523.txt

A Multimedia Micro-University
S. K. Chang, E. Hassanein and C. Y. Hsieh
Knowledge Systems Institute
3420 Main Street, Skokie, IL 60076 USA {changsk,ehab,cyhsieh}@ksi.edu
Abstract
A multimedia micro-university is a multimedia information system designed to support the education
programs and management operations of a small academic institution. It is a multimedia education
tool, an efficient management tool and an effective advertising tool, all integrated into a single
system to support a virtual university. The micro-university concept is based upon the vision of
combining theoretical and applied knowledge while maintaining the small-classroom advantage
even for a virtual university. We describe its important components which are implemented on
personal computers using C, Java and CGI programs and also becoming available on the Web: (a) a
virtual library, (b) an intelligent distance learning system and (c) visualization and planning tools for
the school’s management operations. The assessment plan to evaluate the micro-university is
discussed.
1. Introduction
This paper describes
how a multimedia micro-university is incorporated into the education
programs and management operations at Knowledge Systems Institute which is a private graduate
school of computer science and management information systems dedicated to the education and
training of professionals. The micro-university concept is based upon the education philosophy of
the school, and its purpose is not only to increase efficiency, but also to empower a geographically
and temporally dispersed group of educators, administrators and students to participate in a
dynamic learning organization effectively, without losing the small-classroom advantage.
Knowledge Systems Institute was originally established in 1978 for research and professional
education. The school's excellence is maintained by its dedicated faculty and distinguished advisors,
its low student-to-faculty ratio, and the philosophy of granting ample opportunity for students to
combine theory with practice. Besides learning advanced theories and concepts of computer and
information sciences, students at KSI learn to translate theory into practical applications by
conducting research projects under the guidance of faculty advisors. Through such projects, students
gain technical excellence, improve their abilities to do applied research and develop a critical
appreciation of the engineering/scientific/management aspects of the computer profession in the
course of developing new and specialized knowledge.The combination of theoretical and applied knowledge is fundamental to the education philosophy at
KSI. This educational approach is both sound and meaningful for professionals seeking advanced
education relevant to their jobs. As an institute dedicated to graduate education in computer science
and management information systems, KSI differs substantially from most other universities in its
size. The Institute offers a master of science degree program and a certificate program in computer
and information sciences. In 1998 KSI has an enrollment of close to one hundred full-time and part-
time graduate students. The Founder of KSI, Dr. Shi-Kuo Chang, believes that small is beautiful. He
believes that a small institute, dedicated to advanced research and high quality science and
engineering education, will provide the best training for computer scientists and knowledge
engineers. Another unique feature of Knowledge Systems Institute is that most of its courses are
offered during the evenings or weekends and also available through distance learning. On the one
hand, this arrangement is ideal for working professionals who can devote their own time to the
pursuit of knowledge. On the other hand, this opens the door for KSI to bring in talented and
experienced people as part-time teachers.
KSI is thus a model learning organization where
knowledge is continuously being accumulated, created, exchanged and disseminated by the
knowledge agents comprising the students, faculty and administrators.
Because of these unique characteristics, the school is developing its own multimedia information
system [6] - the micro-university - to support its education programs and management operations.
There are several important components of this multimedia micro-university: (a) a virtual library,
(b) an intelligent distance learning system [10], and (c) visualization and planning tools for the
school’s management operations. It is important to emphasize that these components do not exist in
isolation, but are becoming available on the Web and integrated into a virtual university [5] and
accessible to students, faculty and administrators, thus creating synergy. In what follows we will
describe each component of the micro-university, and then discuss how this micro-unversity is being
implemented and evaluated to serve as KSI’s new paradigm for professional education.
2. A Virtual Library
KSI has developed its own Virtual Library to provide students and faculty an easy-to-access library
information system. The Virtual Library follows the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG)
principle, and is implemented both on the Web and on the PC to support the keyword-based retrieval
and direct visualization of titles in the (physical) library at KSI. The user can first perform a
keyword-based search of the title on the PC or the Web, or browse through the titles on the Web.After the user has found a title, the location of the title is also shown on the shelves of the Virtual
Library, as shown in Figure 1. This enables the user to easily locate the book on the (physical)
bookshelf.
