Teaching Web Information Retrieval and Network Communication Technology to Non-Major Undergraduate Students

World Wide Web and the Internet have touched our life in many aspects. From a technology point of view, both the Web and the Internet have been experiencing dramatic changes over the years. From a societal impact point of view, the Web and the Internet have become an essential tool in our live, similar to reading and writing, to a level where we have to study carefully the effect of this tool in our learning and in our live. This paper describes authors' experiences in teaching the fundamentals of World Wide Web search engines and the Internet technology to non-major undergraduate students. In one course, the first author taught a foundation seminar on the subject of web search engines to a group of first-year students from various disciplines from social sciences, humanity, natural sciences, and engineering. In the second course, the second author taught an upper level course on the subject of wireless and personal communications to non-majors from the business school. Both courses gave us rich experiences on how to reach non-major undergraduate students with topics of great importance and great interest.