Locating Quality
Locating Quality
Locating Quality
Never mind which institutions nationwide had the best programs and top professors in your field. You couldn't even consider them. Oh, how times have changed. These days, you can still choose between State U. and the local community college, but add to the mix the 2,000-plus institutions, some of the very best in the world, that offer online courses and degrees accessible from anywhere with a computer and a modem. Suddenly, getting ahead in life is a lot easierand a whole lot more complicated.
It's easier because the Internet has kicked learning out of the classroom and into cyberspace, making education available anywhere, anytime, even "just in time." Students in Turkey sign up for business degrees from American universities. Working mothers in Denver can squeeze in statistics courses from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania between the workday and family responsibilities. Overachieving high schoolers add college calculus to their secondary-school schedules. Itinerant travelers log in to virtual classrooms whenever and wherever they please. More than 2 million people have taken online courses so far.
But the vastness of offerings only makes E-learning more complicated. In the past few years, 70 percent of American universities have put at least one course online, and by 2005 that may grow to 90 percent. The range of schools posting their intellectual wares on the Web is already staggering: from modest Chattanooga State Technical Community College and its 30 courses, to Rochester Institute of Technology's five bachelor of science degrees, to the University of Illinois's 10 different master's programs encompassing 220 courses. The range of fields covered is almost as astounding: While most curricula lean toward business and technologyat last count, 600 marketing courses were available onlinestudents can still choose among psychology, engineering, and education programs, to name just a few.
Pitfalls. For anyone thinking of jumping into this new education world, the questions present themselves quickly: how to find the right courses or the appropriate programsand how to find quality. The answers lie in understanding a number of issues: How has online education developed, and is it here to stay? What are the pitfalls in signing up for a course? Who does this kind of education work best for? What are the signs of engaging, enriching, and career-building coursework? (Helpful answers to these questions can be found in this and the following stories.)
It seems fair to say that distance education has had a checkered past. The correspondence courses at the turn of the 20th century promised the equivalent of "anytime, anywhere" education but instead delivered shoddy lessons and slapdash instruction, driving dropout rates through the roof. But people still wanted to learn from a distance. Indeed, in the early 1960s, two DC-6 airplanes flew over Indiana beaming lessons by satellite into Midwestern classrooms. With each new technological innovationtelephone, film, radio, audiotapes, and televisiondistance education rebounded. By the 1980s, many colleges were offering courses and programs that taught through correspondence, teleconferencing, videotaped lectures, or some combination of all three. But by the late 1990s, most schools had moved to take the entire experience online.
Schools rushed to the Web for a slew of reasons: Some found the possibility of reaching thousands of new students intoxicating, while others wanted to take the lead in developing new educational technology. More than a few thought the dotcom mirage would become a pool of cold, hard cash. Some universities set up their online operations in separate, hoped-for, profit centers. Many were just afraid of being left behind.
Still, throughout the history of distance education, critics have questioned whether students could really be taught well from far away. Those concerns have been revived with online education. Detractors worry that online courses sacrifice intellectual sophistication for convenience, that they foster isolation among students, and that they dehumanize the process of learning. E-learning may "inhibit rather than promote good education," charges the American Federation of Teachers. Faculty fret that online education forces them to surrender control of their academic work to administrators and business people, who will warp it into something profitable. And with the continuing shakeout among E-learning companies and universities (story, Page 58), students could be left in the untenable position of paying for classes at a school that no longer exists.
Despite such worries, online education is here to stay. For some students, it's their only option. As a service manager with Komatsu Mining Systems, Steve Huff heads off to remote areas for a month at a time. Yet, at 55, Huff was ready to finish his undergraduate degree. He signed up for the University of Phoenix's online baccalaureate completion program. For Huff, maintaining a 3.9 grade-point average while logging in from places as far away as Aikhal, Siberia, a mining town near the Arctic Circle, hasn't been that difficult. Finding the right program to begin with was the challenge. "There are hundreds out there," he says.
For-profit University of Phoenix, the largest private university in the United States, is an interesting case in point. With campuses in 21 states, the school currently enrolls over 90,000 students. But roughly 25,000 of them have opted for one of the school's 18 online degrees. At the University of Maryland-University College, the biggest provider of distance education in the nation, students signed up for 44,000 courses last year. The university expects enrollment to triple in the next decade. As if those weren't enough options, several giant companies, like General Motors, are setting up their own online learning centers for their workers. And a host of other for-profit companies have sprung up to capitalize on what is already a multibillion-dollar market worldwide. Businesses such as NETg, Click2learn, Quisic, and SmartForce formed to sell to individuals and corporations discrete modules that instruct students in business practicessubjects ranging from laying off employees to developing software. (Indeed, for some E-learning companies the how-to-fire modules turned out to be prescient: UNext has laid off 52 workers, and two months ago, Pensare went under.)
Yet despite the economic tumult, E-learning remains a sturdy industry. "Anybody that says online education is just another promise is ignoring what online education is already doing," says Bob Kerrey, president of the New School in New York City and former senator from Nebraska. "It's allowing people to learn in ways that were impossible before." The models vary greatly. The U.S. Army War College's two-year program in strategic studies requires book reading, paper writing, and thoughtful Internet discussions among its 300 participants. Meanwhile, Harvard Business Online uses spreadsheets, case studies, and video clips to teach a quick course on finance for managers. With programs like Harvard's, students can move at their own pace and take time to review lessons. Students don't just receive information online, say advocates, they wrestle with knowledge and make it their own.
Studies indicate that online learning can be effective. Thomas Russell of North Carolina State University reviewed research on all types of distance learning and concluded that there was "no significant difference" between inside- and outside-classroom education. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funds the development of university online courses, came to the same conclusion. Says program director Frank Mayadas, "If the same professor is offering the same course and has offered it online and on campus, the results are equivalent and even tend to favor off-campus learning." Arizona State University compared test results of its online M.B.A. students with those enrolled in the traditional program and found that the online students scored higher.
Gold rush. Still, while the formula can be effective, many online courses are not. Some providers, including universities, bypassed educational quality in their rush toward Internet gold. "Much of corporate E-learning is underwhelming," admits Sam Herring, executive vice president at Lguide, a company that evaluates online education. Indeed, the company reviewed 70 providers for an unnamed consulting company and found only two that it could recommend. Others promise a high degree of interactivity with the instructor and other students, but few frequent the class chat rooms and the professor doesn't return E-mails. Even big-name schools don't guarantee quality. Brian Dalton, 26, complains that the professor of the biochemistry course he took through the University of California-Berkeley sometimes didn't answer all the queries in his E-mails. When he did, the response would be cursory. "He didn't want to be bothered with questions," says Dalton. "I had the feeling that there were lower standards [than at the traditional university] for the professor's involvement in the material, answering questions, and grading." Dalton received an A+.
Successfully venturing into online education, therefore, requires some serious thought. One question worth considering is whether an online program will give you the full breadth of education you seek. While at least 35 institutions offer bachelor's degrees online, it's worth noting that much of the four-year college experience at a brick-and-mortar institution cannot be replicated over the Internet. (Some places are trying, though: Kentucky Virtual University, for instance, offers virtual college sports and "music to study by" to online students.) And at the graduate level, skeptics ask whether E-learning can be the proper mode for educating nurses, for instance, or teachers.
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