Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 What will it be like to go to college in cyberspace? Last month, I went to Allen & Company's offices on Fifth Avenue to attend a simulation of a Global Education Network class. "Attend," of course, is a misleading word. I sat in a wood-paneled conference room with Alexander Parker, GEN's head of curriculum development, and a laptop. Since GEN has not yet put its courses on the Internet, the class I took, an introductory biology course for nonmajors, was on a CD-ROM. Parker clicked me through to the second lecture, on the discovery of DNA. The 55-minute presentation was divided into fourteen "modules," including "Overview of DNA Structure," "Watson and Crick," "X-Ray Crystallography" and "Nature of a Polynucleotide." I clicked on "Overview," and the teacher, Kenneth Miller, a professor at Brown, appeared in the upper-left-hand corner. A screen at his right served as an electronic blackboard. When he read an excerpt from a letter by the biologist Oswald Avery, the words of the letter appeared on the screen along with a picture of Avery, the way they would on a newscast. When Miller explained the structure of a nucleotide, he put a molecular diagram on the screen. He might have put the same diagram on an overhead projector in class, but here he could manipulate the image, highlighting various parts and moving them around to show how one nucleotide docks with another. The class was in some ways better, and in some ways worse, than a conventional lecture. On the one hand, whenever my attention had wandered I could hit the pause button and click back. On the other hand, Miller himself was a rather sketchy presence, and when at one point he turned to the blackboard, you could hear the squeak of the chalk but you couldn't make out a word he had written. The visual aids, at this early stage, are limited to still pictures and dancing molecules; anything much more complex would strain the available bandwidth. Parker's own view is that "it's not as rich an experience as a 15-person seminar, but it is somewhat richer than a 500-person lecture." What I had not experienced, of course, was interactivity, which is the feature that makes the Internet radically different from prior distance learning media, whether the television or the mail. Each GEN class will include teaching assistants -- learning facilitators, in Duderstadt's not-quite-human phraseology -- drawn from the vast pool of unemployed and underemployed graduate students and bearers of graduate degrees. GEN is calculating that it will need no more than one assistant for every 30 students, if that. Once the system is up and running, students will be assigned to the equivalent of chat rooms for "threaded conversations" with fellow students and teaching assistants, and they will be able to ask questions about the material. Students who give a wrong answer on a test will be automatically directed back to the portion of the text that supplies the answer. This is still a fairly primitive use of the technology; once GEN has learned where students go wrong, it plans to videotape the professor offering a series of alternate explanations of the same material, so that a student can be directed along any one of several different pathways to help him or her grasp what wasn't clear the first time around. Another possibility inherent in this multiple-pathways approach is to offer students different ways of demonstrating competence. A student can explain the chemical structure of nucleotides directly, or, Parker says, "We can give him a bucket of elements and say, 'Here, build a nucleotide.' "