ICS 463: Intro to Human-Computer Interaction Design, Spring 2006
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Course Management General Info
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disCourse |
disCourse is an online learning environment designed for project-based learning. We will be using disCourse (version 2) as our online environment for communication and coordination. You can request an account and access disCourse at: http://discourse.ics.hawaii.edu/ You can also go direct to our workspace using the link "disCourse Workspace" to the left. Why disCourse?Why are we building our own online learning software when commercial systems such as Blackboard and WebCT are available? Because I have used both Blackboard and WebCT and found them to be deficient with respect to pedagogical approach taken in many of our ICS courses. The commercial course management systems paste together various functions (email, discussions, quizzes) without really looking at what kinds of activities lead to learning and how these functions should be integrated in support of learning. In particular, they do not make it easy for students to discuss their work (writing, designed artifacts, etc.). With disCourse we are focusing on project-based learning, where students create and iteratively refine designed artifacts (programs, interfaces, etc.), as well as pointing out and discussing other examples and resources. To learn effectively we need to be able to discuss these artifacts, and that is what disCourse is designed to do. Also, disCourse supports a community-oriented concept of learning environment that tries to break down the barriers between online courses. Resources entered to support one course can be used by students in another course, and the member directory can be used to find others with whom you have something in common, even if they are in another course. Furthermore, since we are constantly improving this software, the very system in which we conduct the course can serve as a case study in design of HCI technology. The National Science Foundation encourages integration of teaching and research. I hope that you will agree that this case study will provide a valuable opportunity to experience as a group the iterative design of a real system for a real world application. HistorydisCourse is the offspring of Kukakuka, developed by Jun Xu and which I used in my Fall 2001 ICS 463. disCourse 1 was first implemented in the Fall of 2002 by Viil Lid and Alexander Bergo in PHP/mySQL, and was used in several courses by Chris Hundhausen and myself. Concurrently, Wil Doane, Bruce Harris, Sam Joseph, Viil Lid, Dan Morton, and Josh Wingstrom developed an online community environment for Hawai`i DOE teachers called hnlc.org. Some of the innovations of hnlc.org came from disCourse, but it was a completely different code base, also written in PHP. Eventually we decided that the hnlc.org code base was preferable, and gave it a new "face" for use in ICS courses, resulting in disCourse 2, which has been in use since Spring 2005. At this writing, Sam Joseph is rewriting disCourse 2 in Ruby on Rails instead of PHP to provide us with greater flexibility and responsiveness to user requests. |