Harvard College will launch its first venture in distance learning tomorrow with Harvard at Home, an online learning website that will offer alumni users a chance to explore academic topics from ancient Greek poetry to the physics of fluids.

The site, which was designed for use by alumni only, will not offer full-length courses but rather academic vignettes that will include video and audio clips of lectures, speeches, and interviews with faculty members. Users will also be provided access to supplementary materials such as texts and historical data.

"[Harvard at Home] is meant to give alumni a tasting of learning at Harvard," said Frank M. Steen, director of Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS). "It will be like a course website, but something an alumnus could look at in a few hours."

Get With the Program

Harvard at Home will make its debut with three vignettes. The headliner will be a segment called "Rediscovering Homer: Poetry and Performance," an abridged version of a two-day alumni seminar that was given last year by Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature Gregory Nagy.

The site's debut will also include two segments that will center around Science Center lectures. One, called "Making Waves: Quantum Billiards to Concert Acoustics," was inspired by a public lecture presented by Professor of Chemistry and Physics Eric J. Heller.

The other is called "The Fluid World: flows, films and foams," and is an introduction to fluid dynamics taught by Howard A. Stone, a professor from the Division of Engineering & Applied Sciences.

Steen said he hopes a segment by Nancy M. Cline on "Virtual Continuity: What will be expected of libraries in the next millennium?" will also be ready by Thursday, but that if not, it will be added to the site soon afterwards.

Coming Soon--

To a Computer Near You...

According to Steen, Harvard at Home aims to offer 20-30 new segments over the course of the year.

Next month, for example, the site will offer a piece by Dudley R. Herschbach on "Ben Franklin, Scientist" that will include demonstrations from a Science Center lecture and discuss Franklin's many contributions to the sciences.

And Steen said he hopes to add a segment by Music Department Chair Thomas Kelly on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony sometime in the near future.

As for the rest of the year, Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles has sent letters to a number of faculty asking them to get involved with the initiative. Steen said that a number of distinguished faculty have expressed interest.

To D.L. or not to D.L.?

Distance learning has long been a topic of heated debate at Harvard.

Harvard declined to involve itself in a distance learning alliance that was formed last year by Yale, Princeton and Stanford. The alliance has since grown to include Oxford, and allows alumni of the schools access to online resources at each university.

In fact, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 has previously expressed great concerns that distance learning initiatives might take up precious faculty time--time that would otherwise be devoted to students.

But Lewis said yesterday that he feels Harvard at Home does not pose such problems.

"I think it's terrific that we can let the broader world know in this way about some of the interesting things that go on here," he wrote in an e-mail.

Indeed, the Harvard at Home project may be a first step in adapting this technology of distance learning to Harvard's needs.

Although the site is currently available only to alumni and those guests who contact Harvard at Home to request permission for access, Steen did not rule out the possibility of a more widespread distance learning initiative.

"There's nothing to say that down the road we wouldn't consider opening this up to a wider audience," Steen said.

Harvard at Home was established through a collaborative effort on the part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Information Technology Committee, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Instructional Computing Group, Harvard Magazine and the Harvard Alumni Association. The program is being funded by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Provost's Technology Innovation Fund.