Connecting the Dots for a Quality Education (and the UNIX operating System)

This abstract is an announcement of the inauguration of the Continuous Assessment office (CAO). The CAO Advisory board: David Davison, Mark Jacobson, Mike Havens and Joe Howell. Who I am: Mike Fried, Director of the Office and Adjunct Research Professor of Mathematics. For questions: Please call 254-8787, or 672-8472.

Can you name an operating system with these properties?

It is on every Macintosh since 2000.
It can be installed easily at small cost on every PC.
Bill Gates made his fortune from it by using a tiny piece of that system to make DOS.
It gets upgraded daily, and yet it goes back to 1972.
It is more powerful than any of the operating systems I have mentioned by name.

Whether you can or not name it, that system is the one that can put the educational resources I mention below at your fingertips.

The talk will discuss three types of educational needs and three corresponding types of educational software. Each helps track and assess students, and to manipulate and create reports from your own data unobtrusively.

WebWorks: Everpresent assessments that help students monitor their own mastery learning
I(nteractive)Q(uestionnaire)s: Engagement in step-thinking, serious reading and writing and simplified grading of it all
Interactive Portfolio Management: Organizational tools for involving students in projects or for having data about students ready and in report form

All university people know that Learning and finding ways to use what we learn is tough. Assessing and understanding that learning may even be tougher. Excellent management of what students can learn is at the heart of the software I've mentioned above. It costs nothing.

The CAO is there to help you by listening to particular data and assessment problems you have, and to make available to you a good software solution. The talk will explain what that means.

I have been a Full Professor of mathematics at SUNY at Stony Brook (NY), Univ. of California at Irvine, Hebrew University (Jerusalem) and Univ. of Florida. I have held a Sloan research Fellowship, a Lady Davis Research Fellowship, an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship for my mathetics research.

My educational research has been funded by Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation. I will use this one hour talk to give examples to show they apply to many educational needs, not just mathematics and science.