What may be surprising are the unique learning opportunities these forays afford students and instructors in the department. Students also have access to class newsgroups, where they can post their programming woes and hope for a suggestion from peers or teaching assistants. The complete Web pages from previous quarters are preserved and linked to the current quarter's Web site, making these comprehensive resources available to all students. Virtual lab consultants High enrollments and undersized computer labs necessitated a creative solution, allowing students to take advantage of the expertise of technical support staff from home or other labs. The department's teleconsulting initiative uses communication technologies ranging from the telephone to Microsoft NetMeeting, which permits a consultant to 'take over' a student's computer remotely, to assist students working from home.
Students send a request for help by putting their name in a queue from the teleconsulting Web page .
Streaming media for distributed education On-campus students can also take advantage of a collaborative project between the University of Washington and a number of community colleges in the Seattle area, which addresses a shortage of computer science instructors at the community college level. On-campus students thus have access not only to the transparencies, but also to the complete class session and subsequent annotations so they can review or catch up on missed lectures.