This committee was formed in response to a series of notes prepared by Professor John McCann on the Cyberspace Challenge facing business schools in general, and our school in particular. This memo contains an Action Item that needs your attention as soon as possible. Although we are early in our technology assessment and education design processes, it is clear that we will make extensive use of CMC technology, but the jury is still out on when and how we will deploy live video in our education programs. So, this note concerns our immediate needs to upgrade our computer mediated communications capabilities. We will pursue video in a later communication.
Time is important in our efforts.
Given that we are already very busy, we cannot expect faculty to experience the technology in the abstract, i.e., learn to use the technology without a purpose. Based upon this experience, we will be in a much better position to adapt our courses, materials, and teaching styles to the requirements of the new programs such as the World-Wide Executive MBA program. These features are discussed in more depth in the Appendix. We asked one member of the committee to provide a personal answer to this question, and the response is included below. In the Decision Models course especially, we need to be able to provide fast technical support if questions or problems arise with the modeling techniques and software while students are working on their assignments.