Waubonsee Community College may be geographically isolated amid farmland in Kane County, but don`t let that fool you. It`s about as up to date as a college can get-electronically speaking, that is.
Consider this:
From any Touch-Tone phone, a student not only can register for classes at Waubonsee but also can find out the amount owed on his college bill and even his grades. Students also can register on campus through a computer without waiting in long lines, as they must at many colleges.
The traditional card catalog system in the library has been replaced by a computerized system that students can use from their home computers.
Computerized instruction exists in virtually all academic areas, from English to music to accounting.
And the college has two systems of two-way television teaching, one linking its Sugar Grove and Aurora campuses and the other connecting four high schools, enabling faculty members to teach and talk with students at other sites. Students and teachers can see one another in a two-way hookup Waubonsee officials believe is unique for an Illinois campus.
The two-year college in Sugar Grove is on the cutting edge of computer and television technology, applying it in many phases of its academic and administrative programs as it prepares its 9,108 students for the information age.
Its guru of technology is Louis A. Herman, associate dean of information systems. Last November, Herman was named one of eight winners of awards for achievement in managing information technology, a competition jointly sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon University Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Pittsburgh, and American Management Systems, Inc., an Arlington, Va., firm applying technology to solve complex management problems.
Others winners of the award included technology experts from the United States Air Force, Chrysler Corp., Citicorp, the Royal Bank of Canada and the state of Virginia. He is the first winner from a college or university in the three years of the awards program.
”I like to have people tell me their needs, and I design and implement applications using the technology,” said Herman, who is also pastor of Fellowship Baptist Church in Aurora.
”Through his guidance and vision our college has become state-of-the-art in virtually every phase of academic and administrative services,” said John M. Murphy, vice president for finance and operations.
”If we could resurrect Abraham Lincoln, he might take a look around and say that transportation has really improved,” Herman said, ”but he would also say the ordinary classroom hasn`t changed that much.
”We need to find better ways to teach and share information. Knowledge is exploding. We are going from the industrial to the information age. We need to become more productive with the new information.”
Herman, in his 12th year at Waubonsee, works on a steady stream of technological challenges. Currently, ”we`re trying to tie into the National Science Foundation information network,” he said.
If a student or faculty member wants to do research on computer chips, a computer may show a list of 20 scientific journal articles on the subject. That is a help to the researcher, but he or she still wouldles.
Herman said that faculty members once leery of the idea of an
”electronic campus” are coming to him in increasing numbers to learn how to integrate computer-aided instruction into their courses.
In his music classes, Gibby Monokosky uses software enabling students to move at their own pace to find the missing note in a sequence or to determine how many beats in a measure.
Nursing students turn to computers to learn which drugs are prescribed for what ailments, the characteristics of the drugs and their side effects.
English students use the technology to edit compositions.
Norman Paul, assistant dean for occupational education, worked with Herman to improve instruction in accounting classes.
An accounting teacher used to have to explain a complicated problem by writing extensively with chalk on the blackboard. Now, Paul said, the instructor puts the problem into the computer that is linked to an overhead projector that shows the problem on a screen large enough for the entire class to see at a glance.
Even students studing heating and air conditioning train on computers. They must develop keyboarding skills because office building heating and air conditioning systems are regulated by computers.
Herman has made sure that the college works off mainframes from two different manufacturers, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Both are prevalent in the workplace, he said, and both are used for training students.
In addition to the two mainframes used for academics and training, he said, there are two other mainframes that also comprise part of the campus network. One is used exclusively for administrative functions and contains information about such things as student records and finances. Another is used by the library.
One mainframe can serve as a backup system for another should it break down, said Herman, but security is also one of the main reasons for having more than one central computer. Though each mainframe contains separate information, each can be accessed by any one of the 500 personal computers in labs and offices throughout the campus.
The personnel department, with Herman`s help, has developed 200 computer programs with a variety of payroll and information uses, such as enabling officials to determine which of 250 part-time teachers are qualified to teach English if new sections of classes must be opened.
Herman said Waubonsee officials have continued funding for an electronic campus because they are impressed with cost savings that it produces. Some innovations have been funded with federal grants.
Herman has created a computer program that automatically telephones students and tells them class has been cancelled because the instructor is ill. Numerous other schools have turned to Waubonsee for information about the program, he said.
The electronic campus` crowning achievement, however, is the telecommunications instructional consortium. That`s the formal name for the two systems of television classes.
Waubonsee has two television classrooms, each equipped with three cameras, one focusing on the teacher, the second on the students and entire classroom and the third on whatever the instructor writes. Students sit at long tables with microphones.
Instructors thus can teach those students physically in the classrooms, but also students at other sites. They can see one another on color television and talk to one another. The teacher can be at any of the sites.
Waubonsee has a second campus in Aurora in a building that was a Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store. Thirty classes are going on now linking Sugar Grove and Aurora. They include psychology, accounting and early childhood education. The second system links Waubonsee with four high schools: Plano, Kaneland, Oswego and Waubonsie Valley in Aurora. The key reason for the high school network is to enable students at the schools to take specialized courses that might otherwise be offered by only one of the schools, said Jane Regnier, program manager for instructional television.
Waubonsie Valley has an extensive German program now available to students at the other schools. Oswego teaches a Japanese class. Plano hosts a calculus course.
”It`s a different way of teaching,” Herman said, explaining that teachers have a console of buttons that they press to turn on the overhead camera while they are writing on their desks, which serve the role of the blackboard, or the classroom camera to show students at another location.
Herman and Regnier have found that three of the teachers roam the classroom rather than stand rigidly in front of the camera. They are never out of camera range, however, because they have been trained to turn on the classroom camera that enables them to be seen but still roam the room.
Teachers send copies of tests to students at remote sites by facsimile machine, but Herman expects to make a technological improvement on that.
Kenneth W. Allen, dean of external services and resource development, said he wants the exams sent by computer instead of by fax to improve test security and enable a teacher easily to change forms of the test. ”If a student is absent, (the teacher) may not want to give the same test,” he explained. ”Using a computer instead of fax, the teacher can make changes. The student has a code to get into the computer, then takes the test.”
Computers may make the world of education at Waubonsee easier for the teacher to give a test and easier for the admistrator to store a student record, but according to Murphy, they are not the ones who are meant to benefit most.
”I honestly think that the single (most important) difference this has made-and sometimes this sounds trite or corny-but the single most important thing is the service to the student,” Murphy said.
”We take something of a corporate attitude. We are trying to do our best, within reason, to please our customer. That is the student.”
