FAQ's about Etudes
Q. What is Etudes?
Etudes stands for easy to use distance education software, and is also a French word meaning "studies.". It is a Learning Management System or LMS.
Q. What is a LMS?
A. LMS stands for Learning Management System, which is a term that has been adopted by the e-learning community to refer to software technology platforms used for organizing, tracking and delivering educational content over the Web.
Q. When was Etudes developed?
A. Etudes software was developed by Michael Loceff in 1995 at Foothill Community College which is located in Los Altos Hills, California located 40 miles south of San Francisco, right in the middle of Silicon Valley and home of high-tech internet business owners, executives, managers and engineers
Q. Who is Michael Loceff?
A. Mr. Loceff is a tenured faculty member and director of the Internet, Windows, and programming curricula at Foothill College in the heart of Silicon Valley, where he has been teaching since 1984. In 1994, Mr. Loceff created Foothill Global Access, making Foothill the first community college in the world to offer accredited, transferable courses totally over the Internet. From 1989 through 1993, Mr. Loceff was an in-house consultant/instructor at SGI where he taught classes in the use of UNIX workstations, C, C++ and graphics languages. From 1988 through 1990, Mr. Loceff was the director of software engineering at Medical Computer Imaging where he led development on an electrocardiogram imaging system based upon neural network classification algorithms. He holds a B.S. from the University of Michigan and an M.S. from Stanford University. He's also a screenwriter on the TV series "24."
Q. What are some of the features for students using Etudes?
A. Consistent interface across classes
Easy to use navigation tools
Easy to learn e-mail, discussion, etc. tools
Help desk support – 24/7
* available at additional cost
One interface for all course-related communication and activities.
Ability to access multimedia materials
Easy to use Bulletin Boards - threaded discussion
Real time discussion forums (chat)
Access to their own grades from instructor’s gradebook
Automated password reset features
Group pages where they can work collaboratively
Pages which are accessible to students with special needs using assistive technology*
click here for more features of Etudes Classrooms
Q. What is a computer platform, and what makes Etudes so easy to use?
A. In computers, a platform is an underlying computer system on which application programs can run. On personal computers, Windows 2000 and the Mac OS X are examples of two different platforms. A platform consists of an operating system, the computer system's coordinating program, which in turn is built on the instruction set for a processor or microprocessor, the hardware that performs logic operations and manages data movement in the computer. The operating system must be designed to work with the particular processor's set of instructions. As an example, Microsoft's Windows 2000 is built to work with a series of microprocessors from the Intel Corporation that share the same or similar sets of instructions.