More advanced features are being added to the Virtual Library, so that a user can be
informed of other users who share a common interest in some titles. This is accomplished through
the creation of an active index system which supports the dynamic monitoring of objects (in this
case, titles) [1-3]. It should be noted that a normal library may not be able to offer such advanced
features due to the diversified user population it serves. KSI, being a small graduate school, has a
more homogeneous user population, so that such service can be offered with users’ consent. The
Web version of the Virtual Library is available through KSI’s home page www.ksi.edu.
Figure 1. The Virtual Library.
3. An Intelligent Distance Learning SystemKSI’s Intelligent Distance Learning System KSIDL is an intelligent communication
“channel” between two parties: the source being the author of distance learning materials and the
destination a cooperative recipient. With the Internet a communcation channel can be established
between any two Internet users, but the main problem now is how to facilitate the interaction and
cooperation among the users - in our case, the teacher and the students. Our solution is to organize
the communication process at a higher level of abstraction. By developing a knowledge base to
model the educational process and using Web-savvy multimedia tools (i.e., tools that can easily be
incorporated into the Web), we designed the KSIDL system.
The KSIDL system is designed such that it can pinpoint those areas upon which a student
needs to focus his/her study in order to help the student to understand difficult concepts. The system
suggests that the student review those areas that a complex concept is dependent on and then if any
area is not very well understood the system will suggest more review topics recursively, until the
student reaches those areas that cause confusion.
Publisher
Administrator
The system relies heavily on questioning the
student. That is the reason that we need a
cooperative recipient. A casual internet surfer
KSIDL
may not be willing to participate in that difficult
exercise.
Tutor
Advisor
Figure 2. Intelligent Distance Learning
System.
The KSIDL is a complex finite state machine. As shown in Figure 2, there are four application
programs that interpret this state. Each application program is designed for a different entity with a
different view of the knowledge base and with a different purpose for using the system. These entities
communicate among themselves by changing the state of the system. The four entities are: the
Student, the Teacher, the course material’s Author [9] and the school Administrator. The four
corresponding
application programs are the Tutor, the Advisor, the Publisher and
the
Administrator .
3.1. The Tutor
The Tutor is the application program that is used by the student. It is composed of one principal Java
applet which communicates with other Java applets and a number of CGI programs. It delivers to thestudent the material he/she needs to study. It gives a short quiz after each section and sends the
results to the system knowledge base where it is stored. It also shows the student the homework
assignments and their due dates and receives the answers from the student and stores them to be
graded by the teacher. It allows the student to send and receive mail to and from the teacher and the
school administration.
3.2. The Advisor
The Advisor is an application program that is used by the teacher. It is also composed of one main
Java applet which communicates with many CGI programs. The reason for relying on CGI programs
is to protect the privacy and the integrity of the information in the system.
The Advisor notifies the teacher of new mail and allows the teacher to send replies to the senders. It
also directs the teacher to newly submitted homeworks with their due date and their submission date.
The teacher corrects the homework and sends it back to the student with the grade.
Many problems are hard to explain in writing. In these cases audio messages can be sent to the
students and in some cases demo programs or video clips to illustrate these complex concepts.
3.3. The Administrator
The Administrator is an application program that is used by a school administrator. The school
administrator’s purpose is to mediate and facilitate the logistics of the education process. The
Administrator is composed of two components: a server-based application program that is used to
create the initial components necessary to add a new student to one course in the system, and a
remote client-based Java applet that checks the records of each student to verify the student’s
compliance with school policy.3.4. The Publisher
The Publisher is an application program that is used by the author of the course materials. It is
composed of one main Java application which communicates with other CGI programs. Its main
purpose is to transfer the files from a remote machine, probably a PC, to the server. The files must be
transferred to their correct position and the necessary directories must be created. The system state
must also be changed by creating or modifying the relevant system tables and property lists. The
structure of the Publisher is illustrated in Figure 3.
Module:
• Module number.
