More Colleges Plunging Into Uncharted Waters of Online Courses

November 2, 1998

More Colleges Plunging Into Uncharted Waters of Online Courses

By KAREN W. ARENSON

purred by fierce competition for students, colleges and universities from Florida State to New York University are plunging headlong into the rapidly evolving world of online education, a world that barely existed five years ago.

Kim Kulish for The New York Times
Michele Acuna of Saugus, Calif., is working on a degree from the University of Phoenix, online. "I do a lot at night when my children are in bed," she said. "That's the beauty of this stuff -- you can do it at 3 A.M."

In recent years, technologically adventurous professors worked the Internet into their courses, posting the syllabus or readings, sometimes responding to student queries. Some of the more proficient put courses online. But only recently have universities begun to offer whole programs and degrees on line, where a student can sign up for a bachelor's, a master's or even a law degree -- the 1990s version of a correspondence course.
No college can be certain whether the programs will attract enough students to justify the considerable expense -- $50,000 or more to create and support each class. But school officials say that if they do not stake out territory in cyberspace now, someone else will.
"This is the hottest and most sweeping development I've ever seen," said James H. Ryan, a vice president at Pennsylvania State University, who has been in higher education for 35 years. "It's like being in a roller coaster; it's a thrill a minute."
But even as universities stampede onto the Internet, significant questions have yet to be answered. How good is the education? Who owns the courses -- the university or the professors who create them? How should faculty members be paid? What works best in online teaching? And will a degree from a virtual university be worth the actual paper it is printed on?
Frank Mayadas, a program officer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which has financed programs to improve online teaching, said the picture was mixed. Some online degrees, like Stanford University's master's degree in electrical engineering or Drexel University's masters in information systems, are sound, Mayadas said. But he is skeptical that other offerings will endure.
"The predictability we associate with higher education institutions isn't there yet," he said, "and it needs to be there for this to become a credible source of education."
Still, online classes are a considerable step up from correspondence schools. Internet bulletin boards function as virtual classrooms for students and teachers who can participate at any time, from anywhere, using a computer and a modem. Instructors post lectures and assignments; students turn in papers and tests and discuss their studies with classmates and professors in online conferences.
Michele Acuna of Saugus, Calif., a 34-year-old mother with two teen-agers who is working on a bachelor's degree from the University of Phoenix, signs on almost every day to the Hewlett Packard computer in her bedroom for a communications course. Her professor is in Utah.
"I do a lot at night when my children are in bed," she said. "That's the beauty of this stuff -- you can do it at 3 a.m."

No one knows exactly how many colleges operate on the Internet. But what is clear is that the trend is picking up speed nationwide:
-- New York University announced this month an audacious plan to create a profit-seeking subsidiary to market Internet courses. The venture would allow NYU to raise millions of dollars through a stock offering or private partnerships.
-- The University of Phoenix, a for-profit behemoth that has officials at many traditional universities scared because of its rapid spread online, has nearly 5,000 students in its online program, more than double the number two years ago.
-- Western Governors University, an online college sponsored by 17 states and Guam, was started this fall to improve access to college education for adults and to help accommodate an expected crush of students without building classrooms. The university offers associate's degrees in liberal arts and applied science.
-- The California Virtual University, a consortium of nearly 100 California universities and colleges, opened this fall with more than 1,600 online courses.
-- The Open University -- Britain's 29-year-old pioneer in distance education for college students -- has applied for American accreditation and is striking cooperative agreements with universities like Florida State University.
-- Penn State established its online "World Campus" in February with just four courses and expects to have 30 courses by next February.
-- Florida State will begin offering courses next fall for a bachelor's degree, but will concentrate on course work for juniors and seniors.

Faculty rights and pay for classes over the Internet are issues.

The proliferation of online programs has many traditional educators scratching their heads. A committee of the American Association of University Professors concluded last year that online learning could be "a valuable pedagogical tool to increase access to higher education." But it warned that developments could compromise traditional notions of academic quality, academic freedom, intellectual property rights and instructors' workloads and compensation. In some cases, long-standing safeguards of faculty members' rights may suffice, it said, but in others, those protections may need reworking.
Unlike a traditional classroom course, for which a professor creates and delivers each course, the professor becomes more dispensable online after putting the course together in a form that can be sent out again and again. Another instructor can be assigned to answer questions and grade papers.
Universities are creating different arrangements to determine who owns what. Penn State, for example, is splitting revenues with the faculty members who develop the courses and their departments, while New York University says its new subsidiary will hold ownership rights for the online courses.
The student body for most online courses is part-time adults in continuing education programs or full-time degree-seekers who take most of their work in traditional classrooms. But the trend is to make it possible to earn a degree online rather than just take a few individual classes.
Jeremy Carlo, a sophomore majoring in applied math and physics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, took a computer science course online in the spring when he could not fit the regular course into his schedule. He found the flexibility a mixed blessing.
"It was nice that you didn't have to be somewhere from 4 to 5:30 twice a week," Carlo said. "The negative is that you really have to keep on top of the work."
Ms. Acuna is using her computer for all of her courses. She said she had always wanted a college degree. But as a single mother with a full-time job as an operations manager for a retail chain with night and weekend shifts, she could not commit to regular-class attendance.
She looked into several online programs before enrolling as a business major at the University of Phoenix. At $370 a credit ($465 for graduate work), Phoenix charges more than the local community college. Phoenix students typically take one course at a time for five weeks, and then have a week off before starting the next.
The only requirement Ms. Acuna was not able to fulfill at home was the university's entrance examination, which she took at a local school.
In her current communications course she and her five classmates write essays, read them and discuss them in teams -- but talk about little else. There is no sense of a campus community, but she does not mind.
Now that Internet education is taking clearer shape, some university officials are taking a closer look at the business aspects.
Active marketing is a major component of the NYU plan. Rather than aiming to put all the courses it can on the Web, the university is hoping to start with a dozen or so niche courses -- like computer and management courses that will be attractive to people in industry. As these courses bring in revenues, others will be added.
"Online is a big, important field in higher education, but it does not have a business model that works," said Gerald A. Heeger, dean of Continuing and Professional Studies at NYU, who is directing the university's new online enterprise.
"The dirty, little secret is that nobody's making any money," Heeger said. But someday they will, he added.

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Florida State University
New York University
Penn State University
Stanford University
Drexel University
University of Phoenix
Western Governors University
California Virtual University
The Open University
New Jersey Institute of Technology

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	Kim Kulish for The New York Times
	Michele Acuna of Saugus, Calif., is working on a degree from the University of Phoenix, online. "I do a lot at night when my children are in bed," she said. "That's the beauty of this stuff -- you can do it at 3 A.M."


Faculty rights and pay for classes over the Internet are issues.