Telecommuting will allow more frequent supervision visits while saving time that is currently spent on the road by a supervising professor. The grant will offer an opportunity to explore alternatives in distance education and staff development education courses with the North Texas Community and Junior College Consortium of 22 area post-secondary institutions when it is funded. The eight lectures build on an overview of basic concepts of semiotics by discussing several prominent critics of modern semiotics. Readings will include texts by numerous prominent semioticians. These lectures are accessed by students worldwide who confer with the instructor via e-mail, complete assignments associated with each instructor, and then submit a final paper to complete the course.
Instructors supply their students with a certificate upon completion of the course.
The course certificate, in turn, is valued directly in relation to each instructor's professional reputation as a semiotician. This grant proposal would enable me to modify my existing WWW course to meet the needs of graduate students at the University of North Texas. Taking this course would substitute for satisfactory completion of the corresponding course offered by the English department, should the student prefer to undertake the course in that fashion. Because the CSI is operating on an extremely small budget, the existing WWW course cannot take advantage of what the Web medium offers. In its current state, it consists almost exclusively of lecture text alone.