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“spending hours online.”
Students looking for job opportunities closer to home can browse a recently renovated web page published by the University’s MBNA Career Services Center. Lynn Jacobson, coordinator for career services, says students can find part-time jobs, internships and career opportunities with greater ease on the new web page, which was designed to be organized, aesthetically pleasing and functional. Campus departments seeking student help, such as Public Safety, the library and IT units, use the web page to post a wide variety of jobs.
Students also can create their résumés from this web page by completing a form, which is then sent to a databank, organized by major and posted on the site for employers to view.
“What have you done to help students lately?” is a question that has become something of a mantra for staff at the University. But, it was first an eye-opener when David Roselle asked it 10 years ago as new president of the University. He was determined that the campus would be a friendly place for students—student-centered place—and he has been heard to say, “UD is the middle name in stUDent.”
The goal of a student-centered campus resulted in a campus network that is everywhere available to everyone and provides a myriad of online services, like the posting of job opportunities. The network and the
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In 1992, staff from the offices of the registrar, cashier, financial aid and accounts receivable joined hands in a new Student Services Building to provide “one-stop shopping” for students. Connected by the network to necessary records, files and other resources, staff streamlined the tasks that students face in conducting their campus business. Students no longer had to traipse from building to building to find each of the particular offices they needed.
Still, the geographic constraint existed. They had to walk the brick paths to get to the Student Services Building. And, building hours were restricted by staff's Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule.
Today, everyone does University business online, starting with students who apply for admission.
When the online form was first made available two years ago, a handful of applicants used it. Last year 1 in 6 applicants used the web form.
On “move-in” day, students can use the web to look at their options for dining plans, to check their course schedules, to drop and add courses, to purchase textbooks and supplies at the University Bookstore, to find a problem-solver through the Student Problem-solving Action Network (SPAN), to bone up on rules and regulations in the Official Student Handbook, to take the Electronic Community Citizenship Exam and set up their UD e-mail address, or, maybe, to find out about welcoming festivities and the football schedule.
Once classes start, students and faculty can locate the books they need from the library using DELCAT, the online catalog that was first made available in 1990, in a simple text format. Last fall, the library announced as a source of great pride that circulation is down, thanks to more than 7,000 electronic journals and newspapers and more than 170 networked databases easily linked to on the web. Gregg Silvis, assistant director for library computing systems, reports that the number of “hits” on the library web site reached 17 million in 2000.
When the semester is over, students listen to their grades, as they come in, from a voice synthesizer. And, they check online to find out what books they should return to the library or to renew them, if necessary.
As Commencement approaches in the spring, graduating seniors can click on one link that lists the many things they will need to do and points them to the right source for help—from contacting a faculty adviser to ordering a cap and gown.
The University’s web page acquired a new look 3 years ago, and now projects a newer, better image. The web page identifies a variety of audiences—students, prospective and current, visitors, alumni, faculty and staff. Each audience has a tailored set of links suited to the services and information it needs. Visitors to the site need not concern themselves with organizational names to find what they need. Awaiting its debut on campus is a new “UD and Me” web page.
It will identify and address the specific needs of each person in each audience, Jacobson says. It will be “an institutional information portal,” displaying many “channels” of information, such as, “my course schedul
e, today's assignments, my financial aid status.” He thinks of the new web service as a “personalized or pocket-sized” version of the campus web.
What’s more, it will allow a student to tailor his page with preferred forums, chats and calendars. He could check his friends’ calendars to see who was free to go to a movie Friday night. Jacobson calls these “communities of interest.” The web will be connecting people with people.
UD’s award-winning network, at 7 years old, is feeling its age and the inevitable results of its excellence. The University has funded a $2.1 million project to upgrade the campus network. Dan Grim, executive director of Information Technologies-Network and Systems Services, says the core, or backbone, is being replaced with a multi-layer switched infrastructure that will run about 16 times faster than the current core. The LANs (local area networks) that connect individual buildings and departments to the core will use gigabit Ethernet, 100 times faster than the current connections.
Looking beyond the bounds of campus, the University has joined a new initiative. It is one of 36 universities that are charter members of the Internet2 initiative, the focus of the University Corp. for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID). One year ago, the campus network used a $350,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to connect to Abilene, a high-performance, world-wide network that transmits data more than 10 times faster than the Internet.
The Internet2 project is using high-performance networks like Abilene and vBNS as laboratories to develop a network that will accommodate an astronomical increase in demand for service in the near future, while enabling new types of network service such as “streaming” video and audio transmission. The Bayard Sharp Hall/Atlanta performance was efficiently “multicast” over the network, just to designated points. This is different from a broadcast of a program, which would transmit to every point on the network. Unlike e-mail, which sends a copy of a message to each person on its mail list, the multicast performance efficiently sent the one, live performance to many.
Among the many teams of researchers at the University who will use Abilene in their work, Kenneth Barner, associate professor of electrical and chemical engineering, wants to transmit video images of messages in sign language; Xiao-Han Yan, professor of marine studies, needs to receive information about atmospheric circulation and the climate to simulate ocean conditions; and Murray V. Johnston III, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, will invite researchers across the country to “use” his laboratory’s extensive collection of mass spectrometers.
The vast amount of data that applications like these will send over the network and the anticipated increase in use of the Internet by the general public is going to make the recent yearly doubling of traffic seem modest, says Susan J. Foster, vice president of information technologies.
“Without the network, I'd be dead in the water,” a graduate student was heard mumbling this fall as she “attached” the umpteenth version of her dissertation proposal—including links to graphs and illustrations on her personal web page—to an e-mail to her professor. But, a morbid sense of humor is part of life for graduate students. Perhaps, she took some time on Halloween to delight in the spooky music and ghost stories coming together somewhere out in cyberspace—and get a glimpse of the future possibilities for electronic communication.
January 2002.