TERTIARY EDUCATION - NEWS ITEMCollege Online (5 articles)April 24, 2000 |
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Newsweek By Daniel McGinn The Internet's Next Big Thing just might be going to school. Are the new online programs digital diploma mills or the future of education? With a new generation of students logging on, traditional colleges aren't waiting to find out. Nicholas Jimenez leads a complicated life. As an executive with Computer Associates, he's lived in three countries in five years. Right now he's in So Paulo, Brazil, but "I don't know how much longer I'll be here," he says. "One year? One month?" That uncertainty?plus his hectic work schedule?makes it difficult for him to take classes to gain the skills he needs for a promotion. So when NYUonline, an offshoot of New York University, began offering Web-based courses in February, Jimenez, 27, signed up. He logs on to read tutorials on Management and Organization Principles and chat with his professor. Says Jimenez: "I can take classes wherever I am, whenever I want." College will always convey a certain image: Gothic buildings filled with postadolescents listening to tweed-clad professors. But the Internet is blurring that picture, and State U is quietly morphing into College.com. To be sure, a virtual university is no place for Felicity or her just-out-of-high-school friends; they want the full campus package, kegs and all. But "typical" college students?18 to 22 years old, living in dorms, studying full time?make up only 16 percent of enrollments today, says Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University. They're far outnumbered by the 79 percent of adults who lack diplomas. Many of these folks have kids, work irregular hours or travel, which makes night school impossible. The result: millions of adults are dialing for diplomas. They're attending start-up schools you've never heard of?and prestigious ones like Columbia, Stanford and Duke. By the end of the year, according to researchers at InterEd, 75 percent of all U.S. universities will offer online course work, and 5.8 million students will have logged on. Study any time! College has never been more convenient. Many cybereducators hope to get rich in the process. Online courses constitute just $350 million of the $240 billion higher-education industry today, according to Merrill Lynch, but will grow to $2 billion by 2003. The stock market has been so enamored of online education (or "e-learning") that venture capitalists have poured millions into the sector, funding companies like UNext.com, University Access and Pensare. Universities like NYU and Columbia have set up for-profit Web ventures, which they hope to take public. (Disclosure: Kaplan, Inc., a division of NEWSWEEK's corporate parent, The Washington Post Company, also offers online degree programs.) But while administrators dream of swelling endowments, some educators decry the online institutions as "digital diploma mills," offering subpar education. Others worry online ed could endanger some brick-and-mortar schools. Says Columbia's Levine: "What happens when California looks around and says, 'Do we really need nine public research universities?' " Until last month, many Americans had never heard of online education. Then Michael Saylor, a Virginia software billionaire, announced plans for a $100 million Virtual U. (That was before his stock tanked.) His vision sounds fanciful?Warren Buffett teaches finance while Michael Jordan hosts Dunking 101?and even futuristic. But like all online programs, it's rooted in older forms of "distance education," from correspondence schools to university courses delivered on TV or videotape. Internet courses trump telestudy by letting students interact via e-mail and discussion boards. Boosters say students actually get more faculty contact online than in a lecture hall. "Distance learning has always been frowned upon," says Vicky Phillips of Geteducated.com, a higher-ed consulting firm. But as it gets wired, "it's no longer a fringe activity." As students prove willing to sign up for click-on courses, new institutions are being born. As a young Navy sailor, Glenn Jones tried in vain to learn Russian by correspondence course. The experience led him to search for a better way to educate the masses. In the '80s he started offering classes via cable TV. Then in 1995, Jones, a rich cable entrepreneur, founded Jones International University, a campusless college whose employees work in a Denver office park. Classes take place in cyberspace, where the school offers bachelor's and master's degrees. Last year JIU became the first purely online college to win regional accreditation. Today it has just 125 degree-seeking students, but its namesake sees a huge upside. Says Jones: "There's no reason we couldn't have a million students." As more brand-name schools enter online learning, the concept is even attracting corporate high fliers. Since last May, Chris Colbert, president of a Boston advertising agency, has spent 20 hours each weekend holed up in his bedroom study, logged on to the online M.B.A. program at Duke University. Getting the degree involves more than just dialing in: Duke's "hybrid" program requires students to spend five weeks on campus, and an additional two weeks each taking classes in Germany, Brazil and China. Between campus visits, Colbert's weekends unfold much like this typical Sunday. He reviews a finance lecture from a CD-ROM, checks his class e-mail and prepares for a chat session with classmates collaborating on a case study. "It's wild to be 41 years old and freaking out about grades," says Colbert, who's pulling mostly A's. Colbert seems to be learning, but some academics contend online students are being shortchanged by not studying exclusively on campus. University of York history professor David Noble, the most prominent critic, says the concept is being promoted by profit-hungry administrators