A Paper submitted to the CUMREC Conference

March, 1999

By

Electronic Resources Librarian, Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University

Information Technology Specialist, Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University

Training Manager, International Center for Computer Enhanced Learning, Wake Forest University

Wake Forest University is a private liberal arts institution located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There are 3,700 full-time undergraduate students and 308 full-time faculty. The programs in the Graduate School of Arts and Science, Babcock Graduate School of Management, School of Law and Bowman Gray School of Medicine bring an additional 2,000 students to the Reynolda and Bowman Gray campuses. Wake Forest has strong undergraduate programs in Business, Psychology, Pre-Med., English and many other liberal arts disciplines. Faculty student interaction is at the heart of the academic life of the university and the faculty student ratio is 11.8:1. The university is characterized by its devotion to liberal learning and professional preparation for men and women, its strong sense of community and fellowship, and its encouragement of free inquiry and expression. The Information Systems department of the University supports the entire Undergraduate school and Graduate School of Arts and Science. The graduate professional programs in Business, Law and Medicine have their own computer support staffs who work closely with Information Systems.

As more universities make the decision to provide all students with computers, the issues surrounding introducing students to ubiquitous computing in a campus setting takes on more significance. Wake Forest University has been providing incoming students with IBM laptops since 1995 and, in the four years since, the university has had to plan and implement distribution, support, training and computer orientation for each incoming freshman class. How they did it and the lessons learned along the way are the central issues of this presentation. The primary focus will be the computer orientation offered annually to all incoming students to introduce and familiarize them with their computers and with computing on campus. Additional issues to be addressed include project history, year-by-year evolution of the project, staffing and support issues, and an orientation model for the future. Questions from schools contemplating or implementing similar projects will be welcome.

In 1995, Wake Forest University entered into a ten year contract with International Business Machines (IBM) that would ultimately provide IBM ThinkPad laptop computers to all freshmen beginning with the class entering in the Fall of 1996. Although the ThinkPad project has been groundbreaking in many ways, the focus of this paper will be the portion of the project that dealt with the orientation students got to their laptop computers upon arriving on campus. The orientation program has changed much since its inception and many lessons have been learned. This paper will look briefly at Wake Forest and the ThinkPad project history and implementation and will then present the orientation models for the four years the program has been in place. Finally, we will attempt to design an ideal orientation model taking into account our various successes and failures in the program. This will be an attempt to provide other universities embarking on a similar project guidelines for implementing an orientation program on their campus.

Wake Forest: Wake Forest University is a private liberal arts institution located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There are 3,700 full-time undergraduate students at Wake Forest and 308 full-time faculty. The faculty student ratio is 11.8:1. The programs in the Graduate School of Arts and Science, Babcock Graduate School of Management, School of Law and Bowman Gray School of Medicine bring an additional 2,000 students to the Reynolda and Bowman Gray campuses. Wake Forest is characterized by its devotion to liberal learning and professional preparation for men and women, its strong sense of community and fellowship, and its encouragement of free inquiry and expression. As a result of the ThinkPad project, tuition went from $17,000 per year to just shy of $20,500.

Computing Before IBM: In 1986, Wake Forest began acquiring Macintosh computers for use in several student computer labs. These labs had lab printers and the computers were connected to each other, but there was no campus network for allowing computers in remote locations to communicate. Beginning in 1990, an ad hoc faculty committee of dedicated computer enthusiasts began seriously contemplating the future of computing on the campus. The committee proposed that the University awake to the trends sweeping most other universities at the time � open systems, Internet, E-mail, Usenet, On Line Catalogs, etc. The committee selected two Hewlett Packard UNIX minicomputers to serve the academic community. One was used to support faculty and student uses; the other ran the Library�s on line catalog. The committee also recommended a focus on networking and proposed that the University begin to establish a campus-wide network offering access to the new central computers. As the university began to move toward more campus-wide networking, it became evident that a plan for the future of campus computing was needed.

In 1992, the University began a two-year planning cycle that resulted, in 1994, in the presentation of the Plan for the Class of 2000. This plan proposed a number of objectives to improve the educational outcomes for students and to strengthen the University's position in an increasingly competitive world. One of the 37 recommendations sent by the administration to the faculty for approval was that teaching and learning proceed from the assumption that computer technology be available to all students and all faculty at an equal level. That recommendation became the genesis of a comprehensive plan to equip the entire University with a capable and standard computing environment.

