Students can call up the programs from terminals on the campus network in dorm rooms and offices, day or night. Students electing to take a NET-G course do not receive academic credit. But college officials say some instructors might eventually direct students to take a course as a class requirement. They can gain instruction about the computer applications, such as word processing and spreadsheets, that they use in their academic classes. But they also can take industry-approved training courses leading to professional certifications , such as Novell network engineer, which indicates they know how to manage a computer network that employs a Novell server.
Students can fit the instruction into their own schedules.
But Chuck Moran, NET-G's chairman and chief executive officer, said about 80 percent of the multimedia courses are being provided to Lafayette at no charge because the company is using the arrangement to test products developed for corporate clients. Moran said NET-G hoped to move into educational markets outside the Fortune 2000 corporations that the company has focused on in the past. Company officials, he said, targeted several prestigious schools as potential test sites. They settled on Lafayette in the spring. Lafayette provost June Schlueter said the self-paced courses give students the chance to gain technical training they can use without interfering with academic classes.