The Ewha cyber campus, which was renovated this September, has given rise to repeated complaints from the students enrolled. Complaints centered on the cyber campus are unstable system and poor communication between students and professors. Students were especially discontented with the courses of the International Cyber University (ICU), which were conducted entirely on the Internet. Since the ICU classes are open not only to Ewha students, but also to international students, it has become twice of a burden for them to adapt to the new system.
   The complaints most frequently expressed were about the cyber campus?unstable server. Pages took a long time to load, and students had to face error messages instead of lectures. In some classes, students never got access to parts of lectures and, moreover, had to be marked absent since cyber attendance was kept by the minutes a student logged on to a page or lecture. Lee Eun-joo (English Lang. & Lit., 2), who is taking an ICU course says, ?he supplementary lectures for some of the lessons had errors for several weeks. Then when the administration fixed the problems, I had to click on the past lectures again just as a matter of form, to approve my attendance. Attendance was meaningless in this course.?Another problem with the ICU was  a lack of communication between the students and the professors. Most of the courses consisted of professors posting up lectures and students uploading reports, with little communication occurring between them. Many students complained that they had difficulties working on reports because the instructions posted were insufficient. Gerben Nij Bijvank, an exchange student taking ICU courses, commented that in some of the classes he could not get clear answers to his questions from the instructor and it was ineffective.
   In contrast, some cyber courses, which are held both online and offline, did go against the norm and made good use of the cyber campus. ?aw and Public Life?was designated as the most outstanding e-class by the cyber campus office, which had 22,445 visits to its website during the spring semester of 2004. One of the keys to its success was that it utilized the cyber campus as a site where students could exchange opinions, that they were not able to do during the offline class due to the large number of students taking the course.
   Professor Joo Young-joo (Educational Technology), Dean of the Multimedia Education Institute says, ?he ICU courses are conducted only through the Internet in order to allow participation of students abroad. But this brings an inevitable distance between the professor and student. To improve technical support we have increased our server capacity from 2GB to 4GB. Students do not need to worry because we are making our best efforts to stabilize the system.

저작권자 © Ewha Voice 무단전재 및 재배포 금지