Implementation of the Plan: The discussion that led to this conclusion was one that consumed the faculty committee on Academic Computing for the better part of a year. The major focus of the discussions in the committee concerned implementing such a requirement. At the time it seemed impossible that the requirements could be met. The Academic Computer Center was under funded, understaffed and over stretched. The Residence Halls were not networked and only about half of the students even had computers. There was not enough space on campus for a large increase in the number of labs. Even though the requirement for computer use in teaching was growing at a significant rate, there did not seem to be any way to meet the existing demand. Instead of focusing on why a ubiquitous computing initiative could not succeed, the committee listed requirements necessary for such a project to succeed. This "wish list" became the basis of a report back to the Executive Council on how such a plan could succeed. The "wish list" was a set of requirements which addressed the fundamental problems within the University Computing Infrastructure at the time:

The basic objections that were answered were:

These requirements were passed to the Executive Council and became the basis of a plan that was taken to a vote of the faculty with two other issues in March of 1995 and then to the Board of Trustees in April of 1995. After passing those two votes and passing a vote of the Student Government, the plan was formalized. The result was a plan to increase tuition $3,000 per year, add 40 new faculty, to require a freshman seminar, and to equip students with a new computer every two years. The plan was to begin in the fall of 1996.

In May of 1995, the University completed a ten-year agreement with IBM to provide IBM ThinkPads, support, project management and expertise to the campus. Although bids had been solicited from both IBM and Macintosh, IBM was the only company to develop a plan for the campus. This put the university in the position of having to scale back the Macintosh network gradually, as many students and faculty had all of their work in Macintosh format, while simultaneously building up and implementing a new PC network.

Once the Plan for the Class of 2000 had been adopted, training became an issue. The Library director had accepted the library's role as primary training providers. She appointed a Training Task Force that met weekly in preparation for the coming training. This committee consisted of the Head of the Library's Information Technology Center, the ITC technician, members of the IS support center and other IS staff. This committee has been the center of the orientation planning since the beginning and although the membership has grown as new training issues have arisen, it remains the primary guiding force behind the orientation project. A matrix comparison of the four years of the program can be found in Appendix A.

With the approval of the plan of the class of 2000 in April 1995, the University began to focus on implementing the project for the fall of 1995. To get the project underway all faculty were offered either a new ThinkPad or a new IBM desktop computer. Approximately 85% of the faculty elected to accept the offer, with about a 50-50 split between mobile and desktop computers.

Because of the timing of the plan�s acceptance, it was not possible to include computers in the tuition for the class of 1999. Instead, the University offered a pilot project for 100 students and allowed others that wished to purchase the standard computer to do so. Over 250 students elected to enter the pilot project, which began in August of 1995.

This late date meant that orientation planning had to be put in place for both Faculty and students in less than four months. This was complicated by the fact that the library staff who had been tapped to be trainers for the pilot project did not have computers. Many were working on Macintosh computers, library dumb terminals or DOS machines. The ten Academic Computing Specialists (ACS) that the university hired for computer support in the academic departments were also tapped for training roles but most did not come on board until August 1^st. This provided two weeks for trainer training and one for faculty orientation before students would be arriving on campus.

1. All computers were distributed. Although this sounds like a mean task, it was not. Getting the computers to the students in an organized and controlled manner is crucial to a computer program like ours.
2. Students were given crucial information. Although there were major problems with the network (see lessons learned) students did all learn how to care for the computer as well as the dos and don'ts of campus computer use.

1. A robust network is a must. The network as it stood in August 1995 was not strong enough to handle multiple simultaneous logins. The network crashed and online registration had to be cancelled in many classes. Additionally, because of the Network problems, a good portion of the rest of the classes could not be hands on, but had to be demonstrated by the trainers.
2. Online registration is not a good idea: Because of its reliance on the network, having the students register online was a decided failure. It frustrated the students, terrified the trainers and got the training project off to a rocky start.
3. More time was needed for trainer training and script preparation: The short turnaround time (May to August) to get trainers up to speed and to get viable documentation and scripts written put extraordinary strain on the IS support staff and the trainers.
4. Campus electronic infrastructure not fully developed: The limited number of classrooms, the weak network, the short turnaround time and the personnel shortages in IS all meant that the campus was essentially not prepared for the orientation program.
5. Need a place for students to go who have problems: No troubleshooting location had been designated in advance so students who had hardware problems, and there were several, were at the mercy of wandering technicians and often missed important parts of the classes.

The year between the pilot project and the first year where the entire entering class got computers saw vast changes on the Wake Forest University campus. More dorms were wired for network connectivity, more classrooms were wired and the network was strengthened significantly. Nevertheless, planning orientation for 900 students would be significantly different than planning for 200. One thing that the University decided to do was to send computers through the mail over the summer to students whose tuition was paid in full by the middle of July. This meant that about 50% of the students already had computers when they arrived on campus.

1. Early Ship: Having some computers shipped out early meant that the distribution process went extremely smooth. Students were able to get familiar with the machine before arriving on campus.
2. Touched Base with More Students: A larger number of students came through the training classes and therefore information about care and policies was more widespread.
3. Smooth Sailing: Because there was no network connections for the students, training was primarily glitch free in technological terms. This meant that classes did not run long and it was easy to adhere to a schedule.

