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Virtual Classrooms Booming
School without walls
High-tech ways of connecting students and teachers
Virtual classroom tested 20 percent better
Student interaction
As a working mother of a teenage son, Lynn Greco has dabbled in some of the most cutting-edge changes in the way higher education is delivered to students.
An employee of a local manufacturing plant, where the company provides tuition reimbursement, Greco worked full-time and earned her bachelor's degree in marketing through a weekend program at a community college. She was definitely not what you might call a 'traditional' student.
Then she went global on the information superhighway.
Ms Greco said: "I was approaching my 40th birthday, I though to myself, 'you've got to do it now girl, do it before the new millenium'." Ms Greco, of Wisconsin, enrolled in a master's level pilot program for distance learning.
School without walls
"It's called a school without walls, a virtual school," Ms Greco said.
The master's level course is being run through the Open International University in England. "Most of the course is done on the Internet, but we have done video conferencing," Ms Greco said. The instructor lives in Scotland and the eight-credit course takes six months to complete. At the end of the semester next spring, Ms Greco will travel with other students to Scotland to meet their instructor face-to-face.
For someone who didn't immediately go to college after high school, Ms Greco has taken advantage of some new trends in making higher education accessible to the public.
She's not alone. The virtual university is seeing a mammoth rise in enrollment rates. Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada has seen its online enrollment figures leap. Its online MBA program alone rose fifteen-fold to 957 since it was launched in 1994, making it Canada's largest executive MBA program bar none.
This new type of university is a virtual university -- a "cyber" university that is not bound by its location because it doesn't have a campus in the physical sense. By using the latest technology (along with some more traditional methods, such as mail service), cyber universities are able to bring classes to you, regardless of where you are.
The courses offered through distance education courses are designed and developed to allow learning to take place when you and your professor are located miles, even thousands of miles, apart. There are as many definitions of distance education as there are ways of "doing" distance education, but at the heart of it, distance education is education that takes place when space or time separates you and the teacher.
High-tech ways of connecting students and teachers
The gap between you is bridged through the help of technology or more traditional methods, such as the postal service. Some high-tech ways of connecting students and teachers include e-mail, the World Wide Web, closed-circuit cable television, video and audio tapes, videoconferencing, satellite broadcasts, and voice mail.
For thousands of students around the world, online learning is a match made in cyberspace. From courses in fly-fishing or auto mechanics to a degree program from MIT, the offerings are boundless. Worldwide, more than 25,000 courses are now available entirely online - and that figure is growing on a daily basis.
Thousands more combine an Internet component with brief stints on campus. According to Massachusetts based International Data Corp., about 15 percent of all postsecondary students - or 2.2 millions people - will be enrolled in online courses by 2002 in the US alone, compared with 5 percent in 1998.
Forty percent of those pursuing degrees in the US are over the age of 40. Their children are part of a parallel shift that is transforming the way teaching takes place in elementary and secondary schools.
Universities are scrambling to get online. Last year, Britain's Oxford University launched its first online offering, a two-year program in computer science. Meanwhile, American universities, many blessed with generous backers, are well positioned to capitalize on the boom. The Harvard School of Public Health went online last autumn with a master's program. Stanford, Columbia and others are joining forces to help create course materials for UNext.com.
The University of Phoenix is among the more aggressive players with 9,000 of their 56,000 students online. The cyber university, Western Governors University, counting Microsoft and IBM among its investors, is an alliance of 17 states and Guam.
Virtual classroom tested 20 percent better
A surprising new study at the California State University at Northridge shows that students learning in a virtual classroom tested 20 percent better across the board than their counterparts who learned in a traditional classroom.
In his applied statistics course last year, Jerald Schutte, a professor at Northridge, randomly selected half of his students to be taught through traditional in-class lectures and pen-and-paper homework assignments while the rest learned through text posted online, email and newsgroups, real-time chat with their classmates, and electronic homework assignments.
The students in the virtual-learning group were given two in-class lectures to explain the technology they would be using and then came to class again only for the midterm and the final exam.
There were no statistically significant differences between the sex, age, computer experience, or attitude toward the subject material of the two groups, Schutte said. Both were given identical tests that they took under the same conditions.
Schutte said, "there is a very subtle thing going on here. A classroom can be inhibiting, intimidating. [In the classroom] you think you are the only person who doesn't know the answer, so you don't talk. The very way classrooms are set up, with everyone facing forward, deters interaction."
Student interaction
In fact, according to the study, students in the virtual class spent about
50 percent more time working with each other than the people in the traditional
classroom. And while the report acknowledges that the inability to talk
to the professor was the cause of this interaction, the results show that
the collaboration "manifests itself in better test score" as students
formed study groups to "pick up the slack of not having a real classroom."
Other educational studies have discovered similar benefits to online student
collaboration.
"It is an effort to engage," said Jeff Stanzler, who directs a University
of Michigan program that encourages high school students to share their
poetry online. "Students need to have a certain mindset. This different
than regular lessons and schools. They are encouraged to respond and work
together and put those demands a little more front and center than they
can in a classroom."
Online teaching won't solve all educational problems, however. Although
the results of his study support much of the hype surrounding its future,
Schutte points out that virtual learning may have its limits. "You must
distinguish between the form and the content," he said. Virtual learning
"may only be useful in the abstract, only for certain kinds of classes,"
he added.
© Copyright 2001. Galt Western Personnel Ltd.
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