the creation of an online version of the MA 121 calculus course. If all goes smoothly, that course could be available as early as fall 2000.
The two existing online courses are at unrestricted web sites and are open to the public. The URLs are http://courses.ncsu.edu/MA114 and http://courses.ncsu.edu/MA107
http means HyperText Transfer Protocol
URL means Universal Resource Locator
www means World Wide Web