Virtual Institutes and Virtual Classrooms - How To Enhance Teaching and
Mentoring Productivity
P. Fröhlich, Nicola Henze and W. Nejdl
Abstract
Virtual enterprises can be characterized as cooperations of independent
institutions, which contribute their core competencies towards a common
goal and benefit from reduced hierarchical and organizational structures.
Such cooperations are made possible by extensive use of modern communication
and information technology. Up to now, the idea of virtual enterprises
has been used in commercial environments. We think, however, that it also
has important applications in the context of university teaching and research,
leading to virtual universities, colleges and institutes. During the last
year, we have successively introduced characteristics of a virtual institute
at our department, both for research and teaching purposes. In this paper
we will concentrate on the teaching aspects, based on our experiences with
a two semester course ``Introduction to Computer Science and Programming''.
We will discuss our approach and contrast it to existing distance learning
approaches. Keywords: Distance Education, CSCW
The extended abstract is available as a postscript
file .