• Module profile
Table of Contents:
• Title of each section of the
module
• A link to the module material
• A dependency factor:
• List of all sections that are
considered basic material for
that section.
• each basic section is assigned
a value from 1-100, where 1
means very weakly relevant
and 100 means absolutely
important for that section.
Module Materials(HTML):
• Text
• Sound files
• Pictures
• Movies
Index:
Automatically generated
Index.
Purpose:
1) to help the user to
perform a dumb
search.
2) Help to reset the basic
sections values.
Questions:
• Multiple Choice
• Forms
• Answer by Mail.
“programming”.
• Each question is
assigned a list of valued
basic sections that
represent the section
important to answer that
questions and their
relative importance.
• Each question is
assigned a degree of
difficulty
Figure 3. Structure of the Publisher.
One of the most important aspects of the Publisher is that it is course-independent; i.e., it does not set
rigid requirements on the author as long as the modules are html files. The author may choose any
style and any size, and inclusion of in-line gif and jpg figures are allowed. The Publisher is an expert
system that asks the author a series of questions to set the section dependency graph with the proper
relative weights.3.5. System Architecture
In Figure 4 the architecture of the KSIDL system is shown. The rectangular boxes represent
directories and are designed containers that encapsulate the properties and the state of the different
objects and classes of the system. The black boxes represent the system programs that implement
the system and the four different user interfaces of the system. They are implemented as Java applets,
CGI or Java applications. The oval gray figures are composed of tables and property Lists. They are
used to save the state of the system. Their location is used to add semantics to their meaning; i.e.,
profile of Student i has a different meaning than profile of Student j. They are mainly made up of
three categories: system related, student related and course related.
HTML
Questions
Images
Sound
Modules
Courses
CIS 310
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Modules URL
System
Students
Administration
System
Sections URL
Questions Profile
Students
CIS 376
KSIDL
Movies
General Profile
LoginPassword
CGI Programs
Registered List
Student 1
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Profile
In Table
Mail Out Table
Homework HW Table
Exams Exam Table
Administration
Student N
Java Classes
Figure 4. Architecture of the KSIDL system.
As shown by Figure 4 the architecture of the KSIDL system follows object-oriented design principles
and is easily expandable. A special feature of KSIDL is the decomposition of the student profiles
into general profile and special profiles. Therefore, even if the special profiles are unspecified, the
general profile already provides some information on the students as a whole. As the systemgradually accumulates more knowledge about the students, the special profiles can be incrementally
updated.
4. An Intelligent Tutoring Example
Figure 5 illustrates a portion of the table of contents of a C Programming course. The corresponding
dependency diagram is given in Figure 6 to illustrate the complexity of relating sections of the course
that are essential for the understanding of the course materials. The KSIDL will use this diagram,
which exists as a part of its knowledge base, to identify the areas of misunderstanding for a student.
I.
II.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
III.
A.
B.
1.
2.
3.
IV.
A.
1.
2.
B. Introduction
Types, Operators and Expressions
Variable Names
Data Types and Sizes
Constants
Operators
Expressions
Control Flow
if-else
Loops
while
for
do-while
Functions and Program Structures
Functions
Functions Returning Values
Function Arguments
Scope Rules
V.
A.
1.
2.
3.
4.
B.
1.
2.
3.
VI.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
1.
2. Pointers and Arrays
Pointers
Pointer Declarations
Pointers as Function Arguments
Address Arithmetic
Character Pointers and Functions
Arrays
Array Declarations
Array Referencing
Multi-Dimensional Arrays
Structures
struct Declaration
struct as a Function Argument
Arrays of Structures
Pointers to Structures
Examples
Simple Example
Advanced Examples
Figure 5. The table of contents for some course materials .II Types Operators
and Expressions
B
II.B Data Types and
Sizes
III.Control Flow
A
IV.A Functions
VI.B struct as a
Function Argument
V.A Pointers V.B Arrays
VI.C Arrays of
Structures VI.D Pointers to
Structures
VI.A struct
Declaration
Section A depends
directly on Section B
III.B Loops
VI.E.2 Advanced
Example
Figure 6. The corresponding (partial) dependency graph.
