CNAV History

In the summer of 1995, Gettysburg College began work on what would evolve into the current CNAV system.  The idea was to create a web tool to provide our students, and the entire college community, the ability to better navigate through the college's curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular offerings. The tool was designed to help the college community discover what Gettysburg had to offer and, more importantly, to discover new connections between those offerings.

Our original effort to solve this problem took the form of a typical group of web pages - many pages describing courses, events, extra-curricular activities, professors, etc. As this project grew in size, we began to contemplate the particular page structure needed to facilitate the discovery process. We decided to talk to students about the structure. Our thinking was that if we could understand our students' thinking as they wandered through a web hierarchy, then we would be able to derive a structure that worked well for them.

Our discussions caused us to re-evaluate and radically alter our approach to this problem. We discovered that the students' thinking was quite varied and dealt with questions we did not expect. Statements such as "I am bored" or "I am unhappy with what I am currently doing" were common. Students complained about discovering campus offerings too late to take advantage of them. When they found something that interested them (such as a lecture) they had difficulty finding other things (such as courses) that were similar to that lecture.

In our minds, a more powerful solution was to create a system that was interactive and focused as much on the student as it did on the college's curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular offerings. Rather than trying to make a static web hierarchy, we decided to make a "smart" web tool that would make it easier for students and others to find connections between themselves and other people, courses, or events on campus.

The programming and database work to develop this "smart" web tool was done by a number of Gettysburg College student interns, five full time College computing employees (who also did other things besides CNAV), and,during the  early stages of the project, two consultants from Perfect Order, Inc. In addition, most Gettysburg College offices have been involved in different aspects of CNAV's design, including admissions, academic advising, public relations, human resources, career advising, the Library, the provost's office and the faculty as a whole

CNAV is unique because, rather than treating the web as a series of static pages, it treats the web as a series of "puzzle pieces" that can be assembled into different views. Courses, extra curricular offerings, events, information about groups of people, and individuals themselves are treated as puzzle pieces inside of CNAV. The unique attributes of each of these items can be thought of as the "edges" of the puzzle pieces. CNAV allows each user to describe those "edges" with as much detail as possible. For example, a student who is sponsoring an event can associate many pieces of information with the event: a web page, text description, interest keywords, contact and sponsor information, as well as the more mechanical details of where and when the event is.

A faculty member who teaches a course can associate a course homepage, syllabus, readings list, and faculty web page with the course; add their own course description to the official description; indicate who might be interested in the course; and describe what skills, competencies and what academic themes the course covers. CNAV will use all of this information for the "description" of the course, and CNAV allows totally unique information for each course section, each semester, and each year that it is taught.

From the CNAV users' perspective, how they view the "pieces" can vary depending upon what the user is interested in finding. In addition, once a CNAV user finds a puzzle piece (say, an event) that is interesting, he or she can then use that piece to find other pieces like it (such as a course). Because of this capability, truly unique ways of searching are possible. For example, in CNAV, it is possible for a "course" to search for "students", or "a campus event" and to find similar "courses".

CNAV remembers the particular interests (attributes) of every campus member and uses this information to draw the campus member's attention to "pieces" that the individual would find interesting. CNAV also communicates with other computers on campus (most importantly, our legacy MIS system) to acquire as much knowledge about the individual as possible. Because of this feature, it also acts as a robust student information system, providing web access to financial, academic, and other college information for each individual on campus.

CNAV takes on different personalities for different groups of individuals on campus. Each personality is optimized for that group. Faculty members get tools that allow them to edit course information, access their advisees' information, access budget information, etc. Advisors get tools that allow them to track appointments, access student records, and monitor mid-term deficiencies. Students get tools that provide access to campus events, course catalog, electronic reserves for their courses, personal budget information, and the courses they are taking this semester.

One of CNAV's unexpected benefits is that our campus community is now making the cultural change necessary to deal with on line information tools. Faculty members who would never deal with a web application are now regularly using CNAV.  Another benefit is that since CNAV provides a secure, confidential web engine, and since it already contains our legacy data, it allows all sorts of follow-on projects to support other campus needs. CNAV has also forced us to identify issues and develop policies and practices to deal with concerns regarding information privacy and web-based intellectual property.