William Fenn
Assistant Professor of Computer Technology
BC students registering for courses that I teach. Feel free to contact me at william.fenn@brazosport.edu for questions about any courses, degrees, etc... All Fall 2008 Hybrid courses that I teach will have a course introduction and orientation meeting at the first meeting date for the course listed in the F2008 semester schedule.
Hybrid Course Information:
Hybrid courses are a new course delivery format because they either technically don't work well, or are significantly more difficult for students as fully on-line courses. They also allow two courses to be offered in the same time span on campus as one normal campus course. Hybrid courses still require the same amount of assignments and contact time as regular campus courses.
The hybrid courses will have an online Web Component to deliver most (but not all) of the lecture material and some other class assignments through WebCT / Blackboard. It will be about 2-3 hours of work consisting of reading the textbook chapter, reviewing PowerPoint presentations, answering discussion questions, and other assignments.
The other two hours of class time per week will be the meeting time scheduled in the class schedule listing.
The first day campus meeting day will be orientation, pre-requisite knowledge review, and WebCT account verification / setup, and lab configuration.
All other campus class meeting days after the first one will have a quiz over the online content assignments for the week and then a discussion / question answering session about the online content, followed by the remainder of the class time doing lab assignments in the lab. Two or three times during the semester we will use the campus class meeting time for a major exam and lab if time allows. The weekly quizzes will test to see if you have covered the online content before coming to class.
The Network Hardware course cannot be offered fully online, because of the equipment used that students don't have from home. The Network Hardware class has class meeting times from 7:30PM - 9:30PM to allow for industry workers to get to class after work. You need to count on being here for those hours each week. The weekly quizzes will test to see if you have covered the online content before coming to class. All of the weekly quizzes will be averaged for a major test score.
The Visual Basic course used to be fully on-line, but students had difficulty understanding and troubleshooting programming code basically on their own. Students understand and learn better when I am able to assist and guide them when writing programming code.
Hope this answers your questions, if not, let me know.
About the Computer Technology Program:
Do you own use a cell phone? When was the last time you filled up with gas, used an ATM, or self-checkout system at Walmart?
Computers are hiding in plain sight everywhere in the modern world. Don't let the name of "Computer Technology" degree limit your thinking about job possibilities to "just a PC technician". CableTV companies, telephone companies, and virtually all industries are also using the same digital, computer-based technologies. We have designed the Computer Technology degree to have a broad knowledge base to fit the needs of all of those different computer-based jobs and digitally-based industries.
About me:
After graduating from high school in 1981, I spent 9 years in the U.S. Navy as:
an Electronics Warfare technician,
personal computer systems technician,
group-paced instructor,
training department supervisor,
classified publications custodian,
physical security officer,
and terminal / computer area security officer.
The highest rank I attained in the U.S. Navy was Electronics Warfare Chief Petty Officer - EWC(SW).
I have worked at Brazosport College since Jan. 1991 as:
- an Instructional Media Technician,
- Information Systems Specialist,
- part-time Computer Technology faculty (1997-2001),
- and full-time Computer Technology faculty from 2001 to the present.
I have been trained on and worked with the evolution of electronics from vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits.
I have installed, operated, and maintained the first personal computers in business settings from:
- the Xerox 860 Information Processing System,
- to Zenith 120 and 248 PCs,
- to IBM PCs and all other evolutions of personal computers since.
I have worked with wide area networked personal computers (before the public Internet) in military and business settings, and the Internet since Brazosport College became the first Internet Service Provider in the Brazosport area in 1995.
I have installed and maintained:
- and designed analog television and CATV distribution systems,
- analog and digital satellite systems,
- analog and digital PBX telephone systems.
I have written programs for and designed touchscreen multimedia information kiosks.
I have designed, installed, operated, maintained the equipment and delivered multimedia presentations using:
- overhead projectors,
- opaque projectors,
- 16mm movie projectors,
- 35mm slide projectors,
- VCR's, Video discs, CDs, DVDs,
- video projectors with computers,
- Polycom videoconferencing classroom systems using CATV, ISDN, and IP channels.