Product Review: WebSmart

The Inside Stories of the Innovation Award Winners The Four Hundred, iSeries and AS/400 Insight; Volume 15, Number 19; Author: Mary Lou Roberts

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Education

This award is for the best practice in education excellence for a System i client, college, or university that has demonstrated outstanding commitment for the System i community and provides ongoing education support of System i technology.

Moraine Valley Community College, a community college in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, is the winner in this category. Its Information Management Systems department teaches anything in IT that is software related--primarily programming and applications.

Michelle August, program director, says that the college had been dedicated to the AS/400 platform for more than 18 years and had re-engineered its curriculum several times over the years. A few years ago, however, the department staff re-evaluated the stand-alone midrange program again and, due to low enrollments, the department decided that it again needed to reassess the way in which it offered its System i courses.

Now, says August, the college has acquired a new i5 520, with a Linux partition, and integrated the teaching of the System i into several of its courses rather than having it by a silo by itself. The i5 520 is used in the operating systems course, which covers Windows and Linux in addition to i5/OS; that course also covers e-commerce, and is used to introduce students to e-commerce development tools from BCD Software...

In addition, August reports that, "We are currently working on incorporating the System i into our database applications course, which will introduce students to DB2, and into our Java course, so that students can see an application they created deployed on the System i. This offers our students a chance to work on a system that isn't Windows-based, and makes them aware of the fact that not everything is Microsoft grown."