Northeast Louisiana University


Business Education

Reproduced with permission from NeXT Computer, Inc.
A Reference Guide to NeXT in Higher Education, Fall 1992
ยช 1992 NeXT Computer, Inc

Getting down to business with NeXT's bundled software and development environment

With a Louisiana Educational Quality Support grant, the Department of Computer and Office Information Systems in the College of Business Administration at Northeast Louisiana University has acquired 30 NeXT machines for teaching and research projects. Department Chair John Rettenmayer, a longtime UNIX advocate, considered Sun, DEC, and NeXT machines, but says NeXT's customer support and machine capabilities won him over.

"When I contacted Sun, they were not very responsive," he says. "They only sent literature to me-no one ever came to talk with me. Their marketing department really dropped the ball. We also considered DEC because we already had a lot of DEC equipment at the school, but they weren't terribly responsive either. NeXT had the best support of the three. Someone was out to visit me in the blink of an eye.

"When I saw the demo of the NeXT machine, I was immediately impressed with its power and speed. Plus the NeXTSTEP environment with Objective C and Interface Builder wasn't available on the Sun platform. I knew NeXT would be useful in helping us create our own custom applications-which is something we wanted to do. Plus NeXT comes with a considerable amount of bundled software we could use in the classroom. For the price, we were getting a heck of a lot more with NeXT than with any other platform."

Six NeXT machines now sit in faculty offices, and the remaining 24 are in a computing lab that is open to students 90 hours each week. The lab contains one NeXTdimension that is attached to a video projector so instructors can teach students seated at lab machines.

Since acquiring the NeXT computers in 1990, several undergraduate courses, including Algorithm Design, Systems Analysis and Design, and Database Management and Design, have been modified to incorporate the machines and its Objective C programming capabilities. In Systems Analysis and Design, for example, students now use Diagram! to create hierarchy charts, product dataflow diagrams, and program structure charts. In addition, Rettenmayer has developed a custom application, called AD, that students can use to create action diagrams instead of the traditional flow charts. Students previously had to create all charts and diagrams on paper because the IBM PCs used for the courses did not have drawing capabilities.

Students use WordPerfect, TopDraw, and TextArt to create data dictionaries, term papers, and program documentation. Says Rettenmayer, "Students really appreciate the fully integrated nature of the NeXT machines. For the first time, they're able to draw pictures and integrate them into text-and with little effort."

Assistant Professor Donna Luse has students in her Business Communication and Managerial Communication classes submit all papers and reports via NeXTmail. She uses the New Comment feature of WordPerfect and the Lip Service feature of NeXTmail for written and verbal comments on the student papers. According to Rettenmayer, course evaluations show that students feel they learn more from the instructor's combination of written and verbal comments and they favor the new feedback process over the traditional paper-based grading process.

In the future, Rettenmayer plans to develop a series of custom applications to conduct research on computer support in group decision support systems. "NeXTstep will provide a flexible, cost-effective method to create and continually modify applications for this projects," he says. "I see Interface Builder and Objective C as powerful tools for the project."

In a series of independent study courses, several students have begun to study object-oriented programming on the NeXT. Rettenmayer introduces them to Interface Builder through a series of exploratory exercises and then has students create applications of their own choosing.

"NeXT provides a wonderful development environment," he says. "We haven't incorporated an object-oriented programming class into our regular curriculum yet, but we anticipate that our systems design classes will evolve toward object-oriented design techniques."

For more information, please contact:

John Rettenmayer
Chair and Professor of Computer Office & Information Sciences
Northeast Louisiana University
Monroe, Louisiana 71201
(318) 342-1125
rettenmayer@merlin.nlu.edu