Faculty Scenario
Alice Creely has been teaching a course in early American History at "Your School" for five years. Two years ago, Alice began using email list servers to communicate with her class, and last year she experimented with a Course Management System (CMS), offered free via the web, to post basic course information and instigate discussion via chat and message boards. This year, after attending on-campus edification seminars sponsored by Student Online, Alice has implemented Student Online as the final piece of her revamped pedagogy.

On this day, Alice is sick and decides at the last minute to cancel her class. Logging on to Student Online using the same system id and password she uses at school, Alice clicks on her administration module and sends an alert to all of her students. Besides sending a web-based message and wireless page to all of her students, the alert includes a recommendation to check her course home page, (which is actually an independent CMS product that has been integrated into the Student Online platform), for an extra reading she has posted for the next class.

Next, Alice decides to get some work done from home. Clicking on to a special password-protected group she has set up for a new interdisciplinary project on early American family structure, Alice responds to a message on the message board and sends out a group-wide email request to set a time for the group's monthly meeting. Since she's already logged on, Alice decides to stop by the inter-campus history hub, which lets all history students and professors from different Student Online schools to interact on one platform-wide home page.

In past visits to the inter-campus hub, Alice has met a professor at another school who specializes in her field. Luckily, he happens to be online and they chat privately for a few moments on teaching strategies and recent journal publications. As she drifts off to sleep, Alice receives a page on her wireless PDA asking her to vote on the three recent provost candidates. She indicates her preference and falls into a deep sleep.