Digital Video And Internet As An Effective Supplement For An Innovative Course

This paper describes innovations in teaching a new course developed in the area of Terrorism and Counter Terrorism (TACT) during the Fall 2000 semester. The course was interdisciplinary and it covered political as well as scientific and technological topics. In addition external speakers from industry and government also lectured in this course. Students in the course ranged from journalism, science, medicine and engineering. To assists students from different backgrounds, each lecture was digitally recorded. The video and audio was then transformed into a MPEG file and burned onto a CD. A separate audio file was then produced and was downloaded to the course web page. The audio file was accessible through the course web page. Students were allowed to check out the CDs and view the lectures. Our experience has shown that students were better able to comprehend a new topic by not only attending the lectures, but also by having access to the audio files through their home computers. Some students preferred viewing the video. We will discuss our experiences with this method of presenting a multidisciplinary course to a multidisciplinary student body.