Publication: International Herald Tribune, Special Report on Telecommunications Date: November 29, 1994 Author: Wendy M. Grossman Title: On-line Teaching Grows URL: www.pelicancrossing.net/credits.htm **This is the article as submitted before editing and copy-editing. To quote from tm the article, refer to the published version.** When David Pierce transferred from Padukah, Kentucky, to Manchester, England, two-thirds of the way through his MBA, his degree program continued uninterrupted at Indiana’s Purdue University. The reason: the use of computer communications, which allowed him to send and receive assignments and correspondence with professors via a modem and a direct-dialed link to the university. Mr. Pierce, now vice president for international sales at Miller Group, finished his degree in 1990. His experience is becoming more common as more and more universities, new and old, start to take advantage of computer networking to expand their classrooms off-campus. Some of the names are unfamiliar, beginning with the newly formed Global Network Academy and Virtual Online University, neither of which has a campus outside of cyberspace, and including Thomas Edison State College, which has an administration building in Trenton, New Jersey, but no classrooms. Plenty of mainstream institutions are going online, too: the New School of Social Research (New York), Emory University (Atlanta), Penn State, the University of Memphis, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the University of Phoenix. The use of this technology is not confined to the US. Some of the most advanced use of online technology has been at Britain’s Open University, which has used electronic conferencing in its mix of distance learning techniques for the last eight years and last summer experimented with video conferencing over the Internet. A programming course recently advertised over the Internet attracted 61 responses in four days from students from Fiji to Chile. The University of Bangor, in Wales, uses a mix of technology, including networking, in its teacher education programs to support students placed in distant schools. At the same time, the technology is used to broaden the school curriculum -- a Welsh school may have as few as 350 pupils, only two of whom are studying some top-level subjects. What cyberspace brings to distance learning besides speed and low-cost distribution of course materials is the ability for off-campus students to interact with each other instead of only with the teacher. Dr. Bill Brody from the University of Memphis, whose online graduate-level journalism course begins in January on CompuServe, lists that among the new system’s advantages. In addition, he believes the technology will give professors added feedback. Student discussions, for example, will be held over CompuServe as live conferences, and these can be captured verbatim. “Faculty can go back and review it, and do a better job than in the classroom of assessing student performance,” he says. “I think this is a major plus.” The medium also lends itself to controlling testing. On CompuServe, for example, you can ask the service to return a time and date stamped receipt when the student picks up the test; the student’s finished work then has to be similarly stamped by a specified time. The intention is to make the course exactly equivalent to what on-campus students are getting, and the University of Memphis plans to run on- and off-campus sessions in tandem so that the results can be compared. Such comparisons are an issue for everyone, since there are no easily applicable standards for accrediting such courses and institutions. As with any new technology, it’s not even clear who is in a position to assess such courses, as Steven D. Crow, deputy director of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, says. “There are about three groups at work right now trying to draw up guidelines or standards in distance delivery, so that means that to a certain extent the rules of the road have yet to be established.” In the case of the University of Phoenix, which is accredited by North Central for historical, rather than geographical, reasons, “We had someone visit the San Francisco site, out of which Online operates. We look over the curriculum and the way it’s being done, and get on the phone and talk to students. The challenge for us in the future is that every time you get on the cutting edge of something new you have to ask who’s going to define quality in that new scenario.” Within the US, there’s the additional problem -- which largely doesn’t exist among European countries -- of legal boundaries. Typically, each state regulates who can offer education within its borders, sets of laws which don’t take into account the possibility of an institution that offers instruction without a local physical presence. “This is,” says Mr. Crow, “one time that Americans would be well served to look to England and Australia and some other countries who have turned to distance delivery and are experienced in this area. Other than 18 to 22 year olds, who are going to go to college for rite of passage, the bulk of learning will be through technology.” Getting connected If you’re already online, a lot of resources can help you find an appropriate course. On CompuServe, the Education forum (GO EDFORUM) has an entire section devoted to distance learning, and the library there keeps a list of American Universities offering online degree programs or courses (ONLINE.DEG) as well as an explanation of the accreditation process (ACCRED.TXT). In addition, the Journalism and PR forums (GO JFORUM, GO PRSIG) are the homes of the online journalism and PR courses taught by Dr. Bill Brody from the University of Memphis; these are also available by dialing the university direct. If you have interactive Internet access, you can telnet to Kentucky’s Owensboro Community College (telnet ndlc@occ.uky.edu and login as ndlc), where the National Distance Learning Center maintains an online, searchable database of courses and contact information. On the Web, the Open University runs an information server (http://hcrl.open.ac.uk/ou/ouhome.html), as does the University of Bangor for its teacher education program (http://147.143.2.242, and click on ‘Centre for Interactive Systems and Telematics’). The Open University server also has links to other distance learning programs around Europe and the US. The Open University also has a gopher server with an entire book of papers on distance learning (gopher rowan.open.ac.uk). The Globewide Network Academy also maintains a server (http://uu-gna-mit.edu:8001/uu-gna). Printed books on the subject include The Electronic University: A Guide to Distance Learning Programs (1993), published by Peterson’s Guides and the National University Continuing Education Association, ISBN 1-56079-139-X; and How To Earn An Advanced Degree Without Going To Graduate School, by James P. Duffy, 2nd edition (1994), published by Wiley, ISBN 0-471-30728-9. copyright (c) Wendy M. Grossman 1994 **This is the article as submitted before editing and copy-editing. To quote from tm the article, refer to the published version.**