Telosphere designed two courses for the Graduate Computer Science Department at CUNY. These courses were originally conceived to help train under-employed individuals, who had the drive but not the skills, into the higher-paying Silicon Alley technology job market. The courses were later adapted to the Computer Science department. One is an introductory class on the Internet, the online market, and basic Web site design. The other is a more advanced lecture/lab intensive course focuses on building dynamic and interactive, information-driven applications and mutimedia assets, while also incorporating teamwork and process planning to meet hard deadlines.

"This is a very difficult course. I'm impressed with the calibre of students who have made it through the whole process," says Struminger. "We've thrown them to the wolves, in the sense most of these students have not needed to do collaborative work on hard fast deadlines to make the grade. They've learned about project planning and teamwork (and when the team doesn't work) -- these are the realities in the job market. It's total contextual immersion and the students respond by using their heads, instead of just memorizing for the test."

We also address the media and design side: "One day the students are learning about the virtues of negative space, the next it's interactive nonlinear media, the next it's case studies of market-based applications and whether they are successful. The online world is dynamic. Stuff unfolds in real time, so the narrative quality, which is so important to the human interface, becomes fluid and hard to grasp. Many of these students are struggling for the first time through an experiential course that grades them on their ability to adapt and solve problems in real time. When they realize that we are guiding them, but don't expect right or wrong answers, we begin to see them access their creative resources. You see the light bulbs start to go on."