CIT's Life Long Learning site gets global interest

By Kirstin Mills. © New Zealand ComputerWorld

IF YOU'RE LOOKING for a free self-study site on the Web, check out the Central Institute of Technology's (CIT) Life Long Learning site.

The site has been recognised with a myriad of awards. The most recent one, in June -and the one CIT principal lecturer and site developer Brian Brown is most proud of- is the Lifelong Learning Award for the Global Bangemann Challenge. It's an award he describes as the America's Cup of IT.

"There's no other award in the world, which is global, to award IT-based projects."


CIT's site gets over a million hits a week		 The site had its beginnings in 1995 when many of Brown's students found it difficult to turn up to class due to work and child-care commitments.

"There was a high failure rate," says Brown, "so we decided to put all the information on to a Web server, allowing our students to access it after hours. They could come in [during] the evening, log on to the computers and have a look at the lecture notes and what assignments were due etc."

He says that with being on a Web server people from all around the world discovered the information, and people overseas started using the site and it "snowballed" from there.

CIT doesn't mind people outside CIT using the site, as they've been able to generate a lot of feedback about how to improve the site. The site has evolved from one data communications module to 18 modules.

"It went from about 3000 hits a week to over a million hits a week on our server alone. We have about six world mirror sites, and the individual modules are hosted on hundreds of mirror sites around the world."

He says it's therefore hard to know how many people use the site each week.

"What we do know is that 25,000 people a week come into our server and the ones in Brazil are certainly a lot higher than ours."

He says early on CIT introduced a $35 a year charge for access to the site, as a means of cost recovery. However, it soon did away with the charge.

"The moment we did that [introduced the charge], we got tirade of abusive email from people who previously got it for nothing. And besides, as the numbers increase, your administration costs become so high, you're daily updating account information and access information - it just becomes a complete nightmare."

Instead, CIT decided to produce the same information on CD-ROM and charge for that.

"Even though the information is freely available on the Web, sales of the CD-ROM are very strong. They more than compensate for the cost of the traffic." CIT is now looking at other possibilities for the material such as putting it in to booklet form.

Up until about a year ago, C programming was the most popular course on the site. Now it's just behind Windows NT networking (which accounts for about 50% of all access). In third place is Pascal, and in fourth, data communications. "We analyse everything on a weekly basis to find out what people are accessing the most."

He says the award he was given last month was the culmination of five years' effort from a lot of people and to be rewarded with it was good for everyone involved.

The only minor hitch was getting the trophy home from Sweden where it was awarded. "They gave it to us in a box with metal clips on it which set off the metal detectors at every airport we came to."

The site is at: www.cit.ac.nz/smac/csware.htm. The Global Bangemann Challenge site is at: www.challenge.stockholm.se.