First Contact: Then and Now - Lehigh University, Ed Gallagher

Early American Literature is about exploration and discovery in our new nation, and this course will be about exploration and discovery in online learning. This will be the English department's first academic-year, upperlevel, online class for oncampus students.

We will think and learn about Early America, yes, but a main goal also will be to think about what role, if any, online classes might play at a residential university like ours. The first instinct is to think about online courses as part of "distance education," and certainly we'll get experience with that. But I also want to be thinking about whether or not online classes have a place in the curriculum of oncampus students. Your reflections on this experience will be crucial.

Another goal of this course is to cut loose from the traditional materials we would use in a face-to-face class and explore what happens when we use the web totally as our text. What's on the web relating to the study of early America? And do those materials change the nature of our courses?

My sense, then, is that there are revolutionary things happening via the new technologies that have the potential to radically change the nature of education. And in this course I want to explore and test some of those things with you.

So, I need you to be a bit adventuresome in your willingness to participate in an experiment. Even though some of you will know each other, I'd like you all to play the game that we are "distant" from each other -- and to use the technology as our medium of communication. This actually might be real practice for your professional life as well as the educational environment of your children. (Within a mere ten years many of you will have children in school!)

And I need you patient enough to roll with the technological glitches that will inevitably occur.

And I need you flexible enough to tolerate a course that is not totally planned out from the beginning. In fact, as "point man" in this expedition, I will probably be only a week or so ahead of you in our course of travel -- nosing into the web wilderness.

Exploration, pioneering is an adventure, which makes it fun, but an adventure in trial and error, which can make it not-so-fun, and some explorers never find anything, and some never come back.