Teaching through electronic mail

In November 1994 we (members of the former Human Cognition Research Laboratory) ran an experimental version of the Masters level course DM863, ‘Common Lisp for Artificial Intelligence,’ taught as far as possible entirely through the Internet. This report describes this course and outlines some of the experiences and ideas that evolved during this course. Introduction The intention behind this course was to explore the extent to which it is possible to teach a course entirely through the Internet. The work was derived from two sources, first Tony Hasemer’s work on transferring the basic DM863 ‘Common Lisp for Artificial Intelligence’ course onto the FirstClass conferencing system, and second, the virtual summer school work exploring teaching through the Internet. The main difference in this course was that we tried a ‘lowest common denominator’ approach—we wanted to see how effectively we could teach using communications media so widespread that we could have global reach. In a sense, its aim was the exact opposite of the virtual summer school—instead of exploring how rich a teaching experience could be created using new technologies, we wanted to see how much teaching could be achieved using the most basic electronic communications technologies. In this case, by ‘Internet’ we assumed an ‘IP’ (Internet protocol) of some kind between computers. The minimum specification that we assumed was an electronic mail connection of some kind between students and tutors. In practice, this mostly manifested itself as an electronic mail system using the standard Internet mail protocol, ‘SMTP.’ 1 In fact, the reach of the course was wider than this implies. There are several other computer networks in the world, and almost every one of them has good connections to and from the Internet for the purposes of electronic mail. Other kinds of communication between the networks are less well supported. One student was not on the Internet at all, but on a different network, Bitnet. Because we used electronic mail for communication, and this is a sound lowest common denominator, this was transparent to the other participants on the course.