In recent years, when students in Bob Nau's statistical forecasting class had questions on their homework assignments, they used to show up at his office with computer printouts in hand. Today, they send their queries to him by Email, often with computer files attached. Professor Nau responds by Email, or if he thinks the issue is of general interest to the class, he posts it on the course's electronic bulletin board for all to see. Students can even transmit their completed assignments to Nau electronically. In turn, he can read, correct and return them with a few simple keystrokes.
The Computer Mediated Learning Environment (CMLE), in the planning stages just a year ago, has now become a reality at Fuqua. The hardware and software are in place, experimental runs have been conducted and the medium is in use not universally, but more and more each day. And no one is more pleased than the architects of CMLE at Fuqua, professors John McCann and John Gallagher.
"I've been here twelve years, and this is the most exciting technological innovation I've seen," says Gallagher. "It's breathtaking to see the interactive computer culture unfold before our eyes."
CMLE is being used in different ways by different professors, but the central ingredients are the same. Over the summer of 1994, all faculty computers, as well as computers in the student laboratory, were hooked up to Dukenet, the campuswide computer network which, among other things, provides immediate access to the Internet. The university enhanced its dialin service to allow easier access to Dukenet from offcampus. Windowsbased software, providing Email for all faculty and students and bulletin boards for each course, was put in place. Faculty and students were given training in the use of the software, and a bulletin board entitled forum.computing.help was set up to help students get their own systems up and running at home.
During the fall semester, various faculty began incorporating CMLE into their teaching, adapting it to fit their particular course needs. Professor Joel Huber, who teaches a course in Product Management, primarily employed the bulletin board for discussion of case histories presented in class.
"We used the bulletin board as a way to extend class discussions," Huber says. "For example, we posed questions related to slotting allowances for products, and students responded with their own experiences gained from summer employment."
John Gallagher, by contrast, teaches a technologyintensive course in Information Management. Most of the inquiries in his class were related to very specific problems, such as how to run the macros used to analyze data sets.
Gallagher found that CMLE changed the nature of his interactions with students, and the learning process, in a number of positive ways.
"I used to come back to my office after lunch and there would be four or five students camped out in the hall waiting to talk to me," Gallagher says. "Those students would want clarification on certain issues, which I would provide. But the rest of the class would not benefit from that discussion, at least not immediately. This past semester, I told all my students that if they had questions, they should communicate them to me electronically. The questions were posted on the bulletin board for all to see, as were my replies. It's a much quicker, more efficient way to get information out."
A week into his course, Gallagher's students had made over 200 postings. Gallagher checks out the postings on the electronic bulletin board four or five times a day"more often than I need to", he says. This allows him to quickly spot any problems students are having with assignments. He may respond directly to the student via Email or, if he thinks there's a clarification the whole class would benefit from, via the bulletin board. Students are privy to all inquiries made on the bulletin board, and very often, they will come up with solutions to problems themselves.
"It's great to see students step up and help other students," Gallagher says. "Sometimes, I won't respond to a problem immediately, because I think the students can work it out among themselves."
Professor John McCann, who originated the idea of CMLE at Fuqua, is equally thrilled with the results so far. "What we're getting is continuous learning, cooperative learning a class that never ends," he says. "It's everything we imagined and more." McCann says that not every class is using CMLE and not all those that have used it are comfortable with it. Each professor who used CMLE in the fall semester is polling the students to gauge their response.
"In those courses where students viewed CMLE as an extra requirement, I think the response will not be positive," McCann says. "But for many others, it will." Todd Tippets, a secondyear student who took John Gallagher's information management course, is one of the satisfied customers.
"I came to Fuqua with very little computer experience," Tippets says. "But I've found that if you just dive into it, you'll find the system to be very userfriendly. The CMLE is a simpler, more efficient way to communicate with teachers outside of class. And I've learned computer skills that will be necessary to be successful in business."