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.

A photo of two of my students using 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.

A photo of one of the posters placed around the University of Bucaramanga and advertising my seminar.

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

I am in the back as I teach a class at Korea Telecom in Seoul.

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:

  1. Masoud Yazdani 'Computers and Writing' at Sussex University, July 1990.
  2. Simon Kendal 'The Development of a Flexible Learning Mechanism for Heat Exchange Design' at Univ. Ulster at Coleraine, December 1990.
  3. Evelyn Davis Smith 'The Implications of New Developments in Technology on Searching Habits in a Chemical Company' at Liverpool John Moores Univ., March 1992.
  4. Seyed Massoud Hajsadr 'Application of Knowledge Related Systems in Manufacturing' at Univ. Sunderland, February 1992
  5. Ian Finch 'Intelligent Explanation from Expert Systems', Univ. Liverpool, December 1992.
  6. Thiam Tan, 'Development of an Intelligent Conceptual Storage and Retrieval System', Univ. Sunderland, Jan. 1994.
  7. Maria Garcia Pimentel, 'A Framework for User-Hypertext Interaction and Alternative Operations for Browsing', Univ. Canterbury at Kent, June 1994.
  8. John E Barrow, 'A Computer-Based Writing System for Distance Students', University of South Africa, July 1994.
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

  1. Catherine Rubens, "Weight Adjustment on Rule-based Expert System," M.Sc. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Wayne State Univ., Detroit, Michigan, December 1983.
  2. Chigh-Chiou Sheu, "Search Spaces: Minimum-Cost Spanning Tree Problem and Traveling Salesman Problem," M.Sc. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Wayne State Univ., Detroit, Michigan, October 1983.
  3. Cheryl Earnley, "Heuristics and Continuity in the Traveling Salesman Problem," M.Sc. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Wayne State Univ., Detroit, Michigan, August 1984.
  4. Marc Burgoine, "Tools to Support the Browsing of a Semantic Net Based Hypertext System," M.Phil. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, September 1989.
  5. Anthony Deakin, "The Facilitator in Computer-Supported Collaborative Work," M.Phil. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, April 1994.
  6. Pelagia-Irene Gouma, "Can Groupware Applications Meet the Needs of Organisational Management? An Investigation," M.Phil. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, March 1994.
  7. Sharon Acquah, "Authoring from Multimedia Reuse Libraries," M.Phil. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, January 1994.
  8. Maria Nuria Alonso Rubio, "Developing Orthoptics Courseware through Reuse", M.Phil. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, March 1996.
  9. Baohuan Zhang, "Reusing Courseware: SGML and HTML", M.Phil. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, Nov. 1996.
Washington State University M.Sc. Projects

Ph.D. Thesis Supervised

  1. Hafedh Mili, "Building and Maintaining Hierarchical Semantic Nets," Ph.D. Thesis, Dept. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, George Washington Univ., Washington, D.C., August 1988.
  2. Mahmoud Mhashi, "The Role of Hierarchies in Discussion and Annotation," Ph.D. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, November 1991.
  3. Geeng-Neng You, "Outlining Support for Hypertext Systems," Ph.D Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, September 1992.
  4. Akmal Jahan Zeb, "Browsing versus Searching in a Collaborative Authoring Hypertext," Ph.D. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, March 1993.
  5. Antonios Michailidis, "Efficiency of Computer-Supported Collaborative Authoring," Ph.D Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, December 1994.
  6. Weigang Wang, "Reusable Structured Hypertext," Ph.D Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, May 1995.
  7. Claude Ghaoui, "Authoring and Linearizing Hypertext for Electronic and Print Publishing", Ph.D. Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, May 1995
  8. David Reid, "Browsing Hypertext: Semiotics, Higraphs, Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms", Ph.D Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, June 1995.
  9. Chaomei Chen, "Cognitive Models in Collaborative Hypertext," Ph.D Thesis, Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Liverpool, Liverpool, September 1995.
  10. Thomas Henderson, 'Design and Evaluation for Effectiveness and Efficiency of New Technologies in Education' Ph.D. Thesis, Interdisciplinary among Engineering, Education, and Business Colleges, Washington State University, May 1999.
  11. Kathleen Warren 'Peer Interactions and Quality Learning in Text-Based Computer-Mediated-Communication Systems' Ph.D. in Educational Administration, University of Idaho, Nov. 1999.
  12. Xueguang Ma, 'Building an Accountability System for Teacher Education: An Actor-Network Approach', August 2005.
  13. Heather Holden, 'Assessing teachers' acceptance and usage behavior of current job -related technologies', 2009
  14. Jie Due, 'Knowledge and Evolutionary Computation for Finance', 2012.
  15. Kelley Engle, 'Data Mining and Domain Knowledge: An exploration of methods to advance medical knowledge', 2013
  16. Hayden Wimmer,'Good versus bad knowledge: Ontology guided evolutionary algorithms', 2013.

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.
I taught online to the Gallup Organization world-wide from its headquarters in Lincoln, Nebraska and created the shown graphic as part of the advertising for my courses.

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