Manuel explains the history of web-based classes at NYU as developing about eight years ago when existing educational technologies basically facilitated nothing much more than a faster way of offering correspondence courses that were powered by low-end platforms that enabled simple posting of information along with basic text-based communication tools (which is still true today of many online education programs).

From those initial years, the NYU online teaching and learning infrastructure has grown into providing "a truly interactive environment that is larger than just the class," Manuel claims. "We’ve built communications tools that allow faculty to really communicate with students, and for students to really communicate with other students.

"We are enabling group projects; we are enabling small online classroom interactions like you would have on-site; we are enabling online office hours, study groups and events - all through a collaboration of tools that includes the classic bulletin board and live chat, to voice over IP and live whiteboard expositions between faculty, staff and students."

What technology is driving all this? Primarily Docent, Centra, iChat, and a variety of home-grown course management system (CMS) and portal features, including a self-built discussion board, all of which lies beneath the Virtual College "dashboard". . .

The Centra platform is integrated with the Virtual College dashboard, which is driven by a customized Docent engine that brings in all these other technologies to make the online classroom more communicative, says Manuel, adding that this complete system has allowed NYU to "deploy the true interactive communication activity we were after." The Docent platform "starts with a base that is kind of like a database manager," he continues, "and the front end and APIs to bring in additional software are all enabled once you buy the Docent software."

For the technology-enhanced courses, NYU has some classes in Blackboard and Prometheus, but all of these classes either have been, or are in the process of, being migrated to the Virtual College system platform.

In addition to building all these teaching and learning elements, SCPS and the Virtual College recently rolled out an impressive new web site. The new site is powered by a product from the Art Technology Group (ATG) called the Dynamo Server. ATG is a developer of online Customer Resource Management (CRM) applications with North American headquarters in Cambridge, MA. The web site "enables us to do almost one-to-one communication with people who come to the site," says Manuel. "If you logon to the site and opt into our system, we will know the courses you are interested in and be able to suggest other courses." Manuel refers to the SCPS site’s "Interactive Advisor" function that is prominently displayed on the front page. "This is a walk-through of questions that ask you how you’d like to study, when you’d like to study, and what subjects you’d like to study. It then builds a query off of our database of all those courses that fit your needs."

Manuel further explains how bringing in CRM software into the world of online higher education is of growing interest at NYU. "We are incorporating a lot of CRM-related functions into the web site. There are automations that happen through the web site that could never happen in person." For example, newly enrolled students automatically get a welcome e-mail. Plus, 48-hours before the start of their class(es) another e-mail notification is sent out. When the course is at the halfway point "we can communicate with the student and tell them what courses will be offered during the next term that are related to the courses they have already taken. There are all kinds of management possibilities for us to communicate with students over time."

In addition to building CRM functions, SCPS did some student focus group studies to find out how to better provide information to prospective and current students on their web site. Consequently, a new course index section has been added to present NYU courses sorted out by subject categories and alphabetized. This is in addition to presenting courses by department. The new web site also hosts a spiffy, Flash-generated, informative Virtual College demo that shows all the online features and functions of a virtual class. Once inside the demo, students can also access a printed version of the Virtual College Student Guide in PDF format.

Looking at the overall picture of NYU’s online teaching and learning initiatives, we refer back to an interview we conducted with SCPS Dean David Finney back in February, who talked about two of the primary reasons why NYU started the Virtual College in the first place. The first reason was that "faculty really wanted to do it because they thought they could do a better job teaching if they made use of the web as an instructional tool." Secondly "because our students, faculty and the institution itself were interested in decreasing our reliance on classrooms (space can be a problem in Manhattan) so that a class could meet throughout an entire term but not necessarily come to a physical space."

At the SCPS Virtual College, the operative cliché could be "so far, so good."