No / John Baruch surveys the work of the Bradford Robotic Telescope – a project rooted in innovation and education, full of potential for an exciting future.

This thesis investigates the issues of creating a publicly accessible Web interface to a remote autonomous robot: the Bradford Robotic Telescope. The robot is situated on Mount Teide, on the island of Tenerife, Spain. Its mission is to provide interactive access to the stars to people who would otherwise not be able to appreciate the wonders of the night sky due to light pollution. Whenever weather and darkness permits, the robot processes the observation requests submitted by users via the Internet, operating all the hardware including the dome, telescope mount and cameras. The question of how to enable a content rich high quality dialogue between one robot and thousands of users is explored and divided into seven areas of research. How to design a Web site enabling high quality interaction with the user, how to enable users to request service from a robot, how to store and manage all the user and robot generated data, how to enable communication between the Web interface and the robot, how to schedule many observation requests in the best order, how to support a constant dialogue between the robot and users to engage users in the robot's work, and how to present and display users' completed observations. These seven areas of research are investigated; solutions are presented and their implementations examined and evaluated for their suitability and performance with the Bradford Robotic Telescope, and for how they might perform for any job-based remote robot.

This thesis investigates the issues of creating a publicly accessible Web interface to a remote autonomous robot: the Bradford Robotic Telescope. The robot is situated on Mount Teide, on the island of Tenerife, Spain. Its mission is to provide interactive access to the stars to people who would otherwise not be able to appreciate the wonders of the night sky due to light pollution. Whenever weather and darkness permits, the robot processes the observation requests submitted by users via the Internet, operating all the hardware including the dome, telescope mount and cameras. The question of how to enable a content rich high quality dialogue between one robot and thousands of users is explored and divided into seven areas of research. How to design a Web site enabling high quality interaction with the user, how to enable users to request service from a robot, how to store and manage all the user and robot generated data, how to enable communication between the Web interface and the robot, how to schedule many observation requests in the best order, how to support a constant dialogue between the robot and users to engage users in the robot's work, and how to present and display users' completed observations. These seven areas of research are investigated; solutions are presented and their implementations examined and evaluated for their suitability and performance with the Bradford Robotic Telescope, and for how they might perform for any job-based remote robot.

This thesis presents a novel framework for the collection and evaluation of data around e-learning. It shows how e-learning can play a positive role in empowering teachers in reflective practice through accessible statistical methods, as part of an evidence-based approach. Within this new framework data generated by pupils’ actions in three levels of pedagogical activity: declarative content based, functional tools based and social functional are aligned with three levels of evaluation: satisfaction, learning and behavioural changes. The framework is evaluated using the e-learning system for the Bradford Robotic Telescope. Analysis and assessment of the data by using the tools and concepts of statistics are performed. The first group of 78 clusters, mean size of 25.6 pupils, are examined to determine the effect of contextual factors. Pupils responded consistently to the same learning design across a range of contexts. National indicators for social/economic, academic achievement and group size are examined for bias. Suitable measurements for interpretation by simple Gaussian distributions are identified: satisfaction through the frequency of use with a probability of P>0.05, learning through formative assessment (P>0.3) and behavioural changes through engagement with higher order activities (P>0.2). The second group of 168 clusters, mean cluster size 25.9, demonstrates a meaningful effect size for a change in approach within the e-learning system in the areas of satisfaction, learning and behavioural changes with a probability of P<0.01.

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