Supplementary Instruction (SI) is a proven tool to help undergraduate students succeed in traditionally difficult academic courses. SI involves scheduled group study sessions with direct peer-to-peer interaction between students and the SI leader. The SI strategy has proven its efficacy throughout a wide range of U.S universities that have embraced such a program. SI is offered at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) for several courses in a variety of programs, including the Electrical Engineering Technology (ELET) program. Since the ELET program also offers an IADE (Individual Access Distance Education) option for degree completion, online sections for on-campus courses are required. It is therefore necessary to have SI sessions available for the on-campus students as well as eSI (electronic SI) sessions for the IADE students. For most ELET courses, WebCT is utilized as an asynchronous means of interaction between the instructor and students for both on-campus and IADE sections. The difference in interaction arises in the way supplemental instruction is designed and conducted, especially for the online courses, where traditional group study SI sessions are impossible. This limitation of the IADE offering necessitated the use of an alternate tool to provide IADE students the opportunity for synchronous interaction with the SI leader. CentraOne, an open architecture Web platform for knowledge delivery, is used in eSI to provide the desired peer-to-peer sessions and allow IADE students to directly interact with the SI leader. The recording and publishing capabilities of CentraOne are also used to provide unlimited asynchronous access of sessions to students in all sections.
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