In the fall Barbra Higginbotham met with the chairs/key faculty in each of the departments whose gateway courses have high failure rates to get their input about how we could make the supersites more useful to their students.
Subsequently Petek Kent, our DSI specialist, met with many faculty teaching in the relevant departments (Math, CIS, Economics, Biology, Chemistry); using their suggestions, she made major changes to the sites http://ait.brooklyn.cuny.edu/gateway/. Her experiences and achievements are described in great detail in her reports "Supplemental Instructional Super Sites for Gateway Courses: Fall 2004 Discussions with Faculty" (December 17, 2004) and "Fall 2004 Pre-Calculus Chat Pilot Summary Report" (January 3, 2005).
Faculty who advised Petek and informed the sites' content include Professors Charlene L. Forest (Biology), Fred Gardiner (Mathematics), John Velling (Mathematics), Kreindy Giladi (Economics/Accounting), Mark Kobrak (Chemistry), Paul Goldberg (Economics), Catherine McEntee (Biology), and Merih Uctum (Economics). These faculty also consulted with colleagues whose thinking they brought to the table.
Initially the super sites were all built in Blackboard, so that they could include protected publisher content. In order to maximize usage, this year, Petek created parallel, non-Blackboard versions of each site. Of course, the non-Blackboard sites cannot offer the publisher content.
Ms Kent also developed templates that enable us to post content more easily to the supersites that support Gateway courses. The Gateway sites are now live; page counters have been added.
She is now building online quizzes for the supersites. Precalculus has been completed. Mark Kobrak is assisting her with final modifications on the Chemistry super site and John Velling has helped with math.
Petek also built the online tutoring system MathChat for the Learning Center.
In June 2005 staff from AIT and the Learning Center developed a document describing how they plan to coordinate tutoring and DSI activities in the coming academic year.