The initial page of the distance learning module is illustrated in Figure 7. The following is the text of
the program shown in Figure 7, which performs student gpa computations:
#include <stdio.h>
struct student{
char name[24];
float gpa;
};
struct Class{
int num;
struct student st[20];
};
void setStudent(struct student * st,char * n,float gpa){
strcpy(st->name,n);
st->gpa=gpa;
}
void getData(struct Class * c){
char * str[24];
float gpa;
c->num=0;
scanf("%s %f",str,&gpa);
while(gpa>0){
setStudent(&c->st[c->num++],str,gpa);
scanf("%s %f",str,&gpa);
}
}
main(){
int i;
struct Class cis321;getData(&cis321);
for(i=0;i<cis321.num;i++)
printf("%10s %10.3f\n",cis321.st[i].name, cis321.st[i].gpa);
}
Figure 7. Initial page of the distance learning module for C programming.
After pressing the "I DO NOT UNDERSTAND" button the following dialog box appears in Figure 8:
Given the following struct:struct person{
char name[20];
char tel[10];
};
How can you declare "p" an array of 20 elements of type “person”?
1) person p[20];
2)
3)
struct p person [20];
struct person p[20];
Figure 8. Dialog between student and KSIDL system.
If the question is answered correctly, the following dialog box will appear in Figure 9:
Given the following struct:
struct person{
char name[20];
int id;
} p [20];
In order to set the first person id to 50
1) p[0].id = 50
2)
3)
p[1].id = 50
p.id[0] = 50Figure 9. Dialog between student and system.
If questions are answered incorrectly several times (this parameter is set manually by the instructor
depending on the degree of difficulty of the topic), KSIDL will identify the area(s) of
misunderstanding, and the student is requested to study the course materials that will correct his/her
misconception(s). The correct answers are prestored in the knowledge base of KSIDL.
5. An E-Book for Java Distance Learning
The KSIDL distance learning system is accompanied by multimedia E-books. As an example, KSI’s
Java distance learning course is both available on the Web as an E-book and also published in our
Classnotes Series [7]. This E-book adopts the following approach for page design:
5.1. Page Frame
Page frame is based on the idea of cooperating with the function of the web browser to achieve easy
navigation, and to provide a uniform page frame for all E-book materials. For this purpose, four
buttons are added: Audio_Play button, Index_Page button, Previous_Page button and Next_Page
button. The Audio_Play button enables the student to play the audio parts of the text at the student’s
own pace. The Index_Page button links to the index page of the course. The Previous_Page button
links to the previous page of the text. The Next_Page button links to the next page of the text.5.2. Organization of the Page Hierarchy
Pages are organized into four levels: The topic page, the exploration page, the dynamic page and the
source page. Level one is the topic-page. The topic page briefly lists and defines the key issues of
each page and provides links to the second level exploration page. The exploration page provides
detailed description, explanation, static graphics, screen dumps and links to the third level dynamic
page for real time demonstration, as shown in Figure 10.
Figure 10. The Exploration Page.
The dynamic page demonstrates the execution of the program code on the fly. Side by side with the
real time demonstration are the links to the fourth level source-page. The source page is the program
source code in its original format before compilation.
5.3. Comparative Presentation
In certain time-oriented or event-oriented cases, a student can get a better understanding if the page
supplies two or more comparative results of different times or different events on the same page
simultaneously. The multiple screen dumps of the separate executions are carefully merged side by
side to give this kind of comparative view as shown in Figure 11, where a program calledTwoThreadTest is executed twice. The two screen dumps of the result are combined for comparative
examination.
Figure 11. The Comparative Presentation.
5.4. Adding Interactivity to a Page
The level three dynamic page demonstrates the real time execution of the code. Moreover, if the
progress of the code can be temporarily suspended, a student will also be able to study the outcome
for each suspension and compare the results with the source code. The suspension can be done by
clicking on the Applet area of the screen. For example, Figure 12 demonstrates a rotating 3-D sphere
represented by some randomly created oval dots with different sizes, colors and phases. As the
student suspends the screen temporarily, he/she can have a better view of the details, and then
resume the execution as he/she wants.Figure 12: Adding interactivity to a page.
