During an information session Thursday, Michelle Citron, associate dean of the Graduate School, said NU will start the pilot program with students who plan to graduate after Spring and Fall quarters.
Almost 100 other universities have created similar programs, with many more also looking to do so.
Citron, who is head of the universitywide committee developing the program, said the committee is seeking about 15 volunteers to participate in the pilot.
Citron, a radio-TV-film professor, said her field has been “crying out for years for an alternative to paper dissertations.”
With electronic dissertations, she said, students can add complicated graphs, images, simulations and sound bytes to their texts.
Brian Nielsen, manager of learning support systems for NU Information Technologies, spoke about the specifics of the technology being used for the pilot.
With training from NUIT, participants would be able to prepare and submit their dissertations in PDF format using Adobe Acrobat .
Nielsen said he is also looking at providing style sheets for Microsoft Word and LaTeX, the two most widely used word processing programs.
For the pilot participants, the Graduate School is buying the most sophisticated version of Adobe Acrobat. After the program is fully established, graduate students will be responsible for buying the program.
Students must still submit paper versions of their dissertations during the pilot although the electronic ones would be considered the official versions, Citron said.
One issue addressed at the meeting was the storage and dissemination of the theses. Citron said University Library officials agreed to retain the electronic versions in addition to theses it stores in paper and microfilm.
“The goal is to ultimately put them on the Web,” Citron said. “Why are we doing this at all? It makes dissertations more accessible.”
The new program is part of an effort to make graduate education at NU more efficient, Citron said.
“The departments are getting pressure from the Graduate School to push students through faster,” she said.
Citron said the committee wants some pilot participants to be inexperienced with technology since it has to set up the program for everybody.
“Ultimately, we have no choice,” Citron said. “Eventually, every university will be doing electronic dissertations.”
Lauren McConnell, a theatre and drama graduate student, said it probably will take her more time to gather clips and create her electronic thesis, but she wants to learn the technology and add to it.
“I’m pursuing this because I think it will be useful to be able to include clips of performances,” McConnell said. “The more visual and oral info I can provide, the better.”
Students who attended the session ranged in study from biomedical engineering to theatre and drama.