Paul Beam
Paul Beam was one of the first English professor at the University of Waterloo, known for leading the efforts to introduce "distance learning" and co-operative work-study programs.[1][2][3][4]
Beam became an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo in 1960, the first year the University had a small Faculty of Arts.[1] He earned his Masters degree and PhD at McMaster University and the University of Toronto, returning to Waterloo as an instructor in English in 1968.
English co-op program
The University of Waterloo had long been an innovator in cooperative work-study programs, where students alternated a work term with a study term, so, by the time they graduated they could tell their future employers they already had two years of work experience.[1] However, at first all co-op students were in technical faculties, Engineering, Math, Science. Beam took a lead role in introducing the first co-op program in the Faculty of Arts, and was the first director of its English co-op program. Beam worked diligently to help make sure the technical companies who hired thousands of skilled engineering and math students could also hire English students to fulfill the technical writing needs of their big projects.[5]
Distance education
The University of Waterloo had always had a wide selection of its course available as correspondence courses, where students would be sent lectures on casette audio tapes, and would mail their assignments back to their instructors, through postal mail.[1][6][7] Beam would later describe how some of these correspondence students were among his best students. He described working to make sure correspondence students were eligible to be honours students. He described working to keep short the number of terms a student was required to be on campus.
Beam was an early recognizer that offering courses through the nascent internet would superior to students and teachers communicating via postal mail, and is the author of early papers on "distance education" where off-campus students communicated with their instructors via computer aided communication.[1][6][7]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "English at 50: Dr. Paul Beam (BA 1964)". University of Waterloo. 2004. http://english50th.uwaterloo.ca/faculty/profiles/PBeam.html. Retrieved 2015-11-07.
- ↑ Paul Beam, Brian Cameron (1998). ""BUT WHAT DID WE LEARN.. . ?“: EVALUATING ONLINE LEARNING AS PROCESS". University of Waterloo. http://www.itu.dk/~jonina/KM/4vikur/p258-beam.pdf. Retrieved 2015-11-07.
- ↑ "Innovative educator and leader". Kitchener Waterloo Record. 2011-03-11. http://www.therecord.com/living-story/2577274-innovative-educator-and-leader/. Retrieved 2015-11-07.
- ↑ "Deaths: Beam, Paul David". Globe and Mail. 2011-03-11. http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/Deaths.20110311.93258964/BDAStory/BDA/deaths. Retrieved 2015-11-07.
- ↑ Angie Sawelsky (1984-10-26). "Co-op education: coop for beginners". Imprint. http://issuu.com/uw_imprint/docs/1984-85_v07-n15_imprint. Retrieved 2015-11-07.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Paul Beam, Diane Burke (1994). "Learners as authors: helping ESL employees in a Canadian bank prepare customer relations and documentation material". SIGDOC '94 Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference on Systems documentation: technical communications at the great divide. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=192549. Retrieved 2015-11-07.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Paul Beam (1997). [http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED429530.pdf "Authoring and Development in an Online Environment: Web-Based Instruction Using SGML"]. WebNet 97 World Conference of the WWW, Internet & Intranet Proceedings. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED429530.pdf. Retrieved 2015-11-07.
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