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Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education Course Development Grant Proposal
Graphical User Interfaces
Ball State University

Abstract

This proposal describes a plan to teach the course Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), CS345/535, via instructional materials to be placed on the departmental web server and taught to distance students. The course covers the design of the user interface as well as the design and implementation of programs with graphical user interfaces. The course is an elective on the undergraduate major and the master’s degree program at Ball State University. The course emphasizes programming in the Java programming language and is accessible to anyone who has already learned to program in an object-oriented language such as C++ or Java. The course will be prepared for distance delivery during the summer of the year 2000 and delivered in the spring semester of the year 2001.


Introduction

This proposal describes a plan to teach the course Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), CS345/535, via instructional materials to be placed on the departmental web server and taught to distance students. The course is an elective on the undergraduate major and the master’s degree program at Ball State University and emphasizes programming in the Java programming language. It is accessible to anyone who has already learned to program in an object-oriented language such as C++ or Java.


1. Evidence of Significant Need and Learners to be Served

This course meets the needs both of students who are enrolled in the master’s degree program offered at Ball State University and other students who are seeking to gain valuable job skills in computer science in general and Java and/or GUIs in particular.

Ball State University offers a master’s degree program specifically for distance learners. This program is one of the few graduate level programs approved for delivery via distance techniques in Indiana and the only computer science program so approved. Our current students and those we target in this program are primarily already fully employed in a computer-related position, already have an undergraduate degree in a technology intensive field, but do not have a degree in computer science. Most of them use their employer’s equipment (either IHETS downlink sites or Internet connected personal computers) to participate in the program and are fully reimbursed for their expenses in the program. They and their employers believe strongly in the need for workforce development and continuing professional education. Their acquisition of a graduate degree in computer science certifies their mastery of the underlying concepts in computer science and their ability to learn new technologies as they arrive.

In addition, Indiana is critically short of workers with advanced information technology skills. There exist several statewide and institutional programs to alleviate this shortage by providing training. This course will help provide needed skills to employees of Indiana companies.

The “Wired Inspired. Hired Workforce Summit” met in the Indiana Convention Center on November 17, 1998 and issued its final report on December 15, 1998. It indicated that over 75% of newly hired employees are expected to have computer skills beyond simple computer literacy and about 26% are expected to have degrees in computer science, engineering, or math. The final report indicates that universities must help in the training and retraining of the Indiana workforce to meet the increasing demand for technologically trained employees.

The President’s office at Ball State University has formed a committee to work with industry groups to identify ways BSU can help them meet the needs for information technology workers. This course can be part of that effort.

In addition to on-campus students, we would expect about ten students to enroll in this class because they are working on their masters’ degree in computer science in the distance program at Ball State. We would hope for ten to twenty students to enroll in this course because of their desire to learn critical job skills.


2. Evidence Need Not Being Met

Other institutions in the state offer either courses in Java or courses in graphical user interfaces as part of their on-campus computer science programs. Traditionally, this type of course is taught with a laboratory component requiring the student to either spend significant time outside of lecture in a programming laboratory on-campus or invest in expensive programming tools and hardware to carry out the programming exercises at home. Hence, none is offering this kind of course for distance learners — our use of VBScript and Java will both avoid the expense of tools and allow programming activities to be carried out on the students’ own personal computers.

Ball State University is unique in offering non-introductory computer science courses via IHETS. In particular, no other distance course in the state teaches graphical user interfaces and none teach the Java programming language.

3. Instructional Goals Consistent with Technology

This course was chosen out of several we will be offering for the first time for special developmental effort because of how well the content appears suited for delivery via the Web. Lecture in studying user interfaces consists largely of looking at examples and discussing the good points and bad points of examples. Web delivery of these examples can be accomplished by looking at screen dumps and interactive mock-ups. Looking at these examples via TV would not be possible due to the relatively low resolution of a TV signal. In addition, reading lines of computer program code on a TV is impractical due to the low resolution of a TV signal. Just watching an instructor push buttons and click a mouse would be pointless. Instead, we will be able to deliver web-based interactive examples with Java applets and pages with ActiveX and VBScript.

In addition to being able to look critically at a GUI design, the other primary instructional goal is to teach the student to write programs with a graphical user interface. The key to reaching this goal is to give the student opportunity to practice the skill by writing several working programs. The use of Java as a programming language will work particularly well in this situation because the Java Development Kit (JDK) needed to write these programs is available as a free 20 MB download from Sun Microsystems. The JDK will run on an ordinary personal computer, enabling students to write programs on their own computer without undue additional expense. JDK documentation and tutorials are also available for free browsing at the Sun website.


4. Institutional Support

Ball State University provides excellent institutional support for distance education programs. The teleplex housing the facilities for delivering video-based distance education employs a staff of full-time instructional designers to aid all distance education instructors regardless of the mode of delivery. University Computing Services provides a large web server and has custom written several tools to aid in web-based instruction. These tools include tools to give on-line quizzes and to ease access to newsgroup-based discussions. The Department of Computer Science additionally has it own web servers and has pioneered the use of the web as a means for instructional delivery. The departmental web server, which will be used to host the majority of web pages associated with this course, runs the Windows NT Server operating system, has two Pentium II CPUs, and 512 MB of RAM and is dedicated to running Microsoft’s Internet Information Server and SQL Server. The IIS server supports FrontPage 2000 extensions, making it particularly easy for the instructor to create web sites to support his classes using FrontPage 2000 on his well-equipped desktop machine.


5. Instructional Design and Delivery

The first part of the course concentrates on GUI design and consists of learning vocabulary, identifying desirable and undesirable features in a design, and the tradeoffs between them. This will be accomplished by some textbook and online readings featuring screenshots of commercial software and readings of sites from major GUI design teams such as those at IBM and Apple. On-line self-assessment quizzes will be given to reinforce the readings. Several interactive Java programs will be shown to add a dynamic quality to the screenshots.

