Laptop computers and the ultimate virtual enterprise-education

Education is, and always has been, the ultimate virtual enterprise. Students appear in class, but the work on which most of their learning depends takes place in their homes, residence halls, fraternities and sororities. Thus, there are parallels between the roles of the professor and the traditional manager in their respective virtual workplaces. This paper describes the virtual classroom process, list problems relating to it, and describes solutions to some in the context of the computing environment being built at Rose-Hulman. It then deals with unresolved issues facing both academia and industry