6. Visualization and Planning Support for Management
An institution such as Knowledge Systems Institute has a small number of dedicated administrators
and staff.
KSI’s organizational structure is flat, and each administrator or staff has multiple
responsibilities. It is therefore important for the administrators and staff to easily visualize the
current status of the school without relying on a lot of memos, notes, reports and meetings. This will
be accomplished through the Visualization Support and Planning Support for the Micro-University.
6.1. Visualization Support
Just as the education programs are supported by the distance learning system and the library by the
virtual library, KSI’s management is supported by visualization tools for the direct visualization of
every aspect of the school such as enrollment status, class schedule and enrollment, laboratories’
status, air conditioners’ and heaters’ status, etc.
The Visual Micro-University is being developed at KSI. Once fully implemented, it will allow an
administrator from the Administration Office to visualize and control the status of air conditioning
units and furnaces; class schedules; on-off status of computers and printers in various laboratories,
lighting in classrooms, laboratories and gym; office schedule for the faculty; schedule of staff;
scheduling of meetings; student tuition payments; accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc.
Similar to the smart house that provides the total management of a house through the integration of
sensors, microcomputers and local area network, the Visual Micro-university will support the totalmanagement of a small school. It not only saves resources and reduces costs, but also facilitates the
communication among faculty, staff and students. The micro-university is Web-savvy, so that the
administrators and staff can easily visualize and control the school from their desktops. The Visual
Micro-University furthermore provides planning support, to be described in the following section.
6.2. Planning Support
Our approach to planning is through the continuous creation, update and evaluation of a structured
collection of knowledge tables [4]. The knowledge table (KT) is the functional unit of planning and
has
five columns, namely, GOALS, PLANS, EXPECTED_OUTCOMES, STATUS and
RELATED_PLANS. Each KT consists of a number of knowledge slices. A knowledge slice (ks) is
the fundamental unit of planning and evaluation. It is not merely a row in a table. In fact, the
knowledge slice itself may again be a knowledge table. We will then have nested knowledge tables
that can become a complex, rich structure.
The Plan is a structured collection of knowledge tables, each knowledge table being itself the
embodiment of a plan or a subplan. Each plan consists of a number of knowledge slices, where each
knowledge slice is the embodiment of some goal, the plan to reach this goal, the expected outcomes,
the current status and the related plans. Since all plans are related, the Plan is a structured collection
of these knowledge tables.
The planning process essentially consists of the continuous creation, update, evaluation and revision
of knowledge tables by the key administrators responsible for the plans (the knowledge tables).
Although the planning process can be continuous, it is more realistic to talk about a planning cycle,
whose length is determined by how often the organization engages in the exercise of creating,
updating, evaluating and revising a plan or a subplan (a knowledge table in either case). For KSI the
planning cycle is one year.
Each knowledge table (or plan) is owned by a knowledge agent, which in the most general case can
be a person, a computer program or a group of agents (notice this definition is also recursive). In
practice, the knowledge agents are the administrators, including the chancellor, the academic dean,
the department chairs, the executive director, the development office and the research director. The
knowledge agent who owns a plan is responsible for its creation, update, evaluation and revision.
Because the knowledge tables are interrelated, the knowledge agent will interact with the knowledge
agents owning the related knowledge tables so that they can collectively improve the plan.The above described planning process model adequately accommodates evolutionary changes and
incremental improvements. However, it is also possible to accommodate revolutionary changes
where even the Master Plan can be completely overhauled.
In practice, we have developed a number of such knowledge tables (or plans) as WWW pages. The
top-level knowledge table is the Master Plan. It is related to a number of second-level knowledge
tables, one for each strategic area. Low-level knowledge tables can also be defined for specific areas.
