Collaborative Signal Processing Education on the Internet

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Companies frequently team their employees over widespread regions when undertaking large and detailed projects. At present, these enterprises use leased analog and digital communication lines and will no doubt switch to computer networks as the "Information Superhighway" becomes a reality. From a pedagogical point of view, this modern approach to teaming requires that educators develop in their graduates the skills required for this new reality. These skills include, among others, identifying expertise and interest within a larger distributed group, segmenting tasks in a meaningful fashion, integrating designs across a high-speed network, verifying performance against specifications, and compiling and writing a comprehensive final report. Without these skills, our students face a competitive disadvantage when confronted with cheaper, more classically trained engineering talent now prevalent in the global marketplace. To confront this challenge to engineering education, this project has designed and implemented team learning and team teaching using the Internet. The principal investigators are well-acquainted teaching and research faculty who specialize in digital signal processing. The project features signal processing courses with a heavy emphasis on distributed experimentation. The equipment used to support these new courses is located at each university involved in the project and will form a large connected multimedia laboratory. These individual laboratories support audio and video transmission necessary for facilitating real-time student interaction over the Internet. Relevant experiments and learning aides are being developed and will be disseminated electronically through standard Internet services and through the development of a multimedia textbook authored by the investigators.