The function of this website is educational and informational, particularly for the course "Plant Nutrient Management", which has an enrollment of 35-40 per year. Students have been surveyed each year since 1996 and the results are very interesting! The most telling result is the dramatic shift from 40-60 percent being very comfortable with email and the internet before taking the course in 1996 to 70-80 percent in 1999. And the access has shifted from mostly through a computer lab in 1996 to mostly at home. Overall the reaction was extremely positive, especially on the class notes, and classroom attendance remains high, with most students reporting that they attended more than 90% of lectures (with no coercive measures in place).

Server logs for www.soils.wisc.edu/~barak/ show 78,000 individual user sessions since startup in the summer of 1995. Over 400,000 files have been requested from the server to construct 195,000 webpages, with a total of 5 GB served. Eighty-seven percent of identifiable users come from outside Wisconsin and 13% were international (outside the U.S. and Canada.) Server space and expertise are kindly provided by the Dept. of Soil Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This page was last modified by Phillip Barak, Dept. of Soil Science, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, on 23 Jul 1999. All rights reserved.