Courses will be offered in port and at sea. Assistant vice president of the school's Distance Education Unit, Dr. Jim Wolfgang, and course instructor, Dr. Hank Edmondson, visited the aircraft carrier to brief prospective graduate students on how the program will operate. While the course criteria remains the same, the method of information exchange gives a new meaning to non-traditional. The ship is equipped with an advanced communications suite, called Challenge Athena, that allows accelerated data transmission and increased bandwidth even while underway. Galileo is a database available through the Internet that allows the student to index several thousand periodicals, scholarly journals, business directories and other electronic and print media sources.
Students can only access the database with a password, issued for the duration of the curriculum.
While Galileo resides in Milledgeville, Sailors can access the extensive database to research and review class material anytime, anywhere. Christopher Fields of Winter Haven, Fla., said this will be his first experience with a virtual classroom. The ship's Educational Services Officer ENS Jim Raulsome of Long Island, N.Y., said the first degree offered by the program will be a masters in public administration with courses in ethics and public leadership and managerial economics. He said that the courses were picked because they are statistically the most popular courses taken. Fields, who has a degree in aviation management from Southern Illinois University, has been looking for an opportunity like this for a long time.