PRESS RELEASE
September 21, 2004
American University of Armenia Corporation
300 Lakeside Drive, 4th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612
Telephone: (510) 987-9452
Fax: (510) 208-3576
Contact: Gohar Momjian
E-mail: [email protected]
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, 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.
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The American University of Armenia is registered as a non-profit educational
organization in both Armenia and the United States and is affiliated with
the Regents of the University of California. Receiving major support from
the AGBU, AUA offers instruction leading to the Masters Degree in eight
graduate programs. For more information about AUA, visit