By Kay Mills
Pullman, Washington
While preparing to go
online with History 468,
“Hitler and Nazi Germany,”
Washington State University associate
professor Raymond Sun recalls clinging
to his classroom methods and letting go
only “one finger at a time.” Now Sun, who
had already taught the course for several
years on campus, is sufficiently converted
that he is encouraging the graduate students
with whom he works to become
knowledgeable about online education as
soon as possible.
“It’s becoming part of the landscape,”
he said, adding that expertise in that area
can even help them get jobs.
At Eastern Oregon University in La
Grande, Danny Mielke, professor of physical
education and health, remembers the
days when doing distance education meant
one would “hop in a car and drive somewhere.”
Now Mielke, like 75 percent of
Eastern Oregon’s faculty, offers some of his
courses in one of six bachelor’s degree
programs available entirely through the
university’s Division of Distance Education.
Students enrolled in these programs
need never come to campus.
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Douglas Baker, vice provost for academic affairs at
Washington State University, believes preparing a distance education course improves a professor’s teaching skills. |
Pullman, which is south of Spokane in
eastern Washington State, is in wheatgrowing
country, and La Grande, located
between the Blue Mountains and the Wallowa
Mountains in eastern Oregon, sits in
the 2,700-foot-high Grande Ronde Valley.
Traveling the 140 miles between the two
universities drives home one of the reasons
that these schools have turned to distance
education: Eastern Washington and eastern
Oregon are sparsely populated, with
people living miles from any four-year
stitutions. In the winter, when snow closes
roads and passes, those miles can loom
even longer.
The flexibility of distance education is
the other major reason people enroll. Dan
O’Grady, a firefighter near Portland, wanted
to advance in his career and sought a
bachelor’s degree but couldn’t schedule
both work and classes conveniently. He
signed up for an Eastern Oregon distance
education program in fire services management,
which includes some general education
requirements such as humanities and
social sciences, and received his bachelor’s
degree in 1999. Debbie Fredson, a single
mom with three children who works as a
waitress, couldn’t readily leave Port Angeles
in western Washington. She received
a bachelor’s degree in social sciences
through Washington State’s distance education
program last May.
Every week seems to bring more universities
into online education. Last year,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology said
that it would put virtually all its course
material online over the next ten years, free
to anyone, but will not offer its degrees
online. The Arizona Board of Regents
voted to create the first academic
program—a master’s degree in engineering
—for Arizona Regents University,
which combines courses from the state’s
three universities. Colorado’s public colleges
and universities announced plans to
develop a joint catalog of online courses,
which students at any of the state’s 28
public institutions will be able to take for
credit transferable to their own schools.
The list goes on and on.
Although there are much larger programs
than those at Washington State and
Eastern Oregon, which enroll 3,000 and
almost 1,500 distance education students
respectively, they offer a useful
example of how these programs
fit into the mission of
state universities, how their
courses are designed, who
teaches them, who takes them
and why.
Distance education courses
face the same departmental
review as on-campus classes,
administrators at both WSU
and EOU said. But is distance
education really as good as inclassroom
education?
“It’s not the fact that it’s
distance education that makes
it good or bad, but whether or
not it’s developed with good
design that is based on the
needs of students,” said Muriel
K. Oaks, dean of WSU’s extended
university services.
“We’ve made an institutional
commitment that our distance
programs will be of the same
quality as those delivered on
campus.” WSU spends a great
deal of time on assessment,
and “those assessments
indicate
that the learning in distance programs
is at least as good as on campus.”
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| An effective distance education program requires a “strong, warm advising
system,” says Thomas Hofheinz (left), an adviser at Eastern Oregon University, shown with Joe Hart, director of the university’s distance learning program. |
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Offering courses to people who might
otherwise not be able to take classes also
helps fulfill the mission of a land-grant
university like Washington State.WSU has
a “triple mission—teaching, research and
outreach,” Douglas Baker, vice provost for
academic affairs, said. “Distance education
brings all three together. We do the
research, reach out and teach people in the
state.”
Other universities, especially those in
the “sun belt,” believe that distance education
will help them accommodate surging
enrollments. For Washington State,
though, it’s a way to reach new audiences
and serve parts of the state previously unserved
by four-year institutions, Oaks said.
Washington State offers five bachelor’s
degrees entirely through distance education
—social sciences, criminal justice, human
development, business and agriculture.
