The class, which contains about 50 students, meets twice a week in the newly renovated Teaching Auditorium. Barbara and Karen do not alternate days of instruction, nor do they divided the class into discrete units. Rather, they share a portion of the class lesson. Most importantly, the students feel comfortable with two instructors and will approach either for a conference. We created an IDS home page which directs students to pre-selected and periodically updated sites which are complementary to the material covered in class.
Sites are about art, humanities, history, culture and philosophy.
We intended this IDS web site to serve as an auxiliary text, not an exercise in browsing the Internet. Students visit various web locations as part of the course requirement and the material is subject to testing or inclusion in other graded tasks. Since we plan the courses far in advance and students are given an hour by hour schedule of content the first day of class, we included the specific Web assignments on the master schedule rather than simply offering students a general range of web resources. The point is to make the Internet an integral part of the course material and not merely use it as a research tool. The virtual university, then, would be a learner-oriented organziation that provides educational services to adults at the place, time, pace, and in the style desired by the learner.