An initial version of this course is being taught for Nursing majors in the 1996-97 Academic year in the Spring 1997 semester. This course was designed during the 1995-96 and 1996-97 academic years. This course was designed using the parameters that were developed for the construction of CILit course at the University of Scranton.
Within those parameters, it was decided early in the construction of this course that the students would be best served by placing an initial emphasis on using the web. To illustrate, consider the following quote extracted from the memorandum proposing this course, "The World Wide Web plays a central role in this course. There is a tremendous amount of health sciences material available on the Web. One significant Web site is a site called the Virtual Hospital. This site contains a tremendous amount of material for health sciences majors. The web can serve as a focus for course projects, and these projects can be used to introduce other computing resources (word processing, spreadsheets, graphics, and so forth). The introduction to the web would be incomplete if the students were not encouraged to construct their own web pages. The construction would take place on a PC, probably using an HTML-editor, and require the transmission and placement of the web pages to our academic web server. This will require the students to learn to use the DEC Alpha. Some resources will have to be constructed on the DEC to assist the students in placing and making their pages available. I will arrange this with the Computer Center folks. This will also provide an opportunity for the students to have a direct experience with computing and networking at a lower level."