The Global Campus is a World Wide Web site containing multimedia educational materials including text, images, sound, and video clips. Developed through a DELTA grant by the California State University System, the Global Campus intends to share these resources worldwide with nonprofit, educational institutions and welcomes contributed materials for inclusion in the site. With a front page that is organized around the six main areas of a college education: Business, Fine Arts, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Library, and Science, The Global Campus attains the feel of a place which grants access to higher learning.
Explored more deeply, each of the six “colleges” offers rich and varied information. The Liberal Arts section, for instance, links to web sites in the broad areas of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, Indians of Central America and Mexico, Anthropology, Classics, Cultural Arts, Geography, Climatology, and Cartography — all with several subdivisions as well as remote access to web servers dedicated to related topics. The web links available through The Global Campus have been created by many different institutions and people and vary from government sites regularly updated and maintained to sites that refer users to a new web address.
The Global Campus allows users to search certain portions of it — the United States Tax Code for example, offers full text searching capabilities to the student or scholar wishing to trace certain aspects of the Code through its text. Also offered are a few online courses, presented electronically in diverse disciplines (Introduction to Dance and Object Oriented Programming Using C++, to name two). Finally, the Earth Science portion of the Science “college,” offers a chance to “Ask a Scientist” by means of an email query.
If there is a weakness to The Global Campus “colleges,” it exists in its library, which (at the time of writing) maintains only three links, one to the Vatican Library Exhibit from the Library of Congress; another to a virtual library dedicated to the history of science, technology, and medicine; and the third to a virtual library’s Subject Catalogue (sic). This third link is most like searching a traditional library’s online catalog in that it allows perusal of subject terms, or headings. However, the information retrieved from such a search is strictly other web sites, so one must exercise a critical eye when obtaining and evaluating that information.
The charm of this library site lies in its inclusion of the Vatican Collection which allows users to see the many treasures of that institution — treasures which might otherwise be difficult to find for educational purposes. While this library collection lacks access to a depth of holdings, one suspects that this is due more to a lack of contributors to the Library College than to the web‐page developers’ desire or intent to keep library materials and access from the web site user.
The Global Campus requires a 486 or Pentium computer for optimum use. It needs Netscape Navigator to view text or text and graphics; a sound card to hear audio; and Quicktime (available through Netscape) to view video clips. Printing and downloading are possible, so long as one has access to a quality printer. However, without optimum installation, the visitor to The Global College can still come away rewarded by the available text. One gets the sense that The Global College is not actively maintained since most of the maintenance statements refer to 1996. However, an email address (gcampus@csulb.edu) offers a means to contact someone with questions or ideas about The Global College.
I recommend The Global College to anyone wanting to incorporate technology in the classroom and to anyone wishing to explore a web site dedicated to instructional resource sharing. It would prove useful for high schools, junior colleges, colleges, and universities. Further, I would recommend that departments not only suggest faculty bookmark this site for possible future use, but also encourage making contributions to it for the exchange of information and ideas.