1. All students need orientation training: Although we did not know it while training was going on, it soon became apparent to the support center that training served to answer many computer questions and to ward off many computer problems. The students who had not received training were far less prepared to use the computer on campus than those who did attend training, even though they had received their computers during the summer. There were also many complaints by the parents of the students receiving early shipment of the computer that their child did not receive computer training when they got to campus.
2. Students lose interest if they cannot participate directly in activities: A network connection is essential to truly demonstrate network resources. Although we were gun-shy because of the debacle of the previous year, the WFU Network could probably have handled the additional traffic and we would have been better off letting the students connect and participate directly in the email and Internet sessions.
3. Differing skills levels can hinder training: Because students had differing skills levels, many felt the training went too slow and about an equal number felt it went too fast. It became evident that having novice users in the same room with expert users did a disservice to both.
4. More attention needs to be focused on ethics: Because of problems that occurred throughout the year, clearly a section of the ethical issues surrounding the computer needed to be included in the script.
5. Not all trainers had newer model machines: Trainers received the new model of ThinkPad only days before training and it was difficult to get well acquainted with the machine before having to use it in a training class.
6. Paper evaluations are far too time consuming: Collating and tallying the training evaluations was not worth the effort.
7. Students do not come to training classes: It was not blatantly obvious when looking at the continuing classes during the semester that scheduling particular classes on particular days was a waste of time and energy because students do not come. Students tend not to think ahead and want classes at 10pm the night before the paper is due, not on a Tuesday afternoon weeks before they have a need.
8. Training scripts by committee do not work: The training script for this year went through ten revisions before it was set. This was in part due to the fact that we gave all trainers input into writing the script and this created a 'too many cooks' scenario. The script needs to be set as early as possible to ensure consistency and comfort in the script.
9. Faculty advisors were not given training information soon enough: Many faculty advisors received the information about training locations after they had met with their students for the last time, others just failed to mention it to the students. Consequently there was much confusion about when students were supposed to come to training.

The 1996-97 school year was full of more changes. All dorms were wired for network access, the network was completed, and the decision was made to give all students Lexmark printers as well as computers (the Class of 2000 was also included in this decision). The decision to give all students printers was based on difficulties maintaining network printers in the residence halls. Information systems moved the support center to larger quarters and hired new phone and technical support persons. Additionally, Lotus Notes was chosen as the standard email package. Notes must be configured on each machine and this created a serious training issue. Students who received the computers over the summer would have to come to a fifteen-minute configuration session on Monday before they could participate in the regular training. The UPS strike over that summer meant that many students did not receive their computers until literally moments before leaving for campus, and a few had to have the machines sent after them by their parents. Students who picked up their computers on campus had their machines configured for them.

1. Skill level division sounds better than it is: Although in theory dividing up students by skill level is the ideal, in reality, students in the longer classes resented the time they had to spend in training, especially on Saturday. Despite the fact that the students themselves requested a particular class, they still became restless and bored in the longer sessions.
2. Saturday orientation proved to be bad idea: While the Tuesday sessions had close to 90% attendance, the Saturday sessions were closer to 60%. Either the students had learned what they needed to know or they just did not want to come. This did create some problems for the support center staff who were left to deal with the students on a one-to-one basis.
3. Consistency among training teams is essential: We discovered that as the trainers got more comfortable with technology and with training in general, they tended to take more liberties with the training scripts, some glossing over important areas, others inject information not in the script.
4. Nonstandard software should not be distributed though other university offices: In a welcome-to-campus box distributed by Residence Life and Housing, students received free America Online CD-ROMs. Installing AOL on the ThinkPads erases LAN settings and students must have their machines reloaded. Students who had loaded the software were unable to log on to the university network in training and had to be sent to the troubleshooting room to have the load put back on their machines.

1. Arena-style classes worked well: We found that not having to maintain class rosters in each class was a more efficient scheduling model. Having cruise directors in each building dedicated to filling up classrooms freed up trainers from logistical tasks. Attendance records were obtained through the online test and survey.
2. Technological problems averted: The modem distributed on the machines had a small technical glitch that was not discovered until after the machines were shipped. Because we knew we would see most students in a training class, we were able to discuss the problem with the classes and to demonstrate the solution. Last-minute information supplier has proven to be one of the most crucial roles orientation training has served. As the only forum assured of seeing the majority of students, we can serve as the relater of critical information to the students.

1. Some concession needs to be made for skill levels: Although our experiment the previous year had been less than successful, we were still plagued by students getting left behind while others were too far ahead and bored. We found that the time we spent on email was over the head of some and elementary to others.
2. 85% Attendance is the norm: As in the previous year, we discovered that the average attendance is about 85%. Although we would have liked it to be higher, we now have a number with which to work in planning future orientation sessions. Some incentive/penalty for attendance would be one method for increasing attendance.
3. Consistency among classes essential: As the trainers have become more and more comfortable with the technology they are teaching, we have discovered that there is a wide range of content being taught. Less concerned with following a strict script, some trainers took more liberty with the content then we would have liked. Some effort at quality control must be instituted for next year.

As a result of the lessons we have learned and the successes we have encountered, we submit the following suggestions for an ideal orientation model for institutions implementing campus-wide computing projects.

1. Brown, David G, Jennifer Burg and Jay Dominick.