This summer's project will continue: ReCourse.

Papers have been been presented at:

• Workshop on Architectures for Intelligent Tutoring Systems, ITS '96, Montreal, Canada, June, 1996

• Enable '97, Espoo, Finland, June, 1997.

• WebNet '97 in Toronto, CA, November, 1997.

A related project is WebCT

ReCourse implementation was begun by students in Finland, and continued in the US by a number of people. To see them, click on the blackboard at ReCourse

• Course Bulletin Board Enhancement The bulletin board we are using was created by Kevin Boucher last summer. Enhancements include: adding more categories, allowing the instructor to create more categories, adding a subject to postings, threads and viewing the postings non-linearly.

• Web Views Think of ways to enhance the Site Map. Click on the existing one.

• Secure Grading System This works fine from the student perspective, but from the instructor point of view, it's hard to use. Log into ReCourse as a Guest101 instrutor (username: guest; password: guest) to see what I mean. For the students, you might add software that shows averages for each assignment etc. I would love a tool that alphabetized the entries, so when I put new users in, they are kept sorted.

• Web Quiz The Homework/Quiz system we are using was begun by Rango Keshavan and continued by Yong Li. It needs further development. Suggestions: Add more types of questions; work on the issues involved in submitting and grading a quiz; extend the Quiz creation tool; (for someone interested in teaching) change the present homeworks into the types of questions that can be used by this tool; create lots more questions and a random quiz generator... Another feature might be to send a response to the user as we do in the guest book assignment.

• Apply for funding A small grant from the Davis Educational Foundation has helped develop ReCourse and pay for student help for the labs and project. This funding is about finished. This project would research funding opportunities (perhaps through industry or educational groups), prepare and submit a proposal. This is ideal for anyone looking for a thesis or who would like to be supported as an RA or who would like experience writing grants.

• Prepare a Beta-test for ReCourse We plan to release the first version of ReCourse. Do you have a management bent? This project would prepare a beta test, and find people on whom to test the system. The idea is that when they click on "Try it Out" at www.webrecourse.com, they will be taken to the guest site rather than to the real one that we use.

• "Slide show" Generator You may have noticed that I haven't really kept up with the "previous" and "next" tags at the bottom. ReCourse needs a tool that will start at the first node of a directory (say index.html ) and do a depth-first or breadth-first (or some other search order) search and add these forward and backward links to the pages automatically.

• Automatic Document Assembly Instructors (and publishers!) like to target their material appropriately, including some things for 1 audience, different things for another audience. Read about my pretopics and posttopics, and propose a solution. Designer HTML tags are one possible route. Any other project related to Automatic Document Assembly may be acceptable here. Propose one!

• Installing ReCourse from a CD-ROM WebCT avoids the cgi-bin directory problem when it is installed by installing a Web Server program with it. There are other ways ReCourse might be installed. For this project, study/devise the various ways this might work: we want to be able to send ReCourse out on a CD-ROM to U of Timbuktu, say, and have Prof NaiveUser install and use ReCourse. For your presentation, pretend you are Prof N, and show the installation process options. Download a few of the tools to show it working.

• Some other project you think would fit into the ReCourse system. I'm a "theory/language" person, and often don't think of system or AI approaches and problems. Propose one!

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