Ron has missed class, but he does not want to hike to the professor's office for the handouts. So he logs on to the local campus network and views all the handouts and videos used in class that day.

Tamara forgot the names of some French students she met. She goes to the student directory and searches for students who speak French. Perusing the online pictures, she finds her comrades and sends them an e-mail from her lifetime school e-mail account.

For some Harvard students, these imagined cases are being realized daily--they are students of the Harvard Business School (HBS).

Its well-kept lawns and building outpost make HBS a beautiful place, but what is really impressive about this extension of Harvard over the river is its integration of technology.

David A. Garvin '71, an HBS professor, was one of the first to use the new system for course work. Garvin was interested in the transition that one goes through to become a general manager--a position such as chief executive officer.

"The data is out there. It's in the alumni's heads," Garvin said.

Garvin had a Web-based bulletin board system set up so that students and alumni could discuss issues related to the transition.

After 10 days of online discussion, the alumni were invited to Garvin's class where they spoke with students and had videotaped interviews. All of the data--the online discussion, the in-class talk and the videos--were organized, transcribed and placed on an internal HBS Web page for future access.

This week, one year after the first try, Garvin is replaying this exercise-with even more complexity and appeared even more excited.

"This is not a chat room," Garvin said, emphasizing the significance of the experiment. "You're tapping into real experience."

This real experience could be useful at the College, according to Garvin. For example, a student of organic chemistry could correspond with interns and doctors in the field to see how orgo has been useful to them.

Before 1995, there was no way to do what Garvin is doing. Different HBS divisions utilized six different and incompatible e-mail systems and there were more than 75 faculty configurations.

But that year, the new HBS Dean Kim B. Clark made a committment to overhaul HBS's antiquated and cumbersome system in just three months.

Today it seems that Clark's efforts have been successful.

"We went from a fairly ad hoc environment to a completely networked environment," Garvin said of the transition.