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In This Issue:
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FEATURE
STORY
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 Izumi |
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It was an extremely effective search engine that connected Ikuya Izumi in Japan to Grace Chung, executive director of Columbia Video Network (CVN) in New York. “I searched the Internet for distance learning, found CVN and sent an email,” said Izumi. “Grace was really helpful. She called me and we spoke about the CVN system so I decided to enroll in one course for the summer, in 1999.”
That course was the beginning of Izumi’s progress toward earning a master’s degree in computer science from Columbia via CVN. He will graduate in May, the first Columbia student from Japan who was not in residence. In the short two years since beginning the classes in earnest, Izumi has had first hand experience in the streamlining of Columbia’s distance learning arm.
“I started out with the videos,” said Izumi, “but soon CVN moved to on-line courses available though the Internet. It is really very easy now.” Izumi, who is based in Japan, travels frequently. He is now in New York for two months, having come back from trips to London, France and Japan within the past few months. In fact, he was in Japan last month when Dean Zvi Galil visited Tokyo. (See story below.) “I take my laptop computer and books with me and submit my homework by email,” he said. “When I started, I used FedEx to send it but now there are very few courses where snail mail is still used.”
Columbia Video Network students participate in the same lectures, take the same exams, and receive the same degrees as on-campus students. “For a course on operating systems,” Izumi said, “I had to work with an on-campus student and another off-campus student. We had to cooperate actively but there was a 13-hour time difference between New York and Tokyo. We worked it out so every night around 10 p.m. New York time (11 a.m. Tokyo time), we chatted through Yahoo Messenger. Then I did some work while they were sleeping and, when I was sleeping, they were working. So, for 24-hours a day our group had someone working on the problems.”
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 Ken-Kwofie |
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CVN enrollment for the current spring semester is almost 500 students in more than 60 courses. Of these students, 35 are international students. The majority of CVN students, however, are closer to the Morningside Campus. Jude Ken-Kwofie, a systems engineer who works in the Network Infrastructure and Operations group at Telcordia Technologies in New Jersey, designs and develops web systems centered on telecommunication practices. He received a master’s degree in electrical engineering in February.
“I wanted to get my graduate degree for two reasons, primarily for myself but also for my family. No one in my family ever surpassed an undergraduate degree; my father grew up as an orphan in Ghana and my mother had only a grammar school education. My father studied accounting and finance books to pass banking tests and became a bank manager. When he came to America, he started with nothing but was able to raise three boys, putting us through private school and supporting family back in Ghana. Coming from a humble background instills a mentality where you feel you must succeed and will not lose.”
Ken-Kwofie chose Columbia so that he could work full-time while studying for his master’s degree. “My graduate education at Columbia has helped me to strengthen my engineering fundamentals—approach, analysis, reasoning, patience, diligence—and taught me new and interesting topics while strengthening theories and methodologies that I learned as an undergraduate.”
CVN, which was rated by Forbes as “Best of the Web” for distance learning, has continued to grow despite the downturn in the economy. “Last summer was our most successful summer ever,” said Grace Chung, CVN’s dynamic director. “For this spring semester, our enrollment went up—not as much as we hoped for—but it did go up. It shows the strength of Columbia’s program.”
CVN offers master’s and certificate programs in electrical engineering, computer science, engineering management systems, materials science, mechanical engineering, earth and environmental engineering, civil engineering, genomic engineering, and financial engineering. To enroll, email info@cvn.columbia.edu.
