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Online course management not only helps the student manage his or her academic life but also aids in holding the community together.
Baruch's online course management system, supported by funds from the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation and called the Peter Jay Sharp Online Student System, is relatively low tech but the most important everyday technological tool at Baruch, measured in terms of student use. A quick tour of the system shows why: Initiated four years ago using Blackboard® software, it allows students to sign on using a password. An individual homepage for each student then appears, showing the student all the courses he or she is enrolled in (this page also serves as a bulletin board for campuswide announcements and important information on deadlines and other administrative matters). Under each class listing, faculty in each section and course offer access to that course's materials, syllabi, assignments, readings, library and other Internet links, threaded class discussions, and more. Increasingly, lectures are available for review in streaming video, often with Web links to related readings for further study. A student can pause the lecture, for instance, and look up an unfamiliar term or study a related chart or graph.
 The problem such systems have encountered at other campuses is that some faculty use them and some don't. At Baruch, the system was developed to be comprehensive—Baruch is the only CUNY campus to create, each semester, an electronic platform that has a page ready for every section of every class, whether a professor activates such a page or not. Students seeking information electronically quickly discover whether their professors have activated the pages, created mailing lists for ease of communication, and put materials online—and if they haven't, the students urge them to do so. "Students again drive the growth of the system," Downing says. "Faculty have had to respond to the pressure, and we made it easy by having the pages set up already. All they have to do is learn how to upload the materials they want in it."
Downing emphasizes that none of this, even the video streaming, is intended to replace live lectures and classes. "We haven't abandoned the traditional style of education," he says. "This is a hybrid, incorporating the best aspects of technology and the advantages of face-to-face education. The video lectures are intended to refresh or enhance the classroom experience. Because we're a commuter campus, students aren't sitting around in dorms checking each other's notes. This
is how they go back and review what they
didn't quite grasp the first time or how they find out where to get more information on things
mentioned in class."
And although one required course, Computer Information Systems (CIS 1000), is now given entirely online, Downing insists that that is not a goal for other courses. "The classroom
will remain a part of the
education at Baruch," Downing says. "There are other institutions that offer courses that are entirely online. But our mission
is serving the students of
this city. We expect people within commuting distance to attend classes. We have beautiful classrooms even without the technology. But the technology's there, if you want to make use of it, and our job has been to make it effortless."
The CUNY Central Office is now setting up a university-wide online course management system modeled on Baruch's approach.
Above: The Newman Library was named the best college
library of 2003 by the Association of College and Research Libraries,
in large part for its innovative use of information technology.
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