By Julieanne Leupold

Imagine the Target Greatland of the Internet. One place that contains everything you could ever dream of and then a little bit more.

The Campus Pipeline program - better known as PepXpress - functions as the ultimate Internet superstore to connect every dimension of the Seaver campus.

“We see Pepperdine Xpress as the wrapper; it wraps around many other systems,” said Kathee Robings, chief operating officer of Information Systems. “For a long time we have seen this need to get a more collaborative tool between students and faculty. That’s what Campus Pipeline does. The Pipeline deals with the much bigger picture: it can deal with all Seaver students.”

Between the sprawling campus, the isolated majors and the packed schedules, students and teachers find difficulty connecting with one another. Campus Pipeline seeks to alleviate this breach.

The PepXpress program came to Pepperdine through a strategic alliance between Campus Pipeline and the company that provides all of the university’s Internet services.

“This system gives students one place where they can accomplish self-service administrative tasks, check their e-mail, deal with course-based collaborative content and get personalized messages,” said Dan Kelo, manager of client/server development for Information Resources.

Through PepXpress, which is accessible directly from the Pepperdine homepage, students can view their grades, register for classes and check their student account balance with an unparalleled sense of privacy. Although the newly implemented OneStop station in the Thornton Administrative Center allows students to accomplish all of these things in one location, PepXpress allows students to do the same things without leaving their rooms or discussing their private information with office workers. Instead, when students log on with a unique user ID and password, they can view their personal information in utmost confidentiality.

“We think of PepXpress as the non-stop component of OneStop,” said Robings. “You can go to your web browser and see if you can accomplish what you need to do before even walking over there. Try it on the web first, and if you can’t get what you need, then go and talk to a real person.”

In addition to tracking personal information, PepXpress features collaborative tools, including online chat rooms and personalized messages. But since this portal is so all-encompassing, it can’t delve very deep into individual class interaction. This is where the BlackBoard program comes in.

In a move for modernization, former Pepperdine president David Davenport delivered a mandate to bring more technology into the classroom. In response to this mandate, the BlackBoard program was installed as an independent Seaver campus project while PepXpress was still in idea form.

“Think of BlackBoard as being a narrower but deeper focus on individual course content,” said Kelo. “For example, if a professor chooses to implement technology in their classroom, BlackBoard gives them a variety of tools with which to do that.” Blackboard allows each professor to virtually conduct class on the Web. Using this technology, faculty can post messages, hold online chats and conduct tests over the web.

These two programs, BlackBoard and PepXpress, were created with individual purposes and a slight overlap, but can be internally connected without students even realizing they’re traversing between different systems.

Each teacher has a homepage within PepXpress that can be replaced with the BlackBoard site. That way, students can reap the rewards of the widespread connections of PepXpress and still have the deeper benefits of the BlackBoard system.

These new computer systems, although grand in their idealized view, have their problems. Right now, PepXpress is still just a pilot program that requires the voluntary participation of both faculty and students for its survival. Since the creators of this program can’t track where students are visiting, there is no record of how successful this system is. They are setting up a service e-mail for students to provide feedback in hopes of expanding and improving this program.

“This is a very new and young product, so this is going to be evolving,” Kelo said. “Functionally, it is certainly not quite as robust as we’d like it to be, but I think we are going to see that grow tremendously in the next year.”

Although everyone who bears the name of the Waves is connected through the Pepperdine family, the diverse facets within the campus make it difficult to remain a unified, informed body of people. PepXpress creates a much-needed sense of unity and distribution of information in the cyberworld.

In a society where the expansion of the Internet has been criticized as one of the most isolating activities of all time, the creation of PepXpress builds a connection that transcends this isolation.