Teaching of Roy Rada

Table of Contents

Courses Taught

I have taught a wide range of class sizes. My first course was taught to 500 students in an auditorium, and I enjoyed building enthusiasm in this large audience. My courses at George Washington University and at the University of Liverpool were taught with extensive use of computer networks and student-student interaction through the network. For 15 years my classroom reading has been largely online.

Pre-1995

At George Washington University between 1983 and 1987, I taught a course each semester. For those courses, I developed a system that operated across the Internet. A textbook that I had written was parsed into a relational database running on an IBM mainframe. A Fortran program with embedded SQL controlled an interface through which students would read the textbook, submit exercises online, and give feedback to one another online. We also in 1985 developed some programs with HyperCard for supporting online learning.

In my teaching at University of Liverpool starting in 1988 every student had access to a networked computer and used a collaborative hypermedia system called Many Using and Creating Hypermedia (MUCH) which my group created. The course material was all online and students worked together. The photo shows wwo students on workstations with the MUCH System.

I have lectured to very different types of people, such as doctors in pathology laboratories in Houston, librarians and postgraduates in Colombia, South America. My South American course was taught to 100 people over a full-week on the subject of hypertext. The photo shows an Announcement of my Class in Colombia and was part of large, color-poster advertisement for my week-long class.

I taught telecommunications scientistsat Korea Telecom in a visit funded by Korea Telecom. The photo shows me lecturing to an audience at Korea Telecom.

Some of the normal university courses which I have taught are listed here. In this listing HO = University of Houston, WS = Wayne State University, GW = George Washington University, LI = University of Liverpool, and CSxxx = Computer Science course number xxx.

Post-1995

(WSU means Washington State University, Pace means Pace University, and UMBC IS means Department of Information Systems at University of Maryland, Baltimore County).

My teaching at Washington State University continued the tradition of using computer networks, hypermedia, and groupware in teaching. At Washington State University I created two new courses for the official university curriculum: one was "Virtual Organizations" and the other was "The Virtual University". Both courses were taught in innovative ways. In the spring of 1996 I taught a class that had no face-to-face lectures but was entirely via the web.

I developed the web systems for the CS 450 and CS 470 courses myself using Microsoft Internet Information Server. The computer logged all submissions and maintained a running computation of the students' scores based on their teamwork, the length of each submission, the time of each submission, the number of submissions, and the quality of each submission. Quality was determined by the feedback that other students give to a submission. The page by which students query the database follows:

Search for Submitted Exercises

You may leave all the fields blank and then retrieve everything in the dbms.

Exercises
Chapter
Length greater than
Team Member
Submitted after day/month/year:
Submitted before day/month/year:

Hundreds of submissions were made to the database and students could study these other submissions and learn from them.

At Pace University and UMBC, I continued until 1999 to build toolsets for online courses. After that my teaching was done with Blackboard.

Theses Examined

In the British university system a Ph.D. student's ultimate success or failure is determined by one external examiner and one internal examiner, neither of whom may be the supervisor. I have been examiner for several Ph.D. theses in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, including:

Additionally, in the British system taught M.Sc. courses must be judged by an external examiner. This person is responsible to review all exams before they are administered and to check that the quality of assessed work is consistent with the marks given for the work. I am the External Examiner for the M.Sc. in Knowledge Engineering at University of Sunderland for the 1995-1998 period.

Theses Supervised

A partial list of graduate research students successfully supervised by me follows:

Masters Degree Thesis Awarded

Washington State University M.Sc. Projects

Ph.D. Thesis Supervised

I have been on the Ph.D. committee of several students who have completed or are completing their Ph.D.s to include:

At the University of Liverpool students do a major project which occupies the equivalent of about 3 full-time months, and I supervised about 40 such major projects at Liverpool.

Virtual Training

I taught three mini-courses at The Gallup Organization in the summer of 1996 with topics of "Patient Satisfaction", "Virtual Organizations", and "Consumer Segmentation in Developing Markets". All were offered entirely in virtual mode, and participants were distributed across the globe -- typically half the participants were distributed evenly across Europe, South America, and Asia. The web site used clickable image maps, frames, interactive forms, registration facilities, discussion facilities, search tools, and so on (see Figure). The response of participants was positive.

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