Multi-institutional professional social network for rapid course development

This paper summarizes an on-going project conducted to facilitate course development process. A multi-institutional faculty team is formed based on the similarity of course contents and expected outcomes. Teamwork is conducted to convert the existing curriculum adopted from NSF´s ATE (Advanced Technological Education) centers to online course modules with rich multimedia formats and universal access through the Internet. The collaborative work is performed on a dedicated professional social network system supported by an NSF education and an HP equipment grants. The instructors are exposed to the advanced computing power and cutting-edge collaboration software. This team course development method creates a multi-institutional peer-reviewed teaching environment that is difficult to implement in the traditional non-cyber collaboration methods. During the collaboration and online interaction, instructors can obtain professional support from the team from anywhere at any time. Workload is reduced as multiple people are sharing their efforts to develop similar courses while teaching is able to be standardized among institutions due to the adaptation of the same course modules.