The workshop was opened by the director of EPCC, Arthur Trew , who welcomed the attendees and speakers to Edinburgh. John then introduced Mario Antonioletti from EPCC who went on to discuss organisation's involvement in the area of distance learning over the past few years. MPI On-line . EPCC has also recently been involved in the implementation and development of a Physics first year course given here at Edinburgh University. The resulting course was successfully run earlier this year with over 200 students taking part.
Teachers can spend an enormous amount of their time developing electronic material.
It can take 3-15 times longer to create an hour's worth materials to be used on the web compared to that used in a standard hour's worth of lecturing. Clearly it would be worth while to provide a mechanism to share and obtain materials that could be incorporated in ones own teaching, momentarily laying aside complex issues of intellectual property rights and the such. Software has been developed to do this under the auspices of the EU for the EuroMet project where several centres throughout the world undertook the production of module based training material for meteorologists. The whole programme was coordinated by Edinburgh. Charles provided a live demonstration as to how the tools that have been developed work.