One-hundred fifty alumni of the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration took M.B.A. classes at the school last term, all without leaving their hometowns.
DartBoard, a page on the Tuck School's World Wide Web server, allows graduates to audit classes offered to regular students at the Tuck School. Along with 50 business school students, alumni participated in a class on information technology taught by Business professor Phil Anderson last term.
Tuck School Dean Paul Danos said DartBoard gives graduates most of the resources offered regular students.
"They were able to get all materials on the class and participate in discussions," he said. "They were able to do almost anything except they weren't actually in the class."
"They could do this off computers wherever they happened to be in the world," he said.
Danos said the class taught through DartBoard operated in much the same way as an Internet newsgroup.
"It was asynchronous, like a messaging system, so that people did not have to be there in real time," he said. "You could participate anytime you would like to participate."
Danos said next year's DartBoard will include "real time" connectivity, in which students can "talk" together at a specific time.
Danos said DartBoard may lend itself to more ambitious projects in the future.
"This experiment with DartBoard is just the first," Danos said. "It is the first generation of what will be possible in the future where alumni and other interested parties will be able to stay on an educational plane with their educational institutions."
"This is a first taste of how powerful it will be," he said.
"Coming soon, in a few years, there will be completely interactive video, audio and data that will be ready to use over the web," he said.
Anderson's class will be offered again through DartBoard next spring, Danos said. The Tuck School is planning two or three more classes for DartBoard.
"We are at the cusp of a revolution," Danos said. "This is one aspect of distance education."
"As technology evolves this will become easier and less expensive," he said.
The concepts behind DartBoard have been developed for the past three years, but the technology was not available until this year, Danos said.
"Web technology only blossomed last year," he said. "We only started with the programming last summer and implemented it in the spring."
"This has not been around that long, it is a very recent development," he said.
There were a couple of "rough edges" in the DartBoard project, but the system ran well overall, Tuck School Director of Computing Daniel Longnecker said.
"There were features that were not yet in the product," he said. "Some things needed to be refined but the project team was able to react very quickly and keep it up and running during this first phase of usage."
The project team included Computer Resource Center Manager Andy Williams, Tom Caputo '96, Mark Childs '96 and Michael Pryor '98.
The team was awarded a Kemeny Award for Innovative Programming for their work in DartBoard, Longnecker said.