The degrees are geared for people
who have completed a community college
program or its equivalent, so that WSU
doesn’t duplicate courses offered elsewhere.
There is a master of science degree
in agriculture and one professional program,
a bachelor of science in nursing for
registered nurses. WSU is considering an
online master’s degree in liberal arts.
About one fourth of Washington State’s
distance education enrollment comes from
out of state.Within the state, “students like
to get a WSU degree,” Oaks said. “We’re
known.We have football and basketball
teams.They like that connection.They like
to get a degree from an institution that
they know and trust.” Distance education
graduates’ diplomas and transcripts are no
different than those of students who took
their classes on campus. Tuition is also the
same as that paid by students on campus,
currently $195 per semester credit hour, or
$1,949 for fulltime enrollment for Washington
state residents. Out of state distance
education students pay one-and-one-half
times the in-state rate.
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Students take distance education classes
out of necessity, “not because they want to sit home on the sofa and get a degree,” says Michael Jaeger, dean of Eastern Oregon University’s school of education and business. |
Asked whether distance education
students aren’t missing the campus experience,
Oaks replied:“These are not 18-yearolds.
These are 36-year-olds, on average. It’s
really different.” The college world has
changed anyway, she added. “Many
campuses are commuter campuses where
people come and take their classes and go
home or go to work,” so they don’t have
the residential college experience that
many people remember.
For its part, Eastern Oregon has been
designated as a regional university. Its network
of centers in areas of the state with
low population (many of those close to the
route of the old Oregon Trail) plus several
in heavily populated areas such as Portland
—as well as its distance education
courses—allow it to reach more students
who want college-level work.
EOU does not charge out-of-state tuition,
which has proved especially helpful in
attracting students from neighboring
Washington and Idaho, said Joe Hart,
distance education director.
With regard to the quality of the teaching,
WSU’s Baker and others said that
preparing to offer a course at a distance
helps professors do a better job. “Technology
is an excuse to think about teaching,”
Baker said. “In the process of developing a
course, you hold a mirror up and ask,‘Why
am I doing what I’m doing?’”
Helping WSU faculty think about what
they are trying to achieve through their
courses is part of the task of instructional
designers like Theron DesRosier and
Joanne Sellen. “People start out with the
assumption they can do the same thing that
they do in the classroom,” DesRosier said.
“Experience shows that that’s a backwards
way to do it.We have to know the goals of
the department and the goals of the course.
What skills does the department have in
mind that it wants for its graduates?
“Time spent with design up front saves
time and money in the long run,” he added.
“You can’t go in and put your lecture
notes online and expect students to get
much out of it.” Sellen said. They have to
work on collaborative projects that they
can do online. WSU’s online courses use
home-grown software called Speakeasy,
which, in keeping with the metaphor, has a
Playbill giving the schedules for the courses.
There are Events, which are basically
the lessons, then Tables, or forums at which
students exchange ideas.
Often the course designers and the professors
work on open-ended questions for
students to answer in the online forum that
provides the equivalent of a class discussion.“
If you just ask the class to summarize
material, the first posting will take care of
that and then the rest of the people have
nothing to add,” DesRosier said.
Raymond Sun said that when a course
is taught online, the technology “brings out
the quiet people who have good insights—
they feel safe and can share ideas. But
there are still some people who, either
because of their life situations, personality
or because they just aren’t interested, don’t
participate that much.” He wants to figure
out how to engage them “without making
them feel like the hammer is coming
down.”
Like many who have offered courses
online, Edward Weber in the WSU political
science department said that the
experience “made me dissect my class all
over again, even though I have taught it for
six years…It clarified in my own mind just
what was the most important thing for
them to learn. If you are doing 40 hours of
lectures, you feel you have more time and
can cover more material. Online has to be
more focused.”
Weber, who teamed with instructional
designers Theron DesRosier and Sharon
Roy to create an online introductory public
administration course, described his own
experience as “pretty darn positive.” But
he’s not sure other professors will have as
open an attitude. “One of the concerns of
the professorate,” he said, “is that they
don’t have a great deal of respect for the
course designers.We have the Ph.D.s and
we think we know it all. I think that there is
a real arrogance on the part of some faculty.
They are unwilling to stand back and
think of different ways to educate people.”
Everybody has a certain comfort level,
Weber added. “We like to do what we’ve
always done.”
