Monday, July 23, 2001
|
|
|
Army's Portal Could Benefit Other Distance-Education ProjectsBy FLORENCE OLSEN
An Internet "portal" where soldiers can register and enroll in online college courses has been declared fully operational by the U.S. Army and its contractor, PricewaterhouseCoopers. The portal is called eArmyU. Susan W. Nesbitt, dean of the graduate and professional-studies division at Saint Joseph's College of Maine, which has enrolled 110 soldiers through the Army program since January, says she and others were surprised at how quickly all of the necessary pieces for the portal were put together. Before the Army sought bids to build an online-education portal, technology companies had not gone ahead with the difficult technical work needed to create such an infrastructure, says Bruce N. Chaloux, director of the Southern Regional Education Board's Electronic Campus. Mr. Chaloux says the Army's "$453-million carrot" had the effect of speeding up the technical development that needed to be done before online-learning communities could really take hold. "We're all going to benefit from this," says Mr. Chaloux. "There's real value in building that kind of infrastructure," he says, "and targeting a specific group -- teachers, bankers, electrical engineers. You can create communities of learners." The only question in his mind is how well such infrastructures will handle very large communities like the Army's, which is expected to expand to include 80,000 soldier-learners within five years. The Army portal "will be put to the test very, very quickly," Mr. Chaloux says. PricewaterhouseCoopers worked with 60 subcontractors to build the portal, including more than 20 accredited institutions that deliver courses online. The company had to create electronic "interfaces" for 10 commercial software applications from different vendors so that the applications could exchange information. "The students will probably take this [integration] somewhat for granted," says Mr. Chaloux. But he says the integration required to build an infrastructure such as eArmyU "is an amazing amount of work." For instance, when soldiers use the portal, they have to log in only once to verify identity, instead of having to log in each time they enter secure portions of the member colleges' Web sites. Books are ordered automatically when the soldiers register for classes. The soldiers' view of information has, as technologists describe it, a consistent "look and feel." The processing of tuition payments and other business functions of the portal are less well automated. But several small colleges involved say they are in no hurry to have their database systems exchange information directly with the eArmyU student-administration system. For the number of students involved, at least initially, it may take "more time and effort to try to make the two systems talk to each other than to enter the data manually," Ms. Nesbitt says. For now, some of the smaller institutions receive a spreadsheet file from PricewaterhouseCoopers, fill in the requested information about course credits, tuition, and the like, and send the file back as an e-mail attachment. Some larger institutions have taken the time to create an electronic interface between their administrative systems and those that perform similar functions for the Army portal. "We're working with all the institutions to [achieve] a fully automated solution," says Judy Bendig, the eArmyU technical leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers. According to Army officials, the eArmyU program, offered so far at only three Army bases, has proved an immediate success with the soldiers. On January 15, hundreds of soldiers at Fort Benning, Ga., camped out in their sleeping bags starting at 4 p.m. to be in line to enroll the next day. And why not? The Army is paying for it all -- laptop, printer, Internet service, e-mail account, books, tuition, fees, academic counseling, and 24-hour tech support.
Background articles from The Chronicle:
|
|
|
|
 College trustees often fumble presidential transitions, report says Authors of higher-education report card urge states to use the results judiciously Survey of community-college students aims to gauge institutional quality Federal judge refuses to block Indiana students' production of "Corpus Christi" U.C.-San Diego is told to transfer its minority-scholarship program to a private entity Harvard U. professor pulls out of economic-consulting talks with Thai government Updates on billion-dollar campaigns at 12 universities JSTOR's journal-archiving service makes fans of librarians and scholars Army's portal could benefit other distance-education projects |
Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education