Report on ECDS: An Interactive Course on the Internet
Paul Dekker, David Beaver

Abstract:
Report on ECDS:
An Interactive Course on the Internet
Paul J. E. Dekker, David I. Beaver

From 3rd May until 12th July 1996, an academic course was given for an 
international (and intercontinental) group, via the internet. The course was
given by Paul Dekker and David Beaver, both employed at the University of
Amsterdam. Taking part in the course were twenty people from Japan, Uruguay,
the United States, and a number of European Countries. A group of fifty 
interested observers, spread across the worlds five main continents, also 
followed the course.
The course subject was Dynamic Semantics, a branch of formal linguistics
which grew up in the 1980s, and which impinges upon mathematics, computer
science, cognitive science and the philosophy of language. The Netherlands, 
and the ILLC research institute at the University of Amsterdam in particular, 
has a leading position in this interdisciplinary research area.
The most distinctive feature of the course is that it was taught entirely via 
the Internet, in terms not only of distribution of teaching materials, but 
also of the teaching itself (via weekly ``virtual classrooms''). During the 
preparation of the enterprise, the organizers could find no indication of 
there having ever been any comparable academic course, that is, any wholly 
electronically taught course which was both truly international, and truly 
interactive. For this reason it seemed important to record our experiences, 
and make them available to a wider audience.
In this document we report on the course, on the methods which were developed 
and used, and on our experiences with organizing and teaching a course over 
the Internet. In the first section, we summarize what the course achieved and 
give our main conclusions. The second section briefly describes those 
involved in the course, and the third section details the course itself. In
the fourth and final section we describe our observations and conclusions in
more detail.