When Rosemary Powers started teaching
sociology at Eastern Oregon in the fall
of 1998, new faculty were asked to offer
one course for the distance education
division. “I was quite resistant,” she said.
After a career as an organizer around antinuclear
issues and other social concerns,
she said that “one of the reasons I had
gotten a Ph.D. and wanted to teach at a
university was the delight at being in a
community of scholars.” Distance
education seemed to deny that sense of
community, she thought. She also viewed it
as a business model of education, “the
McDonaldizing” of higher education. “I
was being quite grumpy about it,” she said.
“But I gamely went ahead and designed a
course.”
Only one student signed up, so Powers
got to practice. She found it “much more
labor intensive, which made me a little nervous
about what it would be like if there
were more students.” Since then, she has
helped to develop and teach three gender
studies courses online, and her reservations
about distance education are not as strong
as they were. “I see more of what people
get in far-flung places. I just wish I could
meet them,” she said.
Powers still is not willing to offer a sociology
major through distance education.
“I may change. I may have to change. But
there’s something about people being on
campus with me. I guess I’m not convinced
we can have the same kind of academic
community and synergy.”
Both Washington State and Eastern
Oregon use some part-time faculty as well
as their own professors to develop and
teach distance education courses. In all
cases, those faculty members and their
courses must be approved by the appropriate
academic departments.
At Eastern Oregon, for example, Linda
Kobler, who taught for seven years at the
prestigious Julliard School of Music in New
York and now lives in Erie, Pennsylvania,
teaches Music 201, “Famous Composers
and Their Work.” When she started
developing the course, which now is
offered by other colleges as well as Eastern
Oregon, she confessed to being cowed by
the process.“How am I going to get people
to hear what I hear?” she said. Her course
includes audio samples in which Kobler
can talk over the music
to help students hear
what she hears.
Students who register
for Kobler’s course
receive her e-mail
address. When they
contact her, she sends
them an orientation
letter that includes a
guide to the course, the
website address and
necessary passwords.
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Eastern Oregon University, in a remote, lightly populated
part of the state, offers distance learning classes to 1,500 students. |
They need to
download RealPlayer
software so that they
can see and hear the
video and audio portions
of the course.
Materials for the class
include a textbook,
“Music: An
Appreciation,” by Roger Kamien; a study
guide; and a compact disc set that features
everything from Gregorian chants to music
from the 20th century.
Kobler’s Eastern Oregon University
course is set up so that students start and
finish at the same time within the school’s
quarter system. Students take the course’s
four exams online. The exams are timed,
multiple-choice tests—and the computer
software cuts a student offline if he or she
runs over the limit.
Kobler said she often is asked whether
students look at their books when they are
taking unproctored tests. Technically, they
can, she says, but she believes that having
the tests timed circumvents that. They
don’t have time to flip book pages but
need to have command of the material, she
said, adding that once they submit their answers,
they get an instant read-out on how
they did. And the program logs the scores
for Kobler.
During the term, Kobler communicates
with her students by e-mail. She also has a
weekly hour-long online chat session with
them.Typically, she said, she has about ten
students in her EOU classes and 150 overall
from the various schools for which she
teaches online courses. Last summer Eastern
Oregon started offering her course—
with some changes—to its music majors
and minors because they had so many
students enrolling on campus.
Distance learning administrators believe
that the success or failure of their
efforts depends heavily on support services.
“A strong, warm, advising system—
that’s our greatest strength,” said Thomas
Hofheinz, an EOU adviser.
Eastern Oregon offers online orientation
for its distance learning program, an
online degree planning workshop that
helps students read the academic catalog
and prepare their courses of study, and a
web-based advisory list that provides resources
either to answer students’ questions
or direct them to someone who can.
When students reach the upper level
courses, they generally deal more with
professors than with their advisers, Hofheinz
said. “But we block for them.We
make sure their records are kept and make
sure they aren’t heading for a fall.”
Joanne Parsons, another of the EOU
advisers, said it is their top priority to get
back to their advisees within 24 hours or
less whenever they are called on the tollfree
telephone number or messaged via
the Internet. “I have been told many times
that people went to big universities and
didn’t get one-on-one contact,” she said.
“These are adults who have been
away from school and often are facing
the Internet and computers, which is
threatening.”
At Eastern Oregon, she said, students
will find that there is someone responsible
for helping them.“We are a small enough
institution that we can provide cheerleading
and personal support, yet we
expect students to be responsible for themselves.”
