Executive Summary

Four major areas of concern were addressed when analyzing the Icarus project. These four competencies were as follows: Course Objectives, Web-Based Learning, LCC Goals and Technology.

Course Objectives

Several course objectives must be satisfied by the ICARUS Project in order to fulfill the needs of both students and faculty. These objectives include the ability to produce professional documents such as proposals, memos, technical presentations, and analytical reports. In addition to Georgia Tech requirements, the ICARUS Project must also satisfy requirements of the Board of Regents. Because technical communication, both written and oral, is a skill that is necessary to function in the job market, the people who were interviewed expressed much concern regarding the ability of the one-hour class to provide these necessary skills.

There are many learning-related issues to address when courses are moved out of the traditional classroom and onto the internet. According to the results of interviews with students and faculty, the benefits of web-based learning are the flexibility of class time, the ability to repeat lectures at will, and the continual access to lectures, notes and homework. However, the detriments include the inability to monitor student attendance and work, the lack of interaction, the real-time accessibility issues, and unclear communication of difficult materials. When designing the course material, a technology medium (i.e. audio, video, hypertext) should be chosen such that it is appropriate to the subject, ensuring that the amount of information is limited to digestible "chunks" that can keep the attention of the reader. It is equally as important that the course content is organized and aesthetically pleasing and that a fair and effective method of evaluating the performance of the student is designed.

The Georgia Tech School of Literature, Culture, and Communication has many goals to achieve through the implementation of the new web-based course. Among these objectives are the instruction of the technical writing curriculum, the change to a semester-compliant course, and the liberation of technical writing professors to be re-allocated to additional LCC courses. The achievement of these goals will be determined directly by the success of the Icarus Project.

Technological factors to be accounted for when developing a new web-based course include accessibility, user interfaces, copyrights, and the technology needed to maintain the course. First, accessibility issues for students may encompass physical disabilities, access through a modem connection, or use of different hardware/operating systems. Therefore, each web page must be consistent, simple, and compliant with the web standards. Second, the user interface must maximize learning by displaying information in a clear and unambiguous way, by minimizing distraction to the student, by reducing confusion through consistency and organization and by creating a positive educational environment. The user interface should combine structure, navigation, color, hypertext, fonts, and images. Third, the class pages should be copyrighted so that they may be freely redistributed to all students. All copies and derivative works used in the class must carry the "copyleft" license, allowing them to also be redistributed. Last, the web-based class is using programmable PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format) files and digitized video in the class. Accessibility issues must be considered when choosing such technologies to develop web pages, create web-based training, and use database support.