Prof brings courses to the World Wide Web

With technological innovation rapidly changing the landscape of society, no field lies untouched, including college education. Faced with burgeoning costs and ever-tightening schedules, graduate students are now passing over blackboards and desks in favor of the fiberoptics and JavaScripts of a cyber-classroom. At the forefront of online education development is Systems Engineering Professor Keith Ross, director of the Telecommunications and Networking Program -- a joint effort between the Wharton and Engineering schools. With the help of a grant from the Sloan Foundation, an organization that focuses on technology funding, Ross began offering parts of two of his classes -- Telecommunications 500 and ExEn 615 -- over the World Wide Web last August. "We are very excited to be developing such a comprehensive online-based program which allows advanced courses to become easily accessible to our graduate students, many of whom live far from campus," Ross said. He also noted that the TNP subject matter, which is closely intertwined with computing and networking, makes it an ideal program to be teaching online. "It really is a perfect fit," he said. The program features LODs -- lectures on demand -- which students can call up at their convenience during the week and are offered in written form and in an audio format. "As far as I know, I am the only professor at Penn making some lectures available over the Web with scripted audio clips," Ross said. In addition, students participate in discussion -- posing questions and making comments about current material -- over online newsgroups, which will be further developed with more sophisticated conferencing software. "These online discussions provide a great opportunity for students to explore the material and help one another with their questions and ideas," Ross said. "They also allow students to share links to related sites that they've discovered." A collection of such hyperlinks has already been integrated into the Telecom 500 course in an "online book" that enables students to easily access relevant material. Ross also mentioned that the format eases some of the stress inherent in class work. "Since students can log on whenever their schedule allows, they can manage all their activities more easily," he added. Ross is also experimenting with the concept of the "Asynchronous Advisor," where students submit their course plans over the Web to an advisor and then receive back either a stamp of approval or advice on how to go back to the drawing board. The process is facilitated by the use of a JavaScript interface that checks whether basic requirements have been met. "We feel that online advising can open up a more extensive dialogue between students and advisors," Ross said. Such a broad array of online features could eventually make exam period the only time students will have to come to campus. "We could judge student performance simply by their online participation and not test at all, but that would then raise the issue of cheating," Ross noted. For Phase II of the project, Ross hopes to have six TNP courses on-line by the fall of 1998 as well as introduce JavaApplets, which offer mini-experiments for student to interact with over the Web and guest lectures. By Phase III, which will be enacted in the fall of 1999, he projects that the entire TNP program will be available over the web, including 10 more asynchronous courses and a Web-based administrative infrastructure. Despite these developments, Ross is confident that the computer will not replace the campus anytime in the near future. "There is too much that goes on outside the classroom for students to bypass the residential college experience completely," Ross said.