who don't care about students' welfare. "Students don't want this stuff," Noble says. Carole Fungaroli, an adjunct English professor at Georgetown, says older students need a campus experience as much as 18-year-olds. "The magic that happens between students and professors on campus is irreplaceable," Fungaroli says. Her colleagues also worry that the online U's may demean the jobs of professors. Companies like Jones's are "unbundling" professors' jobs into two functions: a handful of well-credentialed "content experts" who write the curriculum, and armies of "instructional faculty," who actually implement the courses. Online schools say the instructional faculty (who have day jobs) are better able to connect with working adult students. But traditionalists say full-time faculty are as essential to a university as its library. To fight the practice, the American Association of University Professors is trying to prevent online colleges from winning accreditation. Online teachers like Rick Keating don't feel exploited. Keating, 41, has a Ph.D. in English, an M.B.A. and a day job as an Air Force major. Today he teaches three online courses for Jones and another for the University of Massachusetts. On this afternoon he dials in to find 34 e-mails from students. Later he'll read and respond to each, post this week's lecture and monitor the discussion board. The classes work, he says, because online students are more motivated than folks who doze through classroom lectures. "I don't have any duds in my courses," he says. This summer he'll jump a new hurdle: teaching Shakespeare online. For veteran academics, Internet teaching presents new opportunities. This winter Kipp Martin, a University of Chicago management-science professor, has been taping a class with help from University Access, a company largely staffed with former television executives who help professors revamp courses for the Internet, then market them to other schools. Pensare, another prominent e-learning firm, is helping other business professors repackage teaching to sell to the corporate-training market. Martin, who's paid in stock options, says teaching to a camera takes getting used to. But he's impressed by how producers have jazzed up his business-math course. "They have this feature where you could actually see the different terms come out of the formulas and become one," he says. "It was something I've never done on the blackboard." That kind of innovation isn't the norm. While private companies try to re-invent teaching as a multimedia experience, most universities simply install cameras in lecture halls to turn professors' ruminations into Webcasts. The most progressive cybereducators argue that this "candid classroom" approach fails to take advantage of the Internet's richness. "They take a physics class with 1,000 kids falling asleep and think if it goes online it's going to be exciting," scoffs Roger Schank, director of Northwestern's Institute for Learning Sciences. As tech-savvy start-ups rewrite the rules, some worry whether tradition-bound colleges can compete. Says Levine: "The question is, are the brick-and-mortar schools going to move fast enough?" Even when professors get the knack of online teaching, is it effective? There's voluminous research, but no definitive conclusion. Researcher Thomas Russell has collected 355 studies, all showing no significant difference between what students learn in a classroom or far away. But most of those studies deal with television courses; Internet courses are new enough that research is still evolving. However, a study commissioned by teachers unions says most existing studies used flawed methodology. Its conclusion: the research on distance learning has a long way to go. Whether the classes work or not, they aren't a cakewalk. On a campus, classmates provide moral support; working online, it's hard to get a sense if you're on pace or lagging. And while most traditional universities stick to the traditional grading regimen of midterms, finals and a paper or two, newer online schools often assign several papers each week. The assignments don't win points for difficulty. (Example: "Write a one-screen summary in which you discuss what you learned during this workshop.") But even busywork takes time. One result of these hardships: more students drop out of online courses. "That's been the Achilles' heel of distance programs throughout history, and it still exists today," admits Brian Mueller of the University of Phoenix, which began offering online degrees in 1989. The key to boosting retention, he says, is creating a highly social online experience. In the Phoenix M.B.A. program, the same half-dozen students progress through all of their classes together, bonding via modem. But online study still isn't for everyone. Phoenix has 12,500 students in its online programs, but despite traffic and inconvenience, five times as many students show up in the physical classrooms it operates in 23 cities. Once the course work ends, it's unclear how widely employers will accept the dot-com diplomas. "There's a lot of mystery and confusion among recruiters about the value of an online degree," says Mark Oldman, cofounder of Vault.com, an employment-research firm. Recruiters are asking questions like "What's the difference between a cyberlecture and the Discovery Channel?" he says. Oldman predicts acceptance may vary depending on the field. Law firms and academia may never fully embrace them; less conservative businesses may be more flexible. The military, public schools and technical firms seem more accepting, especially of engineering or computer degrees. Established schools argue recruiters won't necessarily know a degree came from cyberstudy. "There's no asterisk on the diploma?it's the exact same degree," says Andy DiPaolo, assistant dean at Stanford, which offers online engineering degrees. Meanwhile, the students who've served as e-learning