The Online Revolution: Derevolutionibus Internetium
by Chris Cumo
Citrus County School District in Citrus County, Florida has turned to distance education to entice new teachers to its schools, according to Gail Grimm, the District’s Director of Planning. The shortage of graduates with teaching certificates has led the District to recruit people from business, allowing them to take on-line education courses from any accredited Florida college or university while they teach under the auspices of a temporary certificate. Participants in the program can earn a teaching certificate without setting foot on a college campus, and Citrus will pay nearly half of the tuition. Other Florida districts have similar programs mandated by state law.
Florida’s move toward distance education does not surprise David McConnell, who has taught education courses at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, and Boston University. He has seen increasing numbers of teachers earn their MAs on-line. In Kennebunkport, Maine, where McConnell lives, teachers save themselves a four-hour commute by taking graduate classes on-line from the University of Maine at Orono.
Florida and Maine are part of a larger trend, according to Lloyd Korhonen, Director of the Center for Distance Learning Research at Texas A & M University in College Station, Texas. He sees the greatest growth in distance education in programs that offer a professional credential like a teaching certificate, an MBA or a degree in nursing, engineering, architecture or the ministry. In response to demand UNext Inc., an internet education company in Deerfield, Illinois announced in July 2002 its intent to launch an on-line MBA program as a partnership with the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University. Duke University also offers an on-line MBA, notes Korhonen, as do the University of Phoenix and the Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry University in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois.
Lloyd Korhonen sees less growth in what he calls “stand-alone courses”: single offerings in literature, history, philosophy or other general-education requirements or electives, but this does not mean that these courses have not migrated on-line.
Mary Ann Koory teaches courses in Shakespeare and mystery fiction for the University of California-Berkeley Extension On-line. She began teaching the Shakespeare course in 1996, and the next year won the University of Iowa’s Helen Williams National Award for Excellence in Collegiate Independent Study. Koory believes on-line courses can be as substantive as traditional offerings without the shortcomings of the classroom. Whereas the same 20 percent of students will typically monopolize classroom discussions, she requires all students to participate in on-line discussions. The content of discussions is more focused on-line, she believes, and less apt to degenerate into ephemeral chatter. She emphasizes that an on-line format requires students to be active participants, and that this engagement correlates with learning. Koory works to maintain this engagement, e-mailing students if she has not heard from them in a few days, and encouraging them to log on to the lively discussions. On-line courses permit an intimacy of exchange between instructor and student that is impossible in a lecture with 200 students, believes Koory, and the bonds she has formed on-line are enduring enough that she still keeps in touch with students from her first class.
Mary Ann Koory and other distance-education advocates are transforming higher education more significantly than any development since the G.I. Bill, believes Bob Chrisman, who teaches on-line business courses at Marylhurst University and Linfield College, both in Oregon. Based on the anecdotal evidence noted below, he may not be exaggerating:
West Los Angeles Community College in California has moved its 100- and 200-level composition, creative writing, and literature courses on-line, according to English instructor Catherine Daly.
One-quarter of students have taken an on-line course at Jones College, with campuses in Jacksonville and Miami, Florida.
Lloyd Korhonen believes that every student at Texas A & M University has taken at least one on-line course.
At Pierce College in Lakewood, Washington on-line enrollments have quadrupled since 2001, according to Edward Bachmann, the college’s distance education Director.
On-line enrollment in Washington State’s public community and technical colleges has risen 102 percent since 1997, says Suanne Carlson, Director of Distance Learning at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, and reached nearly 22,000 in the 2000-2001 academic year.
By comparison, growth has been flat for television courses in these colleges.
The numbers are just as impressive nationwide. In 1999, business invested $1.2 billion in distance education, according to a Merrill Lynch report. In 2002, this figure may reach $30 billion says Farhad Saba, a professor in the department of Educational Technology at San Diego State University in California.
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Department of Education, the number of distance education programs at U.S. colleges and universities grew 72 percent between 1995 and 1998, or from roughly 860 to nearly 1,200 programs. In 1998, 1,680 colleges and universities offered some 54,000 courses on-line, and during that same period enrollment grew from 754,000 to 1.6 million, or 11 percent of students enrolled in higher education during 1998. Farhad Saba estimates that this enrollment number has doubled since the NCES released the report cited above.
Eileen Johnson, a special education teacher in New Philadelphia, Ohio, has joined the on-line revolution. She earned a Master’s in the Art of Teaching from Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan without ever leaving Ohio. With no graduate program near her home, she had no desire to commute 90 minutes to the nearest university, spend hours in class and arrive home at 10 p.m. after having taught a full day.
“Distance education is especially helpful for anyone with family and time constraints,” she says. But she admits that she might have quit the program had she not taken it with five other teachers, who buoyed her spirits through the demanding regiment of reading and writing. The workload was heavier than she had expected and heavier than in a traditional course, she believes.
“We did a whole lot more work,” Johnson says, “and a lot of it was busy work.”
Yet for all its rigors, she recommends the program to friends and praises faculty for their accessibility by phone and e-mail.
Michael Feldstein, founder and CEO of Feldstein and Associates, an educational consulting firm in West Kill, New York, believes distance education is perfect for busy adults because it frees them from “the shackles of time.”
Nancy Avery agrees. She has a full-time job and three small children and can only squeeze college into her frenetic life through distance education. She takes on-line courses at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Michigan and believes she learns more on-line than she would in a traditional class. On-line courses involve students in dialogue rather than immerse them in lecture. The result is a more dynamic class, Avery believes.
“I have more communication with my fellow students in the on-line environment than when I had to sit in a classroom,” she says. “I think a lot of people voice their opinions on-line, and in a classroom they might shy away from that either because they are shy or they don’t want to offend anyone.”
As people like Avery increasingly define the college population, distance education will only grow. How much is a matter of speculation. For example, Suanne Carlson, Director of Distance Learning at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges expects on-line enrollments to increase 30 percent at Washington State’s public community and technical colleges during the next five years. Director of the Center for Distance Learning Research at Texas A & M University Lloyd Korhonen is more guarded in his estimates. He expects steady growth, though he admits the magnitude is hard to predict. He emphasizes that colleges and universities are building their distance-education programs on quality, which he calls “the right model for growth.”
There are faculty members who think students, both undergraduate and graduate, may one day take most courses on-line, but the prospect of an ubiquitous virtual classroom, of Jones International University replicated everywhere, goes too far for Jeanie Murphy, an English instructor at Pierce College. She hopes that students with time and money will always see the traditional college experience as a rite of passage. UC-Berkeley’s Mary Ann Koory agrees that distance education is unlikely to replace the campus, where students learn to fend for themselves away from home for the first time.
“You can’t replace that kind of learning,” she says.
Distance education has its critics, of course, but they are unlikely to stem the tide of growing enrollment. Colleges and universities are bringing the virtual classroom to students who place a premium on time. In this respect, distance education is inclusive and democratic, values that are at the core of America. At the same time, businesses and universities are pouring money into distance education and employing poorly paid adjuncts. If business can turn a profit teaching students on-line, then the Darwinian forces of the market will have selected distance education for survival. The virtual classroom will become the forum of choice for the ideas of Darwin or Shakespeare or Plato. It will be the medium through which students will distill the last 5,000 years of Western civilization. If so, it will succeed in ways that no venture capitalist can quantify, and no adjunct faculty member can imagine.
