University of Waterloo
University of Waterloo’s Engineering Faculty Partners with Microsoft to Offer Students 24-7 Learning Flexibility
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Company Overview
Located in Waterloo, Ontario, the University of Waterloo is one of Canada’s leading comprehensive universities, with strong teaching and research programs in six faculties: Applied Health Sciences, Arts, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Mathematics, and Science. The Faculty of Engineering is Canada’s largest engineering school and offers the world’s largest co-op engineering program, with studies in chemical, civil, electrical, computer, environmental, geological, mechanical, mechatronics, software and systems design engineering, and in management sciences and architecture. Nanotechnology engineering will be added in September 2005.
Co-op work placement happens throughout the school year, which means engineering students are busy, and often obligated to miss lectures and labs. To increase the availability of course materials within the engineering curriculum and provide a more flexible learning environment, the University launched an online learning program in 2003 with the help of Microsoft® Consulting Services and sponsorship from Microsoft Canada.
Business Challenge
The Microsoft Online Learning Initiatives (MOLI) project uses Microsoft PowerPoint® and Microsoft Producer software, and the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio®.NET, to develop e-learning tools and technologies such as virtual lab equipment, simulators, lecture materials, tutorials, quizzes and discussion forums. Dr. William Bishop, who is the director of MOLI and a lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering, says the partnership has benefited the University’s students.
“We’re very happy to have Microsoft as a partner in this initiative. While very tech-savvy, many of our professors do not have any formal training or practical experience designing Web pages. Partnering with a company at the technology forefront has been important to ensure the project’s success,” Dr. Bishop says.
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Solution
University of Waterloo began working with Microsoft Consulting Services in June 2003 to get MOLI up and running, so by September the engineering faculty could provide students with more learning flexibility through 24-hour, seven days per week access to course materials.
“We wanted to figure out how each course might be enhanced by providing access to simulations of important phenomena studied in labs or access to software tools used in those courses, as well as various learning materials,” says Dr. Bishop. “One of the major technologies we’ve been using is Microsoft Producer, an add-on for PowerPoint, which has enabled us to add audio and video to our lecture slides.”
The MOLI infrastructure is based on Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, with Microsoft IIS 6.0 as the program’s Web server. Curriculum materials are posted on the MOLI Web site (www.moli.uwaterloo.ca) using a variety of Microsoft software and .NET Framework development tools. Online simulations are built using C# and ASP.NET, and the project development team, which includes two full-time co-op students per term, develops Web pages using Visual Studio .NET.
The MOLI development team builds online virtual lab environments by designing software that emulates the behavior of devices within the electrical engineering department, for example, giving students unlimited access to “lab” equipment. Instead of physically going to the lab and using the device, they can run the emulation software on their computer from anywhere by logging onto the MOLI Web site.
To give online access to in-class presentations, lectures are captured on video and posted to the site using Microsoft Producer, with an accompanying Microsoft PowerPoint slide show. The technology helps students see and hear materials they may have missed, or re-visit lectures any time.
Each course instructor has final say over the materials posted online, and while some professors are conventional in their approach, Dr. Bishop says many are keen in using technology to enhance their online lessons.
“We’re launching a course in nanotechnology in Fall 2005, and the instructor approached me about the feasibility of designing a simulator with custom views, and exactly what types of tools we could create for him,” Dr. Bishop says. “As we’ve had more success with the program, we’re finding more and more professors are coming to our group with ideas on how to present materials online in an innovative way.”
As of March 2005, lab and lecture materials from eight engineering courses, ranging from first year to advanced fourth year, had been posted on the MOLI site. Dr. Bishop expects development efforts to continue well into the 2006 calendar year, with a total of 11 courses enhanced under the University’s present partnership contract with Microsoft Canada.
“We’ve been able to put together some substantial offerings in as little as two months, although larger projects take longer – we’ve been working on an online high school outreach course for about two years now,” Dr. Bishop says. “I had a particularly strong co-op student last term who was able to develop a simulator within a month, which is going to be launched in a course this summer.”
Business Benefits
The MOLI program is providing University of Waterloo engineering students with 24-7 access to curriculum materials for courses that are part of MOLI. With a more flexible learning environment, students are able to learn at their own pace, and are better able to prepare for examinations by having study materials at their fingertips whenever they need them.