guinea pigs progress toward graduation. Diann Ferreira, a 55-year-old employment counselor in Ashland, Wash., is already planning the party she'll throw when she earns her B.A. from Jones International in August. She figures the degree could earn her a $10,000 raise, enough to let her retire five years early. But just as important will be her sense of accomplishment at finally finishing college. "It will make me feel better about myself," she says. The diploma will hang in her den right over her computer. © 2000 Newsweek, Inc. A Debate Over Online Learning Academics tend to get emotional about online education. Critics, including Georgetown University English professor Carole Fungaroli, say cyber-study can't possibly compete with on-campus learning. She even thinks that professors who embrace such programs are selling out. Supporters, including Gregory Nagy, chairman of Harvard University's Classics Department, view online teaching as a way to reach students they'd never encounter in the classroom. The two agreed to expand on their points of view for Newsweek.com. First, a word about their backgrounds. Fungaroli's defense of on-campus learning comes from her own experience as a "non-traditional" student. She earned a B.A. in English from George Mason University at age 30, then a Master's and Ph.D. in 18th Century English Literature at the University of Virginia. She's taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, and Georgetown; she has published two books, "The Slam and the Scream," about her years as a secretary, and "Traditional Degrees for Non-Traditional Students," recounting how older students can thrive in traditional campus learning environments. For more information on her work, consult her website at www.traditionaldegrees.com. Gregory Nagy is the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. The author of six books (most recently: "The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry"), he is serving out his appointment as the Chair of Harvard's Classics Department until July, when he will assume new duties as Director of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. Nagy isn't as vocal in his support of online education as the entrepreneurs setting up online universities, but he's one of a growing number of traditional academics who view it as a technology that's worthy of experimentation, especially if it will help increase the popularity of classic literature. He currently teaches the course "Introduction to Greek Literature: Concepts of the Hero in the Classical Period," which is offered to online students through Harvard's Extension School. To view this course material, including Web-casts of the first few class lectures, consult http://lab.dce.harvard.edu/extension/clase115/. For a full listing of online courses offered through Harvard's Extension School, consult http://www.extension.harvard.edu/1999-00/courses/distance.html. NEWSWEEK: Professor Fungaroli, much of the criticism from traditional academics over online education frames it as a jobs issue: as online universities deliver a course to thousands of students, they need fewer professors. Do you feel threatened by the growth of online education? FUNGAROLI: No, because I believe that students are intelligent, and they know an inadequate deal when they see one. Money is the biggest reason I speak out against the distance-learning trend. I hate to see universities waste precious monetary resources on such a losing proposition. Also, I don't want to see places like Harvard, Georgetown, Duke, Stanford, etc., dilute their good names by associating themselves with a substandard educational system. Students will continue to seek out live professors because they know that they need the influence and the contacts. They'll flock to good campuses because they want the benefits of the university name. So I believe that my job will not just survive, but thrive. I'd just like to see colleges spend their money more wisely, and assertively welcome adult students to the traditional campus. NEWSWEEK: Professor Nagy, you're currently teaching online through Harvard's Extension School. How high is your comfort level with online education? Can you see a time when students might earn an entire degree at Harvard via online education? NAGY: I want to proceed very cautiously, and only in the context of Harvard's Division of Continuing Education, which is a traditional "extension" school. With Harvard undergraduates, I would stick to the traditional classroom format. NEWSWEEK: Professor Fungaroli, you've never taught or taken an online course, right? David Noble, another prominent critic of online education, doesn't even use email. Doesn't this limited experience undercut the legitimacy of your criticism? If I've never eaten French food, how do I know I wouldn't like it? If you've never taught or studied online, how do you know it's so bad? FUNGAROLI: My online education experience is growing every day. I was a speaker at Benjamin Franklin University's "Global Learn Day II" recently. This was an entirely virtual, global conference. I have also cruised the discussion boards anywhere I can get online, which includes not only the University of Phoenix, but newsgroups like alt.learning.distance. Yesterday I was the guest author in a chat room on About.Com's adult education site. Every time we throw open the floor for questions, I brace myself for an onslaught of verbal abuse from distance-learning students, but it doesn't happen. Instead, they send me private email and say "How can I learn to do it your way? This distance thing sucks." NEWSWEEK: To prep for this discussion, you viewed some snippets of Dr. Nagy's online lectures for his Harvard Classics course. What did you think? FUNGAROLI: It was better than I expected. He is a talented professor, and the material was interesting and challenging. But it made me want to claw the computer screen to get into his classroom and