In our seven year effort to build electronic classrooms we tried to balance the pursuit of new technologies with the exploration of new teaching/learning styles while providing the necessary infrastructure for faculty training and support, and collecting ample evaluation data to guide our transformation. This experience has led to a growing community of faculty users, widespread student acceptance, and administration support for expansion.After four years of usage by 44 faculty (20 tenured, 9 untenured, 15 other staff) from 16 departments offering 122 courses with over 4010 students we are ready to report on the lessons we have learned.

Novel patterns of teachingflearning have emerged from faculty and students who use our three teachingflearning theaters at the University of Maryland, College Park. These fullyequipped electronic classrooms have been used by 74faculty in 264 semester-long courses since the fall of 1991 with largely enthusiastic reception by both faculty and students. The designers of the teaching~learning theaters sought to provide a technologically rich environment and a support staff so that faculty could concentrate on changing the traditional lecture from its unidirectional information flow to a more collaborative activity. As faculty have evolved their personal styles in using the electronic classrooms, novel patterns of teaching~learning have emerged. In addition to enhanced lectures, we identified three common patterns: (a) active individual learning, (b) small-group collaborative learning, and (c) entire-class collaborative learning.

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At the University of Maryland, budget constraints, questions of duplication of effort, and a call to raise operational efficiency have encouraged a number of relatively autonomous units to turn to the central Office of Information Technology (OIT) for assistance in providing IT services targeted to their specific needs. The required services have varied widely, from classroom and desktop support to the provision of server infrastructure. In this panel, the presenters will discuss the approaches taken to provide services to this diverse range of customers. On-site support models for desktop computing, classrooms, and labs include fulltime service desks as well as part-time or on-call support. Backend infrastructure has generally been centralized, as has the creation of software images for labs and classrooms. Included in the discussion will be a highlight of lessons learned as more units have requested increased OIT support.

At the institutional level, Web-based teaching focuses on faculty development. In the 1980s and 1990s, campuses invested their resources on building an infrastructure—putting computers and connective systems in place. Hand-in-hand with the development of an infrastructure is the proliferation of the World Wide Web (WWW). This near ubiquitous phenomenon has provided a common graphic based interface that campuses can use to communicate to a larger audience both internally and externally. It is not surprising then, that attention is now turning to the use of computers to deliver instruction. However, just having a technology infrastructure does not mean that faculty will use it as a part of their teaching. This chapter will examine a faculty development process focused on Web-based instruction within a major research university, faculty reactions to the process, the issues that faculty are facing in Web-based teaching, technology and instructional support, and a glimpse at the future.