History

June 2009

Computer Science CourseWare (CSCW) becomes CascadeLMS.   We are taking on a more public face in order to help departments and schools outside of Miami University adopt the system.   CascadeLMS is still in use by many of the courses in the Computer Science and Systems Analysis department at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio).

Research and development are an ongoing process.

The name “CascadeLMS”

Why Cascade?  Cascade comes from the Cascade Mountain Range.   I, Mike Helmick (the project maintainer), live in Seattle, Washington.   While trying to decide on a great new name for the project, I looked out my window and saw Mr. Rainier, the highest peak in the Cascade Range.  Cascade seemed like a fitting name, since we help navigation the mountain range that is online courseware.

Why LMS?  There are two names that systems in this area seem to take on.

  • CMS = course management system
  • LMS = learning management system

Since CMS does double duty, also heavily used to mean “Content Management System,” I went with LMS.

Spring 2009

Mike Helmick and Jerry Gannod have a paper accepted to FIE 2009, describing the new assessment capabilities of Computer Science CourseWare and how these enable ongoing assessment.

  • Michael T. Helmick and Gerald C. Gannod, “Streamlining and Integration of Miami Three-Tier Outcomes Assessment for Sustainability”, in The Proceedings of the 39th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE 2009), San Antonio, TX, October 18-21, 2009   link will be posted when the proceedings are available.

Fall 2008

Computer Science CourseWare (CSCW) gets a major overhaul!  The source code is upgraded to work with Rails 2.x.   Feature wise, we added great support for outcomes based assessment at the course level, and support for Miami’s 3-tier assessment model.

Spring 2008

We publish on how the Computer Science CourseWare system can support inverted classroom teaching techniques.   In support of this publication, podcast support was added to CSCW.

  • Gerald Gannod, Janet Burge, and Michael T. Helmick, “Using the Inverted Classroom to Teach Software Engineering”, in The Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), Leipzig, Germany, May 10 – 18, 2008  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1368088.1368198

Fall 2007

Computer Science CourseWare (CSCW) gains adoption, and is used in more courses in the Computer Science and Systems Analysis department at Miami University.   At the end of the fall semester, Mike Helmick leave Miami University and begins work at Amazon.com, while still leading the CSCW project.

Spring 2007

The initial CSCW publications are accepted for presentation at ITiCSE 2007

  • Michael T Helmick, “Integrated Online Courseware for Computer Science Courses,” in The Proceedings of The 12th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2007), Dundee, Scotland  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1268784.1268828
  • Michael T Helmick, “Interface-based Programming Assignments and Automatic Grading of Java Programs,” in The Proceedings of The 12th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2007), Dundee, Scotland  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1268784.1268805

Fall 2006

Students in 3 Computer Science courses (2 sections of CSA174 and 1 section of CSA274) begin using Computer Science CourseWare.  Initial results are positive and we begin to add additional functionality and grow the system.

Summer 2006

The initial development of Computer Science CoureWare (CSCW) is funded by a small grant from Miami University’s Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT).   Mike Helmick spends 6 weeks developing the core of what would later become CascadeLMS.

Early 2006

Mike Helmick develops a small application for student journal entries.   For the spring semester, students write journal entries during programming assignments.