ask him some questions! All his online course did was make me hungry for the real thing. NEWSWEEK: Professor Nagy, what do you make of your colleague's position: that non-traditional students really need an on-campus experience? NAGY: I am very taken with Professor Fungaroli's vision of "Traditional Degrees for Non-Traditional Students." From reading her book, "The Slam and the Scream," I can see that she herself was exactly the kind of non-traditional student that I strive to reach when I teach the Classics. I would offer a friendly amendment to her wording, though: Professor Fungaroli was not so much a non-traditional student but an independent-minded student, and it is the inner strength of an independent mind that led her toward her career of teaching and scholarship. Our field of literary studies needs independent minds. Yes, such minds are sometimes categorized as non-traditional, but that evaluation comes from the perspective of conventional educational norms. In my experience, the technology of distance learning can help colleagues like Professor Fngaroli and myself seek out and find those independent minds out there who might not yet have had access to the kind of classroom education that promotes intellectual independence. I agree with Professor Fungaroli that there is no substitute for a classroom experience, but, sometimes, I think that information technology can make the first move, as it were. So my question to Professor Fungaroli is this. If professors like her and myself can develop ways of reaching students in our classrooms through extracurricular followups by way of information technology, couldn't we try out some of these methods in making the first move with students who do not yet have access to classrooms? FUNGAROLI: I think this is an interesting point, and one that we could probably discuss in-depth to our mutual good. The biggest problem here is that when I was a legal secretary without a bachelor's degree, I was so wildly insecure about my own abilities that I don't think I would have dared step on campus unless it was my only option. If distance learning had existed in 1986, when I took my first successful college class, or in 1988, when I returned full time, I might have taken the option out of sheer terror. I was so scared that I almost melted into tears every time I faced campus, before I earned my first A. It was my personal encounter with Dr. Patrick Story at George Mason University, over Wordsworth's "Prelude," that woke my fledgling intellect. Had his course been available online I would have burrowed into it like a scared rabbit. After earning an A in his course, however, I had to get him to sign a form that would take me off of academic probation. In one searing moment he looked at the form, looked at me, stared right into my eyes, and said 'You?' He couldn't believe that one of his best students had been on probation! To have a respected professor express shock that I could ever have been an unsuccessful student was the most validating experience of my adult life. Distance learning would have excused me from the terror of handing him that form, and it would have denied me the the thrill of hearing him say that I was a good student, not a bad one. Three years later I earned his department's Outstanding English Major award, and he presented it to me personally. I don't think departments even nominate distance learning students for these honors, since they never meet them, and the awards are partly political (several of us had strong-enough grades). I wouldn't be at Georgetown today without the encouragement of professors like him, and James Trefil, and Roger Lathbury, or the memory of honors like that! Maybe only people who have ever flunked college courses and dropped out will understand what I mean by this. You carry the stigma of your own incompetence around like a brand. Not a day goes by that you don't see someone's diploma, or read about Dr. this and Ivy-league that, and feel resentment. Distance learning can be a powerful lure because it allows you to retain your sense of having a second-rate mind. I'm relieved that it didn't exist in 1988 because I might have signed up for it, kept my day job, earned a bachelor's degree in marketing (for which I have a talent, but which is not my true calling), and accepted reasonable promotions at my reasonable job. And I wouldn't be writing this to you now, because Newsweek wouldn't have any idea who I was, or why my opinion mattered. Worse yet, I would never have known that I might have been a Georgetown professor one day. NEWSWEEK: Professor Nagy, next year you'll be in Washington D.C. With Harvard's online teaching capabilities, you could use the Web to rebroadcast this year's lectures to next year's students to conduct class. Will you? As more professors do that, doesn't this become a slippery slope? Many students already complain that professors invest too much energy in research and not enough in teaching. Doesn't online education allow professors to further tilt their energy away from teaching. NAGY: I wouldn't take this approach [of rebroadcasting lectures] with Harvard undergraduates. I will continue to teach them in the traditional classroom format, since I will be commuting back and forth from Washington to Harvard. To your larger point, I think there are aspects of Web technology that actually supplement and enhance classroom teaching. For example, my colleague Mary Ebbott has developed a way to prepare students for classroom discussion with a preliminary Website discussion. By using the Web wisely, professor can make better use of limited classroom time. FUNGAROLI: Isn't it tough to keep students from cheating when you teach online? Sports Illustrated once ran an article on coaches who used distance learning as a fine way to get their athletes through required courses by using "ringers" who took their exams. While teaching "live" courses I get to know my students