Program 4: 1:30pm - 2:40pm

Online Education & Courseware: Lessons Learned, Insights Gleaned

Abstract of Talk
Thousands of hours of courseware in dozens of academic disciplines were developed on the PLATO system, and deployed to thousands of students at levels from K-20. The open environment and sophisticated authoring tools enabled any interested and creative instructor to develop courseware.

Because students came to terminal clusters to work on PLATO assignments, authors were able to watch students work through lessons, and observe how students responded to different tasks and lesson structures. In this rich environment, some authors began to develop lessons that were highly graphical and interactive, and encouraged playfulness and open-ended exploration. The elementary mathematics games "How the West Was One + Three x Four" and "Animal Bagger" (Seiler), and "Darts" and "Pizza"(Dugdale et al.); the chemistry lessons "The Great Synthesis Race" (Smith / Chabay) and "Multistep Aromatic Synthesis" (Smith), and the physics lesson "Freebody Diagrams" (Sherwood) exemplified this genre.

The panel discussion will focus on the development and educational use of these programs and others like them.