The second part of the course concentrates on GUI programming in Java. Programming projects will be given with the desired behavior both spelled out as specifications and illustrated as working Java programs for the student to interact with. Projects will include writing a “Notepad”-like text editor, a “Wordpad”-like word processor, and a simple Web browser. Students will complete these projects on their own personal computers using the Sun JDK, load finished programs on a Web server to show off the results, and then e-mail the code to the instructor.

In both parts of the course, students will interact with small examples embedded directly in web pages. They will be able not only to look at the code for the examples, but interact with them immediately without having to leave the web-based instructional environment. This interactivity will provide a much better experience for the student than a TV course which limits the students to only looking at fuzzy pictures of user interfaces.


6. Effectiveness of Design for Target Audience

The design of this course seems to be a perfect match for the target audience. The two primary components of the course are web pages with examples of GUI programs and programming exercises for the students to carry out. Web pages are a perfect place to display Java programs and any reasonably equipped personal computer makes a good platform for developing Java programs with Sun’s freely available Java Development Kit (JDK).


7. Evaluation Plan

The students will participate in the traditional course evaluation system at Ball State University where they will rank the course in about a dozen areas on a scale of 1 to 5. In particular the course evaluation asks the student to rate the instructor on how he:

The evaluation will be submitted to the department secretary via e-mail, to preserve anonymity of the student.

In addition, students will be asked to provide feedback after the self-assessment quiz associated with each course module. In particular, each student will be asked about the relevance, completeness, and ease of understanding the web-based materials for the module.

Dr. Wayne Dyksen of the Purdue Computer Science department will be asked to review the on-line materials and offer constructive criticism at several stages of the development of these materials. Dr. Dyksen has taught the GUI course at Purdue and was Dr. Buis’ thesis advisor.

To evaluate effectiveness of the distance teaching technique, measures of student success will be compared with the on-campus section of the course to be taught concurrently and with the purely on-campus section to be taught in the Fall of 1999.


8. Contribution to Other Instructional Efforts

Since Java programs are such a good fit with Web pages and IHETS is seeking to deliver more course content via the Web, this course would be beneficial for technical personnel involved in preparing other courses for Web-based delivery. They would then be prepared to Java-enhance other course web pages to provide interactivity in a way that is uniquely well suited for Web delivery.


9. Significance in Statewide Context

As stated earlier, this course helps address the critical shortage of advanced information technology skills among workers in the state of Indiana. In particular, an increasing number of workers are being expected to have computer science-related skills and degrees. An serious shortfall of such workers in Indiana is expected to develop.


10. Marketing Plan

The course will be listed on the IHETS/IPSE web site. In addition, students enrolled in the distance learning master’s degree program offered by the department will be encouraged to enroll. Finally, Ball State is a member of INITA, the Indiana Information Technology Association and will use its contacts with information technology companies in the state to promote this course in particular.

Market through Continuing Education publications such as the Semester Schedule, Distance Education Catalog, and information brochures delivered to individuals, businesses, and potential students. Metatags will be embedded in BSU web page to ensure search engines find course descriptions on the BSU web site.


11. Project Schedule

The course is being offered on campus in the Fall of 1999. During the Fall of 1999, a web site will be created on the departmental web server to aid in the teaching of this class in the future. In the summer of 2000, the web site will be enhanced with more interactive features and links to self-assessment quizzes. The course will be offered in an on-line format in the Spring of 2001.


Fall 1999

The CS345/545 GUI course is being offered on campus. A web site is being built to accompany the course. It provides static, non-interactive content including project descriptions, links to tutorials and reference works at other sites, and relevant programming tools offered for free by companies on the Internet. This site is being built on the Computer Science Department’s own webserver.

Spring 2000

Initial work will be done on building interactive components for the course. Technologicially infeasible approaches will be weeded out and the process of producing such components will be set. Software aids for the production process will be chosen.

Summer 2000

The course instructor will build the interactive components to be added to the website with time funded by this grant. Student help will aid the instructor in this production process.

Fall 2000

A CD-ROM will be created to hold course materials produced in the summer that are too large to practically download over a modem-speed Internet connection. The CD-ROM will also include programming tools that can be freely redistributed. The website will still contain these materials, so a CD-ROM drive is not needed, but the website will also have annotations indicating that certain components are available on the CD-ROM.

Spring 2001

The course will be run with both distance students and on-campus students.


12. Key Development Personnel

Dr. Paul E. Buis received his Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University in 1991 and has taught for the Ball State University computer science department since then. In addition he taught summer workshops on graphical user interfaces and object-oriented programming for the Technology Exchange Company which was at the time a subsidiary of the Addison-Wesley textbook publishing company. He introduced the GUI course into the curriculum at Ball State University and has taught it several times.

In addition, Dr. Buis has taught distance education courses in networking delivered in an on-line format several times. He has also taught a distance education course in programming languages delivered via the IHETS satellite video network in the summer of 1999. Dr. Buis was named a Ball State Teleplex Fellow for the spring and summer of 1998 and developed a course to train faculty how to web-based supplements for their courses. He has now been named a Ball State Technology Fellow for the 1999-2000 academic year and will be developing a CD-ROM of free software and documentation download from the Internet to supplement distance education courses in computers science. This CD-ROM will include Java tutorial and Java documentation. It will allow the students to access this material more quickly than if they had to download it from the Internet over a modem-based connection. He will be seeking permission to include the Sun JDK on this CD-ROM—it is not freely re-distributable material.



Last updated: June 21, 2006