Completed projects: Distance education

Projects: Distance Education

2003 – 2010 - TIDIA Ae - Phase I and Phase II.

• Coordinator: Wilson Vicente Ruggiero
• Description: TIDIA Ae: Electronic Learning - Phase I Duration: 15 months Funding: FAPESP; Value: R$ 1,100,000.00. This project aims to stimulate research in the area of ​​Information Technology applied to Distance Education (DE), based on the premise of the availability of a high-performance network, namely, the Advanced Internet. More specifically, this project aims to stimulate research for the development of a set of integrated tools, independent of operating platform and geared towards DE. The tools should cover the three major groups of general DE tools: administration, coordination, and communication. Therefore, initiatives aimed at developing support tools within, but not limited to, the following research topics are expected: - Administrative management of courses, involving access statistics, visualization of participant interaction, course analysis tools integrating content with student participation data, etc. - Formative and continuous assessment of student learning; - Co-presence and co-production tools; - End-to-end assured quality of service regardless of the user's access method; - Interface and interoperability standards aimed at the reuse of academic content; - Creation, organization, and maintenance of a repository of open knowledge objects, specified and built to be shared in the development of new teaching and learning content; - Support for updating, sharing, reusing, and storing courses and content; - Virtual laboratories including remote access to real laboratories and context-specific simulations; - Improvement of online interaction and collaboration mechanisms; Finally, this project aims to create conditions for fostering research and development in the area of ​​tools for teaching and learning.

2000 – 2001 - LED-ES.

• Coordinator: Wilson Vicente Ruggiero
• Description: Research Project: LED-ES: Distance Education Laboratory in the areas of Engineering and Health: Duration: 2 years; Partner: UNIFESP; Funding: CNPq; Value: R$ 150,000.00 The common interest in the area of ​​distance education, demonstrated by both LARC - EPUSP (Laboratory of Network and Computer Architecture of the Polytechnic School of USP) and CIS - EPM (Center for Health Informatics of the Paulista School of Medicine - UNIFESP), created the opportunity for a partnership between these research groups. This partnership facilitated the exchange of experiences acquired in the field and new joint developments, in order to demonstrate the applicability of remote teaching methods, tools, and infrastructure in very different areas. Information technology resources, both computational and communication, can be used to make the educational process more effective: helping to keep students intellectually active in relation to the subject matter during classes and lectures; allowing on-demand access to course material, as well as auxiliary materials spread throughout the international network; automating the tasks of monitoring and evaluating students in mass courses; providing simulation laboratories for the visualization and understanding of complex situations and allowing the exercise of virtual activities, establishing partially automated distance help systems with graphic and interactive capabilities [Carl96]. All these aspects can be addressed in both Engineering and Health education. This project aims to create and implement Distance Learning Laboratories for the Engineering and Health fields, enabling the implementation of the necessary infrastructure to support research, development, production, and evaluation of multimedia teaching materials and the environment for their distribution to a large community of geographically dispersed users.

1997 – 1999 - DSN Project.

• Coordinator: Stephan Kovach
• Description: Project in partnership with CPDIA - NEC of Brazil. Development of an internet site linked to cable TV. Activities involved specifying the architecture, sizing equipment, implementing network management and security, and developing a remote learning application (via the Internet).

1997 – 1999 - COL - Online Courses

• Coordinator: Wilson Vicente Ruggiero
• Description: The COL project consisted of developing a pioneering platform to support distance learning and face-to-face teaching. It allowed for the management of classes, teaching materials, and interaction via chat and forum. It was widely used at USP for several years, until it was replaced by the Tidia-AE system, a multi-institutional project funded by FAPESP and led by professors from LARC-USP.