In addition to the kind of online services one would expect to find inside a student portal - such as registration, transcripts and records services; financial aid services; library and bookstore access; and a variety of student orientation tools and news services - the iGuide Web site holds a good number of other useful tools and information inside an "Advising and Resources" section. For instance, one subsection of this area, called "Learner Resources," includes online access to a Writing Center (see page 8), a Career Development Center, a Study Skills Resource Center and a Virtual Learning Team Resources section.

This section of iGuide is a place for students "to reflect on various aspects of one’s life," and it has a wide range of subsections addressing such key themes as understanding career options, finding internships, and mastering work-life issues. There’s also a "Putting the Pieces Together" subsection, where visitors are provided with links to a variety of personal inventory-oriented exercises and tests, including the "Princeton Review Career Quiz," the "Keirsey Character Sort," and the "Motivational Appraisal of Personal Potential (MAAP) Style Inventory," all of which, combined, claim to help people gain insights into their work styles, personality traits, career fit and more. The Career Development Center also has a "Career Corner Learner/Alumni Discussion Board," where, as a guest, visitors can access postings by students who are actively engaged in online discussions on topics concerning such important issues as techniques for getting a promotion, whether or not job hopping can hurt one’s career and how to conduct research on prospective employers.

We found this to be one of the more interesting and in-depth subsections of iGuide. "This is a very new tool on our Web site for helping learners to work better in teams when they have team projects in their courses," says Wheeler, adding that students often have "mixed reactions" about working in virtual teams.

A wide variety of information on key processes and steps for completing team projects is available inside the Virtual Learning Team (VLT) subsection of iGuide, where it is noted that VLTs are "an essential element of the online education experience at Capella and a key part of the learning process."

For students who may be hesitant or apprehensive about working in teams, Capella’s Faculty Trainer Paul Hardt explains that the successful 21st Century work force is built around team work, especially in what he calls "the training and performance improvement world, where you can’t be a lone wolf. The whole emphasis in this field is toward system-wide change. If you are going to get involved in system-wide change, you have to deal with teams, because you, alone, can’t know everything about the system."

"There are several benefits to virtual teams, and probably the largest among them is that learners can establish great relationships," notes Smithmier, who also explains that "teaming is something we want happening both inside and outside the course. We see a lot of application and benefit to people being able to start their own team, club or network around a professional topic that may not have anything to do with their course. [For instance,] we have people who are K-12 teachers who want to connect with each other. In some ways that can become a virtual team in which they use the same tools that they use inside the course room. It is that kind of architecture and strategy that we (Capella’s E-Learning and Web Strategies unit) are now working to develop."