Experiences in Cross-Teaching within a Distance Education Environment

A project-based course in Robotics was created to serve as an elective for engineering students at the University of Georgia (UGA) and National Taiwan University (NTU). It was implemented during the Spring and Fall 2012 semesters with a total of 27 students from both universities. It was designed around 4-5 projects with lectures and laboratory demonstrations performed by the instructors (from both sides) to provide necessary background materials for students to carry on successfully with their chosen projects. The major difficulties were the differences in the start date and duration of the respective courses at each university and prevented our attempt to synchronize student progress and interaction. The "technical" issues turned out to be easily solved by each side using similar hardware and software. The instructional materials were shared via classroom capture and webcasting technologies: recordings of live lectures from either university were re-purposed to accommodate the flow and topical differences in the materials taught and frequency of class weekly attendance - twice a week for NTU students and once a week for NTU students. We also had found the necessity to change the instructor-student interaction method as NTU students were less comfortable in interacting directly with the UGA instructor. Student surveys at both universities showed strong enthusiasm for the Project-Based Learning approach. Differences in student motivation and project quality were found between the 2 universities, perhaps as an unplanned consequence of the differences in how each university provided the students access to the robotic hardware and software components.