was glad to see a Windows environment product, as the VAX was full of commands that were user-unfriendly. And I had never liked application packages that were full of commands. The WinTycho (as it became when WebTycho was invented) development days were exciting and energizing. We would spend hours at a time debating how the product should be set up, what needs were important for the graduate and undergraduate schools, and what the design should look like. In retrospect, it was a great committee—everyone felt free to express ideas. The client [software] that students and faculty needed to load in order to connect to the server was a problem for a lot of people. In the early days, there were no ISPs as we know them today and folks had to do a lot for themselves with the help of the very small Tycho support staff, our UMUC help desk, and people like myself. We did write a wonderful manual that was provided to all users, but that did not happen right away. Actually, I don’t remember when the first version was written, but I still have a copy of the last one. (I have a hard time parting with some memorabilia.) Getting the name Tycho copyrighted (not sure if that’s the right term) so that no one else would use it was something the committee took care of. We were on pins and needles waiting for this legal piece to take place. As soon as we had WinTycho up and running, the Web began to come into prominence. We could see immediately that this was the direction we needed to take. Again, we had a wonderful committee that began the development and design of the Web product. I’ll take a break now and let others dive in.
—Enid Rich Daumit, an adjunct associate faculty member, offered some insights from a teacher’s vantage point: Teaching a WebTycho course requires more hours than teaching in a face-to-face classroom. One reason is having to navigate around the WebTycho classroom. We were using VaxNotes when I first started teaching online. One feature that VaxNotes didn’t have was an indication of whether a (conference) note had been read. I had 15 or 20 topics in my course conference and I had to keep a record of the last response for each topic to ensure that I didn’t miss any new responses every time I went into the conference. That became a very tedious task towards the end of the semester for me and for my students. Now the WebTycho classroom provides a red star to the left of each unread topic/response. A list of unread topics/responses is also provided and a double arrow at the top and bottom of each
topic/response leads directly to the next unread topic/response. Less time is needed to navigate around the conferences and more time is available for meaningful use of the conference. The read/unread capability is also helpful for navigating around the Assignments folder.
—Rich Nathaniel Calloway (academic director of e-commerce and technology management, School of Undergraduate Studies) added a few anecdotes of his own from the very early days of Tycho’s latest iteration—WebTycho:
Hi, Everybody! Web-based education via WebTycho at UMUC has a very special meaning for me. The very first WebTycho course at UMUC in the School of Undergraduate Studies was offered in the summer semester of 1997. The course was ACCT 321 Cost Accounting. I remember it well, because I was the content expert for the development of the course and taught the course that first semester. It was exciting, because in addition to developing the course itself, a series of video programs for the course were also produced to be shown on the cable channel and made available for rental from UMUC. I was the presenter in the filming of two of the video programs and the coordinator for all of them. All things went smoothly and we thought that everything was ready for the first day of teaching the course. We discovered during the first week of the course that those students enrolled who used AOL and Erols as their internet service providers could not connect to WebTycho—could not get into the Web site to take the course. We eventually corrected the problem and, most important, did not lose a single student because of the problem. The lesson we learned was that e-mail and telephone/postal mail contacts are very important in communicating with students during such a situation. Considering that it was the first time for WebTycho in the undergraduate school, we saw that our immediate attention to the needs of our students made the difference. At that time, it took an unprecedented level of cooperation and effort on the parts of the academic department and the IT systems support to solve this problem. I enjoy teaching WebTycho, and have done it every semester since the summer of 1997. In addition, I am doing my doctoral study in the field of Web-based distance education. I believe that Web-based distance education will be a significant part in the present and future of education—especially higher education.
“WebTycho” continued on page 17 15
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