Though most of the students bring their own laptops onboard, there are always some undergrads who don't. For those students, the ship has about 100 loaner laptops, and a computer lab (shown here), which has about 25 Dell desktop PCs and is open 24-7. Here, undergrads can surf the Web, print materials, read PDF books or log onto to the ship's intranet.
This summer, Semester at Sea will update its intranet with course-management software that lets students and faculty exchange class materials, including documents and multimedia files. The open-source software, called Sakai, also gives students a way to submit papers via the intranet. Teachers can then grade or perhaps comment on them with audio clips, according to Moschella
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