September 21, 2004

AUA Faculty Teaches San Francisco State Students Via Internet

American University of Armenia faculty member from the Computer and Information Science Program (CIS), Hovhannes Avoyan, has recently begun to teach a graduate course in Software Architecture, via distance education from Yerevan, to the graduate students in the Computer Science Department at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Students "meet" with Mr. Avoyan on a weekly basis via communication technologies including voice over IP and video conferencing.

One year ago AUA and SFSU entered into an agreement to pursue joint endeavors and enhance educational and research cooperation between their students, faculty and staff. Subsequent to the signing of the agreement, there has been good progress on joint endeavors in several areas. "It is highly unusual for lecturers located outside the United States to offer courses to students at U.S. institutions," said SFSU Prof. Barry Levine, and AUA Director of the CIS Program. "In addition to providing SFSU students with an important advanced Software Engineering course, the SFSU students will gain valuable experiences in cultural issues and development efforts when the development teams are geographically dispersed." The Office of International Programs at SFSU Financial provided financial support for this distance education course.

AUA masters students also collaborate with students and staff at SFSU in the Moodle project, whereby students at both institutions are developing components of an open source course management system (Moodle) that could be used at many institutions. The freely available Moodle system will assist faculty in electronic learning efforts. Successful adoption of the system with the students' enhancements will gain much recognition for AUA and SFSU.

In another joint endeavor, Mr. Avoyan and Dr. Barry Levine have collaborated to publish a joint poster presentation at the 13th World Wide Web Conference in New York City, 17-22 May 2004, http://www.www2004.org/. The poster presentation evolved from student projects completed in the Software Architecture courses offered at AUA. The paper, "Using Circuit Board Approach for Application Assembling", describes an approach to effectively assemble software applications in an analogous fashion to the assembly of hardware circuit boards

AUA's Computer and Information Science Program was established in 2001 within the College of Engineering to prepare leaders for the computing industry. In addition to providing technical classroom and field expertise, it also includes business, management and entrepreneurship training.