Roadmap to Computing

In 1994 the department recognized that understanding and using basic computer applications was becoming very important for a large number of students in a Science, Engineering, Commerce and other Faculties, but no appropriate tutorials on these subjects were available. In response to that need, two of our faculty members (Ian Cavers and George Tsiknis) designed a series of interactive, self-paced, web-based, non-credit courses providing a comprehensive introduction to the computing resources available on campus, including basic and advanced concepts of the Unix system, basic text editors, the C++ programming language, the scripting language Perl, electronic mail and news, Web searching and Web page design. A year later we added a number of introductory and advanced course for the most popular application, including an introduction to Microsoft Word, advanced course in word processing, introduction to spreadsheets using Microsoft's Excel, making presentations with PowerPoint, introduction to Microsoft Access, introduction to the C programming language, and Javascript programming. On-line course notes, tutorials, interactive exercises, progress evaluations, and TA assistance were all available to the entire university community through the World Wide Web. The novel approach we used in the design of these courses is that the presentation was alternating between asking the students to perform a series of tasks using the tools they were learning, assessing their knowledge, and guiding them through the new concepts in a way that was interesting, enjoyable and effective. The courses were offered successfully every year until 2001. Each academic year we had about 1000 users registered in our courses and over 350,000 requests for our popular web-based documentation.