The enhanced MOLI courses have a direct impact on students studying software engineering, computer engineering, electrical engineering and mechatronics. The faculty estimates that a total of 10,000 engineering students will benefit from online learning through the MOLI program.
As well, the flexibility of the .NET Framework tools used to develop the MOLI site has enabled the University to extend the online learning project to a wider group of students. Since the program’s launch, a total of 1,942 engineering students have been exposed to the enhanced learning environment – a number that exceeds the level of student exposure projected when MOLI was first developed.
“We’ve actually exposed about 27 per cent more students to the online learning tools than originally anticipated, because Microsoft technology is flexible enough to allow us to re-use some of the tools that we’d developed for other courses,” Dr. Bishop says. “Four of the eight courses we’ve added to the program leverage tools, techniques and materials developed for the other courses without placing additional financial burden upon the project.”
Better Grades, Better Skills
Since MOLI went online in September 2003, Dr. Bishop says engineering students have reported being impressed by the high quality of the faculty’s online lecture materials.
“They like the fact that they can be immersed in the course material not only when they’re on campus trying to complete a lab, but also when they’re off campus on work term – it really smoothes out the learning over periods of high and low intensity,” Dr. Bishop says.
The engineering faculty ran some studies on its first-year computer programming course, and found results that signify MOLI is having a positive impact on students. In the one term where students had access to online materials, the average jumped by about five per cent over the long-term trend, and the failure rate dropped by about 40 per cent.
“The online learning materials enhance the ability of our first-year instructors to examine a wider range of advanced topics earlier in our program,” says Dr. George Freeman, associate chair, Undergraduate Studies for Electrical and Computer Engineering. “MOLI gives our first-year students the edge they need to succeed in a competitive, co-op job market. The University of Waterloo has the highest co-operative education placement rate in Canada.”
“Students like the consistent interface, which makes the learning curve relatively short,” Dr. Bishop says. “Plus, it’s empowering to a co-op student who might be in their first-ever job to work on developing their own course materials and those of their colleagues, and also to be making a difference in the quality of education at the University of Waterloo.”
John Freeman, one of the co-op students who worked on the MOLI development team, says his learning experience was enhanced as a result of his work with Microsoft development tools. “I was impressed with Visual Studio. It helped us to quickly and easily build the functionality required to ensure MOLI was an effective resource for faculty and fellow students,” says Freeman. “My familiarity with Microsoft technology on the MOLI project has definitely helped give me an edge in the job market.”
Stable, Secure Platform
Although the majority of the University of Waterloo’s IT infrastructure is Unix and Linux-based, the MOLI program is on a Microsoft-based platform from end to end. According to Dr. Bishop, many of his colleagues have been surprised by the solid performance and stability of the Microsoft-based infrastructure.
“Most of the faculty members in our department were a bit skeptical of the Microsoft products at first, because they had a poor track record in the late 1990s. We’ve always heard about the reliability of Unix and all the Linux variants, and how Microsoft Web servers were unreliable,” Dr. Bishop says. “In fact, our implementation of Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6 is amazingly stable. We’ve noticed a number of times when our main Web site has been down, which is Unix-based, while our MOLI sites remained online.”
Dr. Bishop says the Microsoft-based platform is also helping the engineering faculty keep MOLI content secure. In 2004, the University of Waterloo had to issue a cease-and-desist letter to a U.S. university, which had copied a lab manual verbatim and was using it in a course.
“Our lab technologists who had developed the manual were actually receiving e-mails asking for help from students at this U.S. school, because the school had mistakenly left their e-mail addresses on the manual,” Dr. Bishop says. “Microsoft has really focused on security within its development philosophy since the late 1990s. We’ve been able to use an authentication system and some ASP.NET scripting to protect our MOLI content from people outside our user community.”
Plans for the Future
Dr. Bishop says there is a strong possibility of extending the MOLI program beyond the 11 engineering courses within the original contract. As well, he believes there is potential for other faculties to take advantage of the program’s online learning tools and methodology.
“Like every other Canadian university, we’re fighting a budget shortfall. But if funding were available, we are open to the idea of expanding some of the materials we’ve developed to other courses in the Faculty of Engineering or even other faculties,” Dr. Bishop says.
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