Eastern Oregon offers one master’s
degree online for prospective teachers,
usually people who have worked in
another field and now want to be in the
classroom. Because of their jobs or family
obligations, distance educators refer to
them as “place bound.”They cannot easily
leave their home towns for a year on a
campus because they are fulfilling the
requirement for a teaching internship.
Eastern Oregon offers a one-year program
that helps them earn their initial teaching
license, then shepherds them through the
long process of obtaining a final license.
It is clear to Michael Jaeger, dean of
EOU’s school of education and business,
that these students are earning their
degrees through distance education for
often poignant personal reasons—“not
because they want to sit home on the sofa
and get a degree.”
Teaching, Jaeger said, is “leadership in a
crowded space.” In offering a teaching
program at a distance, he added, “it’s
difficult to judge whether a person can be a
leader in a crowd if they are getting a
degree off by themselves.We have to see
how a person works in a social setting.”
That’s why there are residential parts of
the program in the summers before and
after the teaching internship as well as
evaluations by onsite administrators
checking the master’s candidates as they
teach.
Both Washington State and Eastern
Oregon have had special reasons to build
up their distance education programs. A
decade ago,Washington was among the
states with the largest percentage of people
starting higher education but among the
lowest-ranking in terms of students completing
four-year degrees, said Muriel
Oaks. The state had a strong network of
community colleges, she added, but many
people lived too far from four-year institutions
to finish their university degrees.
WSU decided that the students weren’t
ever going to receive that education “unless
we take it to them,” she said.
At about the same time, timber workers
in the western part of the state faced high
unemployment because of restrictions on
logging. The state’s higher education
coordinating board told Washington State
it would provide funds to cover college
tuition for those workers and their spouses
who had had enough education to qualify
for the university’s distance education
program. The University of Washington,
located in Seattle and therefore closer to
the unemployed workers, was not doing
much distance education at that point, so
WSU got the nod along with Western
Washington University.
Debbie Fredson, whose ex-husband had
been a log scaling supervisor, qualified for
the tuition waiver. She took most of her
courses by watching videotaped lectures,
reading the texts and other books, and
writing papers, although she did take one
research course online. She especially liked
a course on gender and culture.
Asked which courses she liked best, she
replied: “I liked them all. It was exciting to
be learning. I used to cry that I was so glad
I was able to get an education.” She always
feared that the timber tuition waiver money
would dry up before she finished her
degree, because she was going so slowly. “I
could only take two courses a semester,”
she said.
The only disadvantage Fredson could
see was the lack of fellow students.“I didn’t
make any friends through my college
experience—but I had many friends in
Port Angeles that I could talk to about it,
lots of educated friends.” As for the advantages,
she said, “I have a degree. I did it
at my own pace, my own comfortable
level.”
Looking at the recent history of Eastern
Oregon University shows how a distance
education program can support its sponsoring
institution. Because of its record of
providing opportunities for students in the
communities in which they lived and
worked, the EOU distance education
program helped keep that university open
after voters passed Measure 5 to limit state
spending in 1990.
There was talk of turning the small
university, which today has 1,850 students
on campus, into a rehabilitation center.
But, said Dixie Lund, dean of the division
of distance education, “we mattered to a
lot of influential individuals as well as influential
groups.” In addition to the number
of EOU distance-education graduates
around the state, the university’s regional
staff, for example, had helped local communities
apply for and receive grants for
their programs. So “talk about closure of
Eastern Oregon in the legislature was met
by opposition.”
Today, Eastern Oregon’s challenge is
growth. “How big do you want us to get?”
Lund, herself a distance education graduate,
said she asks her bosses. Once the
Internet exploded onto the scene, she said,
there were more adults seeking education,
and EOU’s distance education became “a
very robust program. In the 2001 fiscal
year, for example, distance education
earned $2.9 million in revenue against $2.5
million in expenses. The school is reinvesting
its earnings in campus teaching
faculty, course development and other
resources so that it can keep up with demand,
Lund said, adding that “maintaining
our instructional capacity is our biggest
challenge.”
Washington State faces a similar challenge
—finding a way to finance its distance-
degree programs that simultaneously
meets the needs of students, faculty and the
institution, said Muriel Oaks. “We need to
develop high quality courses that provide
effective and engaging learning for
students, provide a reasonable workload
for faculty, and do all of this in a costeffective
manner that does not drain resources.”