and their writing style; that's my best defense against cheating. Aberrantly intelligent work tends to stand out. If I suspect a student has turned in a paper which is not his or her own work, I simply ask that student to write me a brief summary of the paper without referring to the document itself. Students who actually wrote their own papers can do this without fail. How will you prevent this type of fraud in the distance-learning world? Does it concern you? NAGY: I like your ideas about prevention of cheating. But it seems to me that information technology can enhance detection. NEWSWEEK: Professor Fungaroli, most critics of online education envision students having a choice: either studying online, or attending "live" classes on campus. But most online educators say their students lack this choice. They claim online ed is addictive, drawing folks to higher education who would otherwise be at home, caring for their kids or watching television. If they're right, and online learners wouldn't be taking courses any other way, is online education still such a bad thing? Is taking an online course or pursuing an online degree better than taking no course or pursuing no degree at all? FUNGAROLI: What I worry about is the single mom who gets the message that it is more responsible to take distance-learning courses and stay home with her kids than it is to pack up the kids and get herself to campus. She and her kids have the most to gain from the in-person experience, but she is the first one that society will try to pressure into the distance-learning dungeon. I also worry about the employee who needs to break away from a domineering boss, but whose only options for company-paid education are distance ones. This keeps workers chained to their desks and away from my influence. If I get them in my classes, I will encourage them to follow their dreams and talents rather than the dictates of an employer with an eye on the bottom line. And that mythical TV-watcher who takes a class on-line instead doesn't exist. After all, she or he didn't turn off the tube and go to the library. In my experience, the kind of hunger that will lead someone to go back to college online or in person is relatively r are. I'd rather see those new bodies get nurtured on campus, and possibly change their lives, rather than absorb more passively online, and feel okay about staying right where they are, in a comfortable but killing rut. NEWSWEEK: Okay, if you're right, and online education really is offering an inferior experience to on-campus learning, why does every trendline show student interest in this field as exploding? This year, millions of education consumers will choose to study online. Don't they know what's best for them? FUNGAROLI: Because employers are happily paying for it. This is a boon to bosses who can pretend to offer education benefits and still keep employees chained to their desks. It is also being over-sold to single mothers, veterans, and other people who stand to gain the most from going on-campus. Distance learning is a new way for campuses to get their hands on the corporate dollar, which they desperately need. It's a deal with the devil, because it ensures that the elites will continue to get their prized, in-person educations, while the struggling parents and clerical workers will have to be content with a substandard, asterisked degree. I am heartened, however, because consumers are smart, and they DO know what's best for them. The more they hear about the options of going on-campus, the more they'll just say no to their Simon Legree bosses who make them stay at the office more and take classes online. The only way to break your chains is to calmly walk away. I believe that more and more intelligent distance learners will do just that in the days ahead. Remember, distance education has been a popular theory since radio. If you scan the Library of Congress's listings, you'll find such titles as "There's a Campus in Your Mailbox" going back to the early 1900s. Throughout the 20th century, National Geographic has published such futurists as Buckminster Fuller, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frederik Pohl predicting that we'd soon go to college via radio, thermal facsimile, television, and even hologram! It didn't work then, and it won't work now, because a correspondence course will never be more than that. The attrition rate will remain near 70 percent. It doesn't matter what sort of big, prestige campus offers the virtual degree: If the professor never meets the student, and the student doesn't set foot on campus or does so rarely, then that student didn't go to Georgetown, Harvard, Columbia, Duke, or anywhere else written on the diploma. You can't pretend something happened that didn't happen. © 2000 Newsweek, Inc. The New School An ambitious start-up with blue-chip university partners and very deep pockets hopes to bring college to millions worldwide?and transform the way they learn. You've signed up for an accounting course called assessing profitability. Dry stuff, right? But on the first day there's no boring lecture, no syllabus. You click to the opening screen and discover you're caught up in a crisis. You work for the imaginary Turing Computer, a company that's getting pounded by Dell, Compaq and Gateway. Turing's mercurial CEO, Cathy McIntyre, thinks that acquiring Psion, the British maker of handheld computers, might save her company. But Cathy?who's right there on your screen, tossing fitfully in her sleep?intimidates your boss. You must find the answers that will help him avoid her wrath. At stake is Turing's future?and yours. Sure, this sounds like a videogame, but educators call it "problem-based learning." It's a confrontational style used by, among others, Harvard Medical School. It's also the core method of teaching at UNext.com, a new Internet university that is outspending every competitor?about $100 million even before it opens for business. The project includes five elite schools?Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Carnegie Mellon and the London School of Economics; three Nobel laureates on the faculty; and investors such as Michael Milken and Oracle's Larry Ellison. Wall Street expects big things: "UNext has an opportunity to be the truly leading Internet university," says Michael Moe, Merrill Lynch's expert on the education market. UNext's covey of experts in cognition and distance learning are burning through up to $1 million per course to develop not just a made-for-online curriculum, but an entirely new way of teaching over the Net. The company will begin teaching this summer?and envisions a future student body of millions. UNext's founder, 48-year-old entrepreneur and educator Andy Rosenfield, has two target markets: people around the world who can't attend a top school, and those who already have degrees?executives, teachers, consultants?but need lifelong education to advance their careers. UNext will first offer business courses, such as corporate finance, and later expand to other disciplines, hoping to convince global corporations to enroll their employees by the thousands. To get course materials, Rosenfield's team approached major business schools. Columbia was the first to sign on, with the following deal: the school will get 5 percent of profits, in cash or UNext stock. If UNext flops, Columbia gets $20 million for its trouble. Rosenfield's team wants to totally re-engineer professors' old-fashioned "stand-and-deliver" courses. At UNext, a "course" requires perhaps 30 hours of work. Four or five courses make up a "course suite," the equivalent of a campus semester of, say, marketing. (Tuition works out to 80 percent of the roughly $2,600 that a semester course costs at a top B-school.) Clients like Bank of America and Owens-Illinois, the packaging giant, are enrolling pilot groups of employees for classes that begin this spring. UNext will eventually offer M.B.A. and other graduate degrees; the sheepskins will be from Cardean (CAR-dee-an) University, a UNext subsidiary named for a Roman goddess who guarded doorways (think portals). This sounds better, Rosenfield says, than a degree from a dot-com. Now suppose you do sign up for assessing profitability. You'll be grouped into a new class of about 25 students. You'll have two faculties instead of just one: a cluster of experts who've put together your course, and the part-time instructors?all with master's degrees or Ph.D.s ?who were hired less for research scholarship than for teaching ability. Your course is the progeny of a Columbia professor named Michael Kirschenheiter and a UNext team led by Don Wortham, an educational psychologist. Taking the course resembles using the Net itself to research a problem: applying your wiles, rooting out information, piecing together solutions. "What we don't tell you," Wortham says, "is 'Here's what to do next.' It's an adventure." As UNext rolls out its courses?maybe 100 by the end of the year?the company is focused most on how to replicate what online education obviously lacks: face time with professors, and those study groups and beer-hall sessions outside the classroom. "You don't teach in elite universities for 15 years and think, 'The real action is in my little lectures'," Rosenfield says. "Imagine how empty your education would have been if you'd only gone to class." Adds LoriLee Sadler, the company's technology chief: "What none of us [at UNext] is satisfied with is the social aspect of this. If we let you feel like you're out there all alone, you might as well just buy a textbook." UNext is working with a team from IBM and Lotus Development on still-secret ways of connecting students. One option among many: mount cameras on each student's computer, and use broadband video to bring everyone together, live, on the computer screen. UNext has other bells and whistles. Instructors won't just sit back and blindly hope that student s will collaborate with each other: they'll see spider-web diagrams that show which students are e-mailing others?and who's hanging back. A software technique called click-stream analysis shows instructors every bit of the course that a student has, and hasn't, sampled. Knowing that, the instructor can direct a confused student to the materials she hasn't yet seen?or send her a proactive e-mail: "I see you're stuck on Internal Rate of Return. Can I help?" Enio Ohmaye, an alumnus of Apple Computer's advanced-technology group, says this "back end" system insures that no student is overlooked, even if she's one of 100,000 people taking corporate finance. "Because we know where she's been and what problems she's having," he says, "we can do things for her that no other university can." Tucked deeper in the back end is software that will let UNext's academic deans scrutinize the instructors themselves. Here, screens nicknamed "the God station" keep track of how responsive instructors are to their students. Examp le: what's this instructor's average turn-around time on homework? UNext faces obvious hurdles. It's one thing to have Chinese education officials ask about the possibility of buying courses by the millions, as happened during a sales trip to Beijing a few weeks ago; it will be quite another to translate all of UNext's coursework to Chinese. And while the company has 150 education and information-technology professionals crafting its courses, UNext is still relying on outsiders to point up shortcomings. Not long ago a friend of Rosenfield's was puttering around with one course. "Do you have a button on this screen so people can hear every written word?" the visitor asked. Rosenfield decreed that UNext's courses be friendlier to students who have vision problems, who learn best by hearing, or who speak English as a second language. On a recent Friday Rosenfield stressed that pledge in a talk with 30 of his