Building a Remote Collaborative Learning Course

Greetings from the 8th International Conference on Computer Science and Education (ICCSE 2013) in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where Hampton C. Gabler is speaking on  "Building a Remote Collaborative Learning Course in Computational Modeling of Car Crash Injury Prevention". He is looking at how to better teach students across two campuses. He commented students did not like forming teams across campuses (which is also the ANU experience). But it seemed to me that the teaching approach was still too much tied to a traditional lecture based mode, but with video. I suggested the video time could be better used for students talking to each other. Earlier in the day I discussed how we could flip the teaching approach to use asynchronous e-learning with very limited synchronous.

This paper describes an approach for the design of coursework in crash injury biomechanics based on a remote collaborative learning environment. Virginia Tech and Wake Forest University (VT-WFU) have formed the Center for Injury Biomechanics, a unique partnership, which offers a graduate curriculum in crash injury biomechanics to prepare graduate biomechanics students to address this critical public health issue. A challenge however has been how to integrate students at these two geographically separated organizations. This paper describes our experiences in designing and conduct a highly interactive class which revolved around open-ended design and analysis problems. The result has been a course conducted in the collaborative problem-solving environment characteristic of modern interdisciplinary research organizations distributed across geographically disparate regions. From: Building a Remote Collaborative Learning Course in Computational Modeling of Car Crash Injury Prevention, Hampton C. Gabler, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. & State Univ., ICCSE 2013, pp. 751-754.