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Newsletter Volume 3 |
Spring 1999 |
ACEPT On-Line Update
Rod Heyd
ACEPT Webmaster
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Newsletter Volume 3 |
Spring 1999 |
Over the past year, there have been a number of changes, additions, and milestones to ACEPT's on-line presence. In July, we surpassed the 1 million file downloads mark. The astounding growth of the Internet over the last few years has been mirrored by the growth in usage of the ACEPT website. Two years ago, when we switched on our new webserver, we averaged about 180 page accesses per day. Today, our average is over 1000 pages accessed per day, and that number continues to grow.
Other advances of note are the increasing number of ACEPT faculty that are adding on-line components to their courses. In addition to the nearly 500 pages hosted on ACEPT's primary site at acept.asu.edu, many ACEPT faculty are setting up their own websites and are hosting additional materials. Currently, there are over 1900 documents on-line between the various ACEPT related sites.
Due to this large increase in documents, the ACEPT website was quickly growing beyond what our original design could handle, and we needed a new design that would highlight what ACEPT was about while making all these new documents across many different servers easily available. The result of this re-organization was unveiled last April. The new design simplifies navigation by re-organizing ACEPT's on-line resources into several different areas: courses, project information, newsletters, etc, while bringing our search engine into greater visibility by placing a link to our search page on most of ACEPT's "top level" pages to aid in finding other types of information quickly. In addition, many pages in the old site were revised and or consolidated to try to reduce the amount of redundancy and ease maintenance of the site. One other small revision was made last fall; we simplified the URL of the ACEPT website by dropping the "la" from our URL. The website can be accessed from the acept.asu.edu URL as well as the old acept.la.asu.edu URL.
On-line ties to Community Colleges Improved
During the past year, we strengthened our ties to our collaborators in the community colleges. We are in the process of creating on-line ties to the Dynamic Learning Group at South Mountain Community College, as well as showcasing or adding links to the on-line efforts of community college faculty that have participated in ACEPT workshops.
 All workshop participants receive instructions on how to develop web pages. As a result, ACEPT faculty are continually adding on-line components to their reformed courses. |
John Zikopolous, Professor of Chemistry, of Mesa Community College leads our "cetpcoll" listserv that has been created to facilitate discussions among community college faculty in all the collaboratives. If you are interested in how the CETP project is affecting math and science education in community colleges, I recommend you contact John Zikopolous directly (zikopolous@mc.maricopa.edu)or join our listserv and start a discussion there. Information about joining the various listservs that ACEPT maintains can be found on the ACEPT website at:http://acept.asu.edu/listserv_info/listserv.html
New Directions and Projects
Last year, we began to embark in a new direction, to make our website more interactive. The first of these projects to come on-line is the On-line Lab Report form for Susan Wyckoff's PHS110. Students taking this course may now submit lab reports to their TA's via an on-line form. Other interactive projects under development are a quiz system where students may take practice quizzes on-line and eventually complete surveys and take exams. Developments are underway to use the ACEPT website to aid Daiyo Sawada in his task of evaluating the ACEPT project.
 TEAMS students, Scott Thomas and Chris Ridgeway (left to right) discuss the development of a website with ACEPT Webmaster Rod Heyd (far right) |
TEAMS On-line
We have begun to make plans to improve our on-line support of TEAMS. The ACEPT Web developers are teaming up with Jonathan Knaupp, to help maintain parts of the TEAMS website as well as put together a workshop or two for TEAMS students to teach them how to setup and maintain their own websites and webservers when they enter the classrooms.
Students who assisted the ACEPT Web Team were John Wood and Jeong-Wa Kim. John has been responsible for putting Susan Wyckoff's new lab manual "Scientific Inquiry" on-line, while Jeong-Wa is helping us to create a website for the Chemistry Workshop led by Jim Birk this past summer.
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