The UC Web-based Inquiry System for Engineering (UC-WISE) will enable curriculum designers to build on effective instruction and incorporate promising research into their courses. UC-WISE will incorporate an instructional framework developed from over twenty years of research, the powerful WISE learning environment (Web-Integrated Science Environment), and an innovative research program that has immediate payoff for instructors.

Using UC-WISE, instructors will rapidly prototype new courses, readily add course elements tested by others, and easily secure review comments from experienced instructors. UC-WISE courses will be evaluated using a common set of benchmarks. A community of instructors using UC-WISE will exchange resources and compare student responses to the benchmark assessments.

UC-WISE will enable and support practical and powerful educational research based on innovative methods suited to higher education. Rather than assuming that one course fits all students, one will with UC-WISE develop flexibly adaptive courses that can be customized to the needs of different students, curriculum frameworks, and course content.

UC-WISE Principles

UC-WISE will enable course designers to use pragmatic pedagogical principles synthesized from past research, for example, "enable students to learn by doing", "make thinking visible", "vary course activities to target different aspects of learning", "identify student misconceptions", and "provide multiple representations". UC-WISE will also implement a framework that supplies the rationale for each instructional component and explicit links between components.

For references of research on which UC-WISE is based, see

• Computers, Teachers, Peers: Science Learning Partners, by Marcia C. Linn and Sherry Hsi (LEA, 2000).
• Designing Pascal Solutions, by Michael J. Clancy and Marcia C. Linn (W.H. Freeman, 1992, 1996)
• "The Case for Case Studies of Programming Problems", by Marcia C. Linn and Michael J. Clancy, Communications of the ACM, March 1992.

Technology is constantly changing. Course developers at worst reinvent the wheel, at best use previously developed course material whose design and rationale they donít necessarily understand. UC-WISE will solve this problem by providing rationale, context, and evaluation of course components. UC-WISE is not tied to a particular course or subject area, and thus should benefit course and curriculum designers and instructors outside computer science and CITRIS.

The UC-WISE environment, based on WISE (Web-Integrated Science Environment), will implement our pedagogical framework and support activities typically occurring in technology-based courses.

• Support for course designers and instructors:
• A "critical review" facility for course components: topic sequencing; class, homework, and lab activities; and evaluation mechanisms
• Access to previously developed course material, assignments, exam questions, along with accompanying context and rationale; this will include several complete model courses
• Access to model student work
• Support for course activities involving search for Web resources, collaborative work, and computer program development and analysis
• Access to a community of instructors
• Integration of tools and facilities developed by other CITRIS projects
• Support for administrators:
• Procedures for collecting course components and their rationale that are required for course certification and articulation
• Data collection of student performance and evaluation of course components for accreditation purposes
• Support for students:
• Facilities for collaboration and online evaluation
• An integrated environment for guided design, development, and analysis activities
• Flexible modules that provide for self-paced learning and accommodate a variety of learning styles

UC-WISE will allow a number of research questions to be more easily addressed. These include the following:

• Methods for benchmarking educational innovation
• Analysis of elements of technologically-based instruction: What makes a good online learning environment? How can facilities for visualization help? What facilities for course customization are most useful? What role should the instructor play in a technology-rich course environment?
• Studies of the process of customization: What customizations do instructors prefer? What customizations succeed? What evidence helps instructors continuously improve their courses?

Work in Progress

UC-WISE presently consists of several components:

• The Course Builder, a facility for creating a data base of annotated, linked course components (e.g. video segments, homework and lab exercises, exam problems).
• The Curriculum Customizer, a facility for choosing course components from the data base to build an actual course.
• The Student Learning Environment, which supports student collaboration and online problem solving and provides guidance.
• The Course Portal, which provides access to all course information and materials (e.g. a calendar, shared resources, a syllabus).

A draft of a detailed "requirements document" for the system is available here. We have mostly designed the data base, and are evaluating the design. We used the system to teach the summer 2002 CS 3, with great success; information about this experiment is available here. (CS 3-related information is available here.) A number of tasks remain, listed here.

For further information, contact Mike Clancy