E-Learning in Theoretical Computer Science: Experiences From an Undergraduate Course

E-Learning is a trendy subject: a lot of money is spent on it, there are hundreds of research papers, conferences, newspaper articles, and political statements on it. There are also several interesting and mature software and hardware solutions. However in most cases they involve a lot of resources, are costly or cover only a few components of courses. So – as it seems to us – up to now only few tools are suitable to be integrated into usual course production, mainly because they require excessive adjustments to the usual processes of course preparation and presentation. On the next pages we report on a modest but concrete project which is carried out with small resources (one scientific position for two years). Our aim is to set up and test a realistic and costeffective environment for e-courses in theoretical computer science. This is a subject close to mathematics; so it involves longer lines of argument and proofs for which the classical blackboard technology has been extremely successful over centuries. For us, it was a challenge to see how slides from a beamer and some infrastructure around them would compete. The next two sections describe the “product” developed in our project; the last section summarises our experiences and conclusions. Our e-lectures are developed within the project ULI (“Universitärer Lehrverbund Informatik”). Within ULI, the Aachen team has to develop course material in theoretical computer science. Four e-courses are being developed: