In the Fall of 1999, Georgia Tech will transition to a semester-based cirriculum. Faced with the task of reorganizing its entire academic structure, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering has embarked on a progressive vision which promises to change pedagogics forever. The Task Force ECE Task Force on Remote Computer Enhanced Education has been charged with the job of developing a major research and education program in the area of remote computer-enhanced education. This activity was mandated by the ECE faculty in the Fall of 1995 at its annual retreat, and it has been formally in progress since January of 1996. Stated simply, the goal of the Task Force is to have Georgia Tech become a world leader in research, development, and delivery of computer-enhanced courseware for engineering education.
Education is about to undergo one of the most fundamental and extensive changes in history.
Nowhere will this change have a greater impact than in education, where the additional flexibility and efficiency of the new technologies offer both great opportunities and great challenges. However, it would be naive to believe that this educational revolution is going to be easy. Current courseware tools are very primitive, production costs are very high, and the infrastructure is often unreliable, slow, or even non-existent. More fundamentally, it is not yet clear how the new technologies can best be utilized. Learning is an active process, and passive information delivery, regardless of how extensive and efficiently delivered, will not be educationally effective.