Anna Grabowska: 1

Teleworking for Business, Education, Research and e-Commerce

Vilnius, Lithuania, 21-22 October 2002

BSCW, TeleCAD - Examples of Basic Support for

Co-operative Work

dr inż. Anna Grabowska

Anna Grabowska: 2

Why co-operative work at DECTUG (1)

• DECTUG - the Distance Education Centre at Technical University of Gdansk is an experimental didactical unit, which realises pilot national and international projects involving computer networks and multimedia techniques in the process of continuing learning.

• DECTUG was established by the Rector of Technical University of Gdansk on April 30, 1997 as a part of the Phare Multi-country Programme in Distance Education (Establishment and Operation of Regional Phare Distance Education Study Centre) project.

Anna Grabowska: 3

Why co-operative work at DECTUG (2)

DECTUG main responsibilities are as follows:• creating access for students and staff of the

TUG to study materials, correspondence lessons, scripts and communication environment using LAN (Local Area network), MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network) facilities,

• developing distance education course modules and adaptation of existing EU distance education course modules in subject areas of importance to the economic and social development in Poland,

• improving access to education and training by establishing the flexible teaching environment concerning distance, time, choice of course providers and teaching resources.

Anna Grabowska: 4

Why co-operative work at DECTUG (3)

All activities performed by DECTUG staff and

co-workers are based on using platforms for

collaborative work.

There are two possible options:

building new or adopting existing platforms.

At DECTUG BSCW and TeleCAD are using for

co-operative work.

Anna Grabowska: 5

BSCW and teachers’ training (1)

• The postgraduate study "Internet and multimedia” is offered at Gdansk University of Technology (Faculty of ETI + DECTUG)

• The main purpose of the study is to teach participants how to develop computer based teaching methods and new teaching tools using Internet and multimedia resources.

• The curriculum of the study covers:

- how to prepare interactive multimedia presentations using PowerPoint,

- how to design and develop multimedia courseware,

- how to design and develop Web-based classroom project.

Anna Grabowska: 6

BSCW and teachers’ training (2)

Anna Grabowska: 7

BSCW - main features (1)

• Authentication: People have to identify themselves by name and password before they have access to BSCW workspaces.

• Version management: Documents within a workspace can be put under version control which is particularly useful for joint document production.

• Discussion forums: Users may start a discussion on any topic they like and the system presents the threads in a user friendly manner.

Anna Grabowska: 8

BSCW - main features (2)

• Access rights: The system contains a sophisticated access rights model which allows, for example, that some users may have complete control over an object in a workspace whereas others have only read access or no access at all.

• Search facilities: Users can specify queries to find objects within BSCW workspaces based on names, content or specific properties such as document author or document modification date. Furthermore, queries may be submitted to Web search engines and the result of the query can be imported into workspaces.

Anna Grabowska: 9

BSCW - main features (3)

• Document format conversion: These facilities allow users to transform a document into their format of choice, e.g., a proprietary document format into HTML, before downloading it.

• Interface to synchronous communication: Through this interface users can specify synchronous sessions and launch respective tools, e.g., audio/video conferencing software or shared whiteboard applications.

Anna Grabowska: 10

BSCW - main features (4)

• Customization: Through user preferences the users can modify the system interface to some extent, e.g., whether or not they want to use an Javascript or ActiveX enhanced interface.

• Multi-language support: The interface of the system can be tailored to a particular language by straight-forward extensions. Several languages (e.g., French, Spanish, Catalan, Finnish, Estonian, Polish Hungarian) have been created by users of the system and are publicly available.

Anna Grabowska: 11

BSCW in teachers’ training

• to assure the communication one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many,

• to announce students' tasks,• to monitor students' performance,• to share working materials,• to enable the transparency of the

participants' (students and teacher) actions,

• to store the history of documents,• to store the final works.

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About TeleCAD (1)

• The idea of the TeleCAD course evolved from the AutoCAD course delivered in ODL (Open Distance Learning) mode for students from Civil Engineering Department at Gdansk University of Technology since 1996.

• The AutoCAD course covers basics of drawing using the AutoCAD program. During the course students are expected to prepare a series of drawings, at different levels of complication.

Anna Grabowska: 13

About TeleCAD (2)

• TeleCAD (Teleworkers Training for CAD Systems' Users) is a course of AutoCAD (ver. 14.0, 2000, 2002) and teleworking basics.

• The course was co-financed by European Union Leonardo da Vinci Programme and developed in co-operation with four foreign institutions from Greece ZEUS, IDEC), Finland (Pekkala Software Oy), Italy (ARGO) and one Polish company Young Digital Poland S.A.

• The course consists of 9 modules covering basics of drawing in AutoCAD. The course materials are prepared as HTML pages to be acquired by the WWW or from the CD-ROM or in a printed form.

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About TeleCAD (3)

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TeleCAD environment registered users

TeleCAD Number of participantsPilot international, 2000/2001 16Pilot PL, 2000/2001 35Exam – sem. 2, 2000/2001 240Exam – sem. 4, 2000/2001 166Extra-mural, sem. 4, 2000/2001 62Extra-mural, sem. 3, 2001/2002 24Extra-mural, sem. 4, 2001/2002 40Exam – sem. 2, 2001/2002 259Course - summer edition 4

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BSCW and TeleCAD prospects (1)

Three Socrates projects are experimentally

co-ordinated with the support of the BSCW

environment:

1. PROMETHEUS -

(Socrates Comenius, 2001-2002)

2. MISSION- Multi-country Integrated System

Support for Improved ODL Networking

(Socrates Minerva, 2001-2003)

3. MEETING GENERATIONS -

(Socrates Grundtvig, 2001-2003)

Anna Grabowska: 17

BSCW and TeleCAD prospects (2)

TeleCAD will be proposed for supporting second

phase of Socrates Grundtvig, 2001-2003,

MEETING GENERATIONS project

TeleCAD is offered as an environment for teaching

AutoCAD and telework.

The book and CD were published by Polish

Publishing Company MIKOM (Warsaw)

in October 2002.

Anna Grabowska: 18

FOR MORE INFORMATIONhttp://www.dec.pg.gda.pl