Current Research Interests

Rapidly advancing microcomputer technologies, such as CD-ROM’s and graphical Web browsing software, and the expanded availability of Internet communications capabilities have created the potential for new and more meaningful electronically based formal and informal learning experience delivery systems. Advantages for such systems include providing students with several alternative learning environments and instructional methodologies, very low cost (once the instructional materials have been developed), dramatic reduction of duplicative instructional efforts, obviation of the need to bring students and instructors together, eliminating the need for designated time and fixed facilities (lecture halls, classrooms, etc.), and many other potential advantages over traditional classroom learning environments. These electronic formats will undoubtedly become the basis for the Virtual Learning Environments of tomorrow's society. The knowledge gained by those using the proposed informal instructional opportunities based on these technologies will be a great benefit to learners, who will need these new skills to access the electronic learning environments which will deliver the modalities of the future.

We have conceived a new hybrid format for distance delivery, combining text-based information accessed from the Internet with digitized lectures, animations and other enrichments, stored on CD-ROM discs and/or video servers. Students using this format will interact with both Internet resources and the CD-ROM disc resources from a graphic web browser. The web browser retrieves both resource modalities seamlessly, so users will not know the origin of the materials, nor will it matter. This approach will provide a suite of computer based instructional materials to students in a learning environment which is asynchronous—that is, independent of location and time.

We have developed a set of CD-ROM discs, with accompanying text-based materials, to introduce learners to human nutrition. These interactive CD-ROM's contain a wide variety of entertaining and engaging interactive components, produced with the same high quality now available from TV, film and entertainment consortia (and expected by both young and older learners), and which draw the learner into the learning environment. These components (games, puzzles, problems, assemblies, videos, sound bytes, animations, and every kind of experience we could construct) combine to form an Internet "Sesame Street", with the student guiding the learning experience.

The outcome is an entertaining, task oriented, self-directed adventure in SMT education, with Nutrition concepts forming the central theme. For example, in our model, mathematical concepts are demonstrated through calorie calculations, body compositional data, RDA's, and other interactive examples, where students use mathematics to find answers to other questions. Science concepts are demonstrated via biochemical reactions during digestion, absorption and metabolism. We even have examples of evolutionary biology based on nutrient availability. Finally, engineering concepts are presented using familiar devices (refrigerators, calorimeters, etc.) and tools.

At the outset we have developed the assets for CD-ROM (or, when generally available, for DVD movies and DVD-ROM), but with the goal that we will transfer the total delivery to the Internet as soon as advances in technology provide solutions to problems of compression, decompression and bandwidth.

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