newest hires. He also startled these new crusaders for online ed with his rousing endorsement of... brick-and-mortar universities. "We believe in attending schools like the University of Chicago, Harvard, Wisconsin or Illinois," he said passionately. "That's the best form of education there is." The problem, he said, is that only about 1 percent of the world's population has the time, money and opportunity to attend top universities. UNext won't pretend to be the ideal school for everyone. It just aims to attracts the other 99 percent. © 2000 Newsweek, Inc. Tangled Wires in Harvard Yard As America's most elite university, Harvard could be excused for raising a snooty eyebrow at online ed. Yes, its administrators are skeptical. But with other schools plunging ahead, they realize Harvard can't stay on the sidelines. So far-flung departments are experimenting?cautiously. And faculty are debating. Can a course taught to 100 students still be effective when it's also "scaled" online for 1,000? And how much of a Harvard education comes from being at Harvard? The university doesn't offer online degrees yet?and some of its 10 schools probably never will. There's deep reluctance to confer B.A.s on undergrads who'll never stroll the Yard. "A Harvard degree is more than just passing some exams," says physics professor Paul Martin. "It's a whole community, an environment." Nobody wants surgery from a cyber-M.D., but the Med School will allow working docs to do continuing ed online. Business School Dean Kim Clark won't offer an online M.B.A. because professors' case-study discussions couldn't be replicated online. "We're doing things that aren't scalable," Clark says. But executive ed courses may be cyberworthy. As at most universities, the continuing-ed department is the boldest experimenter. This spring computer-science professor Len Evenchik is conducting a class by posting videotaped lectures from last fall to a new group of students. Like that one, most of Harvard Extension School's 18 online courses are for techies, but on a recent evening, classics professor Greg Nagy and three T.A.s discussed Euripides in front of 35 students?and two video cameras. Webcasting allows six more students?one in Singapore?to take the class. Some online students say they miss campus life. But most appreciate the cachet of Harvard on a resume. When Keith Davis, a systems consultant in St. Louis, mentioned his Harvard online coursework in a job interview, "They were impressed," he says. For now, the school's migration online will remain slow and experimental. But if it ever opens its doors widely, Harvard.com could be higher education's killer app. © 2000 Newsweek, Inc. "So You Want To Be An Internet Prof..." To the daydreamer who's slogging through workaday life in Corporate America, academia sounds heavenly: leafy campuses, adoring students, and the telephone that now drives you berserk rings only when Ted Koppel's booker calls to ask if you can share some of your specialized wisdom with the "Nightline" audience. But the realities aren't always thus: if you did make the leap from cubicle to classroom, you'd quickly learn that campus politics can be vicious, there's never a parking space when you need one and most lecture halls are filled with students who appear to have been cast from lead. A new option for working professionals: a job teaching students through an online university. The greatest attraction may be the ability to teach at the college or graduate level without quitting your day job or, for that matter, without having to live within commuting distance of a university. Plus, you're likely to have a fairly engaged set of students, particularly if their employers are footing the tuition (and getting regular progress reports on how their workers are performing in class). For a look at what it takes?and what it's like?to be an Internet prof, Newsweek explored how one new online university is building its faculty. The school is UNext.com, based in the tony Chicago suburb of Deerfield, Ill. UNext, which will begin offering courses this summer, will start out by teaching graduate business classes to employees of major companies. Within a year or two, individuals also will be able to sign up, and the curriculum will expand to all sorts of non-biz disciplines. UNext is actually a company, but its pedigrees are considerable: the investors include former junk-bond king (and now passionate education advocate) Michael Milken as well as Larry Ellison of Oracle, the big software outfit; the faculty includes three Nobel laureates; and the list of elite universities that are providing course materials includes the University of Chicago, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, the London School of Economics and Stanford. Edwin Eisendrath, a top UNext executive, reels off a long list of attributes that he wants in his online instructors. "They need to create a context that's supportive, guiding, encouraging, motivational and also gives students the sense of belonging to a university," he says. "Basically we're looking for people with content knowledge who can teach via distance." He's also looking for people who'll really do the work. During UNext's formative period?way back in 1998?Eisendrath and others at the company did their oppo research by taking courses from other online universities. Eisendrath, who was taking a course from one of the best-known Internet schools, began to suspect that nobody was really reading the homework he submitted. So he staged a little test. He translated his weekly work into Klingon, the garbled language of Star Trek, and submitted the gibberish to his professor. Sure enough, he earned a passing grade. Eisendrath tells the Klingon story to newcomers being trained in the more demanding ways of UNext. The job, he says, should be far more satisfying than working as a graduate assistant at a brick-and-mortar university. "For starters," says