Volume 18 Number 1 Winter/Spring 2001

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constructive idea

In this class, students must master Web-page construction as well as the basics of virology.

BE HONEST. WHAT HAPPENED TO THOSE COLLEGE ASSIGNMENTS YOU AGONIZED OVER FOR DAYS, THOSE TERM PAPERS YOU GOBBLED NO-DOZ TO FINISH IN THE WEE HOURS? DID YOU OR ANYONE ELSE EVER LOOK AT THEM AGAIN? CHANCES ARE THEY WENT RIGHT INTO THE TRASH AT THE END OF THE QUARTER.

But students in Robert Siegel's Humans and Viruses class can admire their handiwork with just a mouse click -- and so can any of the other billion people in the world with Internet access. For the last three years, Siegel, MD, PhD, associate professor of microbiology and immunology, has required each student in the class to build a Web page exploring a family of viruses. He then posts these pages at http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/viruslist.html for all the world to see.

His goal, he says, is to demystify the Internet and allow the students to create something lasting that can serve as a resource for others. "Traditional ways of evaluating students are good for motivation, but they don't produce anything that is useful for anyone else," says Siegel.

That's not to say that the juniors and seniors taking the course don't get plenty of traditional assignments -- the class is known as one of the hardest on campus, says Siegel. Between finishing weekly problem sets, building a three-dimensional model of a virus, and organizing a class presentation, his students have to research, design and construct their Web page.

Siegel assigns the topics to ensure that each viral family is covered, but he gives the students free reign to choose their own approaches. "Knowing their sites will be visible to other people ups the bar in terms of how seriously they take this," he says. Many take full advantage of the Web's interconnectivity and multimedia capabilities, weaving in links, art, photos, animations, and audio and video clips. Some students have even interviewed luminaries in the field and included transcripts or audio on their pages. Janet Maldonado and Manisha Dayal, members of the 1998 class, talked with Baruch Blumberg, the 1976 Nobel Prize winner responsible for the vaccine against the hepatitis B virus.

Surprisingly, Siegel finds that today's computer-savvy students, who can't recall a time when PCs weren't ubiquitous, are intimidated by the Internet. They usually think creating a Web site is more complicated than it is, he says. To help his students conquer this fear, Siegel at first required them to write their own HTML code as they constructed their pages -- though now he allows them to use software to make it easier.

Of course, putting your work on the Web means anyone can see it, and many students have been surprised to find themselves suddenly considered experts, receiving e-mails from around the world asking for everything from basic information to medical diagnoses.

And it's not only the students and Web surfers who benefit from the projects. Siegel himself often uses the pages as references when he's drawing up a lecture, and he gets great pleasure from teaching these kids. "The energy and enthusiasm of the students is so great," he says. "It's amazing what a bunch of Stanford undergrads can do." ­ MITCH LESLIE