Generally, the answer is yes. Most distance students do, however, have a "home" at one of ODU's regional Higher Education Centers or Teletechnet sites, which can be found throughout the state of Virginia and at many locations outside the state. These provide physical facilities where students have access to advising, lab equipment, and rooms for tests/examinations.
Important: You must attend any televised sessions, tests, etc., at the site at which you are registered. Furthermore, many distance sites expect you to speak with the on-site staff before registering. If you register at some sites but are not known to the staff there, they may administratively drop you from the course. (And if the course at the proper site for you has filled up, you might not be able to get back in!)
As a general rule, yes. Our internet-based courses will usually have a section sited in Norfolk. Please be aware, however, that your classmates are scattered around the country, and that you will therefore be required to follow the same rules and procedures as more distant students. (For example, if the instructor has a policy that assignments should all be turned in electronically, then handing physical sheets of paper directly to the isntructor may be frowned upon, as it requires your submissions to be handled separately and differently from everyone else's.
Although Blackboard is a popular system for hosting web-based courses at ODU, and some of our courses are indeed there, many of our course designers found it unsuitable for rendering advanced content. Consequently, the majority of our web-based courses are actually hosted on our own CS Dept. servers.
This can be confusing because some of the pages at Distance Learning give the impression that all ODU web courses are run through Blackboard. To make things worse, the Blackboard administrators will sometimes, without asking us or telling us about it, create empty Blackboard websites with our course names and numbers.
To find the "real" website for a course, you can
In fact these are not rooms at all. These codes are used with "pure" web courses that have no televised sessions and so do not require students to be associated with a particular Teletechnet TV reception site.
A course section listed in "web hr" is open to enrollment to anyone on the Norfolk campus or at one of the four Higher Educ. Centers (Virginia Beach, Peninsula, Tri-Cities, and Northern Virginia). A section listed as "web va" is open to anyone else in Virginia, and "web nonva" denotes a section open to distance students outside Virginia.
When we offer a regular on-campus course, enrollment is automatically limited by physical factors such as classroom size and by our ownestimates of how many students can be supported by a single instructor before the quality of instruction begins to degrade.
Distance courses, expecially web-based courses, are even more sensitive than conventional courses to the instructor's ability to respond promptly to individual student's questions and problems. A web-based course may be offered to more than 30 different sites. Obviously, if each site were to register as many students as go into a normal on-campus class, the instructor's ability to respond to individual students would be drastically reduced.
To preserve the quality of instruction in web-based courses, the CS Dept. has adopted the simple guideline of limiting distance course enrollments to the same limits that we would impose on an on-campus course. To do otherwise would, we believe, compromise the educational experience offered to the distance students. Furthermore, to allow students at each site equal access to our offerings, we place caps on each site's section enrollment so that no one site can monopolize the course during the early enrollment period. (Not all sites conduct registration at the same time, so a simple first-come, first-served policy is not considered reasonable.)
As the registration period progresses, adjustments may be made in these caps as it becomes clear that demand for the course is higher at some sites than at others. If the toal demand for a course at all sites exceeds the overall enrollment cap, we look into alternatives such as finding additional instructors or additional resources to support a higher enrollment load, but this may not be possible (particularly if the situation does not become apparent until late in the scheduling and enrollment process).
First, if you are a Norfolk student or a student at one of the ODU Higher Education Centers in the Hampton Roads area, and if it is still the first two weeks of pre-registration, just wait. Enrollment caps at these sites start small (to give other sites some opportunity to register for the course) but are relaxed after the first two weeks of pre-registration.
After those first two weeks, let your advisor know that you are trying to get into the course. For Norfolk and Higher Ed. Center students, contact the CS Dept advisors. Students at more distant sites should contact the Teletechnet site manager. We try to respond to enrollment pressures as well as we can (there's no incentive for us to turn students away!) but we need to learn from the advisors which sections are in the most demand.
Some Internet-based courses have some form of class meeting. CS instructors have been encouraged to seek an appropriate balance of "asynchronous", self-paced individual activities with "synchronous" meetings of instructors with students. Some courses will meet every week for the same number of hours as a conventional lecture-style course. Others may meet only a few times over the entire semester. A few do not meet at all. Consult the individual course descriptions to see what is planned for each course.
How do these courses "meet" at all? Most courses meet via Teletechnet satellite TV classrooms, located at the ODU Higher Education Center or Teletechnet site where the student has registered. Students may also have the option of registering for a "streaming video" section of the course, in which case they may attend via any high-bandwidth internet connection.
Some courses may meet online via network conferencing software. If so, details will be provided on the course website.
The dates and times for these meetings are, unfortunately, often not known at registration time. Consequently the courses are listed as "TBA" (To Be Announced). Watch the individual course description pages for announcements when the meeting times have been finalized.
You can register for CS internet-based courses in the same way you register for any ODU course. The Distance Learning site is one of your best sources of information and other administrative procedures if you are new to TELETECHNET and Distance Learning at ODU.
To register:
No. Many Internet-based courses are also offered at various times as Teletechnet TV offerings. The internet-based, televised, and, for that matter, live on-campus courses all fulfill the CS degree requirements.
Depending upon the course you need, you may be able to take it at a local college, community college, or university, or you may be able to take it as a Teletechnet televised course.
Exact requirements may vary from coruse to course, but general guidelines are:
Perhaps more importantly, your ISP must be able to actually feed you information at that rate during the time periods when you will be logged in. It's not unheard of for people to invest in broadband or in very fast modems only to find that their net access stays the same - because their ISP was too overloaded to serve up the information as fast as their modem could accept it. Unfortunately, this is not an easy thing for individuals to determine (and few ISP's will have the candor to admit when they have too many customers for their own good).
Beware in particular of satellite-based broadband. These are typically great for doing long downloads (one-directional traffic to your machine), OK for web browsing (mostly one-direction) but, according to student complaints, often very poor at the kind of 2-direction, back-and-forth traffic that most programming activities require. You may be better off with a good dial-up connection.
The web-based course CS 252 is specifically intended to train students in how to use the software that allows this remote access. Thus most courses that have CS 252 as a pre-requisite or co-requisite will take for granted that students have access to programs providing the following remote-access capabilities
The CS 252 Library page (log in as "guest") maintains a list of free and reduced-price versions of all three kinds of remote-access software.
g++ are strongly preferred. Windows users can find free versions of these from the CygWin and Code::Blocks projects.Teletechnet sites vary considerably in the degree to which they may provide access to such software, but most should at least provide PC labs with broadband capability and support for remote access to the CS Dept facilities.
Again, the individual course's web page should provide details on what additional software is expected and how students may obtain access to it.
Most courses have prerequisite requirements, and you can find out about these from the ODU catalog or the individual course's web pages.
In addition, anyone taking a course via the internet is expected to have certain basic computer literacy and networking skills. Individual courses may have additional expectations, and the course's web pages should be consulted for these.
Information about offerings and degree programs in the CS Dept can be obtained from the CS Dept home page.
Information about distance learning at ODU is available from the ODU Distance Learning page.
ODU's library extends services and resources to distance learning students.