Eisendrath, "if you teach for UNext, you wouldn't feel like you were just beavering away for some research professor. The class is yours to teach." The material, however, wouldn't be yours. UNext has 150 education and info-tech experts who are building its courses from scratch, using materials culled from world-class professors at its five partner universities. That group of professors in effect constitutes one of UNext's two faculties. The other consists of part-time instructors who can live anywhere they choose, and who actually teach the students. Being hired less for research scholarship than for teaching ability won't appeal to everyone. But for those who really do want to share knowledge with students, the online game may be a good one. Here's a clue to UNext's thinking: Eisendrath wants his staff to listen carefully to what job candidates discuss during their interviews. Do they seem focused on their own achievements? Or do they spend more time talking about students and how to help them learn? "This job isn't about attracting research money," Eisendrath says. "We need people who can help students, who can write well, who can project an engaging p ersonality." The ideal UNext instructor is someone 30 or older who has spent enough time in the real world to know how it connects to academic subjects. All must have a master's degree at a bare minimum; a doctorate is, of course, even better. Alan Drimmer, who hires instructors, says pay rates depend largely on workload, but applicants can figure on earning at least 90 percent of what adjunct professors get for classroom teaching at top-flight universities. A rough estimate of how that works out: if you spend 10 to 15 hours a week teaching one course for 12 weeks, you'll earn about $3,000. Four courses a year means $12,000. Unless, of course, you're better than average, in which case UNext will do something that almost no other school will do: pay you a bonus! So far, the company has hired 66 instructors across the United States. Many now teach at the college or graduate level; some work in the private sector, often in fields like finance. Once courses are up and running this summer, each will be expected to check in on his or her class of 25 or so students at least once a day, six days a week. Eisendrath expects the heaviest workloads to come on Mondays and Tuesdays as instructors grade the homework, or "deliverables," that students submit by e-mail over the weekend. Stephanie Woodson, who manages the instructors, has a feel for the challenges they'll face. One is the fact that students may be scattered around the globe, which means they're often working in different time zones. That won't keep an instructor from meeting UNext's goal of turning around each student's work in less than 24 hours. But it will hamper some efforts for students to collaborate on projects if they try to do so in real time. Another potential problem: instructors will have to pay careful attention to the tone of their communiques with students. As anyone who's ever read e-mail knows, it can be hard to discern whether the sender of a sentence like, "Are you still having trouble?" is caring, or impatient. Because it uses a style of instruction called "problem-based learning," UNext isn't looking for teachers who like to pontificate. Students will learn not by reading (or viewing) lectures, because UNnext courses don't have any. Instead, instructors help students work through elaborate problems by hel ping them understand course materials that appear both on the screen and in a textbook. Students discuss the problems among themselves in "threaded discussions," essentially bulletin boards in which comments are arranged by topic. A look at the discussion in one course shows an instructor who's carefully hanging back?attentive, but unwilling to give the students an easy answer. As the students thrash through the problem, the instructor jumps in with comments like, "Bob is onto something"?a sentence that, in context, sends the students off in a new and more promising direction. That's indicative of a plus to teaching online: if you're creative, you can find all sorts of new ways of helping students. Jack Gould, formerly dean of the graduate business school at the University of Chicago and now UNext's top academic officer, says he expects students themselves to devise clever new ways of collaborating, just as employees at countless companies have figured out e-mail shortcuts to speed up and simplify communications. But Gould's instructors, too, will help find new ways of teaching. Lisa Metros, a finance professional, spent part of the winter guiding 15 far-flung IBM execs through a pilot business course at UNext, and found herself grappling with a few students who weren't progressing as fast as the others. Metros tried asking her quickest students to work directly with her slowest; that's a proven technique in the classroom, but would it work on the Web with students who barely knew one another? The upshot: the slower students caught on quickly?and formed deep bonds with their colle agues. Metros was a bit surprised?but also satisfied that she'd found a new trick for teaching online. One final bonus: UNext's instructors also have the unusual knowledge that they're teaching courses which have been lab-tested with real students acting as guinea pigs. UNext has an elaborate testing facility in which its learning specialists watch students work through its online courses; if the students seem to be struggling at certain points, the course is then revised to make it more navigable. In fact, a couple of hours into each new course, a UNext employee interrupts the guinea pigs to ask a pointed question: based on what you've seen so far, can you tell me what this course is about? Imagine the howls from the Faculty Club if anybody asked that at a brick-and-mortar university. © 2000 Newsweek, Inc.
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