In an evolutionary situation, the knowledge tables will not change drastically overnight. During each
planning cycle, the administrators will inspect the knowledge tables to fill in missing entries, correct
some entries, and perform an evaluation. If they are happy with the progress and the evaluation, no
major changes of the knowledge tables (the plans) will be necessary. If they detect major problems,
then the affected knowledge table, its parent knowledge table and other related knowledge tables, all
need to be examined carefully, so that the administrators can decide whether these knowledge tables
(plans) require major changes. (Since the knowledge tables, which are WWW pages, reside at the
individual directories of the administrators, distributed updates are possible.) Based upon this Master
Plan, the second level strategic plans are developed. These second level knowledge tables are
owned by key administrators or faculty committees. An example Master Plan and the Equipment
Strategic Plan are presented in Figure 13.
MASTER STRATEGIC PLAN (owned by Chancellor)
GOALS
PLANS
EXPECTED_OUTCOMES STATUS
Attain academic
excellence
(1) improve curriculum
suitable for 21st century
(2) improve library
(3) improve equipment
laboratories
(4) recruit faculty
Maintain financial
stability
(5) recruit more
students
(6) develop research
center with industry
(7) fund drive
(and other knowledge slices)
updated curriculum
student can access
any library in the world
maintain state-of-art increase full-time
faculty start recruiting
1998 more local
professional students
closer cooperation ongoing ongoing STUDENT
RECRUITING PLAN
RESEARCH PLAN
more donations start 1997 FUND RAISING PLAN
EQUIPMENT STRATEGIC PLAN (owned by Equipment Committee)
GOALS
PLANS
EXPECTED_OUTCOMES STATUS
Improve
equipment
Purchase
more equipment
(and other knowledge slices)
RELATED_PLANS
curriculum
revised Sept 1995
Virtual Library
in use June 1995
ongoing
Maintain state-of-art
laboratories
ongoing
CURRICULUM PLAN
LIBRARY PLAN
EQUIPMENT PLAN
RELATED_PLANS
Figure 13. Examples of (partial) knowledge tables.The above described planning process model is a distributed intelligence model in the sense that
intelligent agents (humans or computer prgrams) cooperate to accomplish the objectives of the
enterprise. The administrators know exactly what knowledge tables they are responsible for, and
know with whom to interact in order to achieve certain goals. Therefore, the decision-making
process is interactive and spontaneous. This also means the Plan can be implemented and improved
incrementally. We are developing the
computer tool to support the KT-based planning and
evaluation process. Basically, the tool is a Knowledge Table Editor (KTED) which allows the
administrator to easily manipulate the knowledge
tables. The kowledge table (plan) can be
associated with visualization tools so that the administrator can keep track of the evaluation and
planning activities owned by him/her.
Our major concern is security: how to put the KTs on the Web and yet at the same time prevent
certain sensitive information to be accessed by the general public. Our solution is to enhance the
HTML
to
a
Tele-Action-Object
Markup
Language
(TAOML,
see
www.cs.pitt.edu/~chang/365/vpl.html and an example in www.cs.pitt.edu/~chang/365/w5.txt), and to
provide a TAOML Interpretor to generate HTML pages from TAOML pages dynamically using the
MICE
tool
(Multimedia
Information
Custom
Engineering,
see
www.cs.pitt.edu/~jung/README.IC.html). Conceptually, this is somewhat similar to the concept of
database views, so that different users can view the WWW pages differently.
7. Implementation and Evaluation
As mentioned in the Introduction, KSI is a model learning organization where knowledge is
continuously being accumulated, created, exchanged and disseminated by the knowledge agents
comprising the students, faculty and administrators. Because of these unique characteristics, the
school is developing its own multimedia information system - the multimedia micro-university - to
support its education programs and management operations. The purpose of the multimedia micro-
university is not only to increase efficiency, but also to empower a geographically and temporally
dispersed group of educators, administrators and students to participate in a dynamic learning
organization effectively, while preserving the small-classroom tradition at KSI, thus facilitating the
continued accumulation of knowledge and serving as KSI’s educational paradigm for the Twenty
First century.
As the name suggests, the multimedia micro-university is designed for the special needs of a small
educational institute and consists of several important components: (a) a virtual library, (b) anintelligent distance learning system and (c) visualization and planning tools for the school’s
management operations.
