Universal access to ECE undergraduate information via the Web

The World Wide Web is being used as the gateway to all academic information appropriate to 1500 undergraduates in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Our goal is to change the behavior of students so that they will look to department home page first in search of answers to any question related to classes, curricula, and extracurricular activities. Advising materials include explanations of all curricular requirements, links to course catalog and timetable information, on-line lookup of advisor name and homepage, and links to professional societies. We are actively pursuing a departmental goal that students be able to access home pages for all their ECE courses in order to obtain materials such as instructor names and office hours, class assignments, course notes, and old exams. Bulletin boards are integrated into the home pages to encourage interaction among students and instructors. We are pioneering the use of asynchronous learning technology for computer grading of homework exercises and access to teaching assistants around the clock. Our undergraduate organizations (e.g. IEEE and HKN) promote their many valuable services over the web, including publishing of surveys of courses and undergraduate research opportunities.