The virtual library was implemented on PC and became operational in
1996. It currently has over 2000 titles and provides daily service to KSI’s students and faculty. The
Administrator part of KSIDL was implemented using CGI programs and WebBase, became
operational in 1997 and is in daily use now. The Intelligent Tutor part of KSIDL is being developed
in JAVA and tested in class. The distance learning E-books are being added to our website one by
one. For example, the Java E-book was created in 1997 and currently in use by our students. The
KT system was implemented using the TAOML pages and active index system [1-3] and became
operational in August 1998. It is currently being tested.
To evaluate the effectiveness of micro-university, we need to measure the academic achievement of
graduate students with the following intended student outcomes, which include the ability to solve
problems related to computer and information systems, design and carry out innovative research
projects, explore and exploit new knowledge, demonstrate basic knowledge, and communicate
effectively in written and oral forms. KSI’s student achievement assessment program was designed to
measure these outcomes quantitatively [8]. In other words, micro-university cannot be evaluated in
isolation and must be considered as part of an overall assessment program. This assessment program
is administered by KSI’s academic dean and discussed and evaluated continually at the faculty
meetings. Alumni surveys and the institution-wide Faculty-Student Round Table are used to evaluate
the student academic achievement assessment program as well as every other aspect of our academic
programs, leading to continual institutional improvements. Although a comprehensive evaluation of
the micro-university is yet to be done, our self-assessment [8] indicates the micro-university
components already implemented are contributing to the learning processes at KSI.
References:
[1] H. Chang, S. K. Chang, T. Hou and A. Hsu, "The Management and Applications of Tele-Action Objects",
ACM Journal of Multimedia Systems, Springer Verlag, Volume 3, Issue 5-6, 1995, 204-216.
[2] S. K. Chang, "Towards a Theory of Active Index", Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, Vol. 6,
No. 1, March 1995, 101-118.
[3] S. K. Chang, "Extending Visual Languages for Multimedia", IEEE Multimedia Magazine, Fall 1996, Vol.
3, No. 3, 18-26.
[4] S. K. Chang and C. S. Ho, "Knowledge Table as a Unified Knowledge Representation for Office
Information System Design", the Newsletter of IEEE TC on Office Automation, Vol. 3, No. 1, February 1989,
12-25.[5] H. Freeman, T. Routen, D. Patel, S. Ryan and B. Scott, The Virtual University: The Internet and
Resource-based Learning, The Open and Distance Learning Series, Stylus Pub. Llc, April 1998.
[6] W. Grosky, R. Jain and R. Mehrotra (eds.), The Handbook of Multimedia Information Management,
Prentice-Hall PTR, 1997.
[7] C. Y. Hsieh, Electronic Enterprise Engineering using Java, KSI Classnotes Series, Volume 1, Knowledge
Systems Institute, Skokie, Illinois, June 1997 (ISBN 0-9641699-7-5).
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Biographical Sketches
S. K. Chang received M.S. and Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, USA in 1966 and 1969,
respectively. He is the Founder and Chancellor of Knowledge Systems Institute, a private graduate school of
computer and information sciences. He is also Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering of
the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as Chairman of the Department of Computer Science from 1986
to 1992. Prior to that he was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engneering of Illinois Institute of Technology from 1982 to 1986, and Professor of Information Engineering
of University of Illinois from 1975 to 1982. He published over two hundred papers and eleven books in visual
languages, image information systems, multimedia systems and knowledge-based information systems. Dr.
Chang is a Fellow of IEEE.
E. Hassanein received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University, Evanston ,
IL, USA in 1989 and 1992 respectively. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor, at the Computer Science
Department at the Institute of Statistical Studies and Research (ISSR), Cairo University, Egypt. He was an
Assistant professor in the Knowledge Systems Institute from 1995 to 1997. His current research interests
include distributed databases, knowledge engineering, deductive object-oriented databases and logic
programming.
C.Y. Hsieh Education: received Ph.D. from Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of
Technology in 1987. He is currently Professor and chairman , Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences,
Knowledge Systems Institute. His technical interests include networking and distributed application
development..