Virtual Classrooms, Real Education

BY LEO SHKLOVSKII

College online? The Internet's next big conquest may just be the schools. The possibility of getting a digital diploma without ever setting foot in a classroom is not at all remote. In fact, ever since 1996, several hundred students a year receive their degrees in technology, business, and management from the University of Phoenix without ever taking a trip to the lecture hall. They earned their sheepskins through taking courses exclusively online.

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Although it's still controversial whether these virtual classrooms are mere diploma-crunching machines or waves of the future, four top-notch universities are jumping on the bandwagon and collaborating to create Internet-based distance education programs to expand their offerings. Yale has thrown its hat into the ring with its involvement in the University Alliance for Life-Long Learning.

This distance learning alliance between Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Oxford universities is geared exclusively toward alumni who wish to expand their knowledge and has been in development for several months. Each of the four institutions has committed $3 million to help start the program, which hopes to create courses that students of the four schools can take to continue their education after they’ve graduated.

The Association of Yale Alumni already provides several non-credit courses with interactive web content to Yale alumni, but the Alliance program seeks to do this on a much larger scale. When fully operational it will provide a multimedia experience in a variety of topics to any alumni would appreciate. The "virtual classroom" would also be supplemented with chat rooms and email contacts to allow discussion and interaction.

The Alliance would not make its own classes, choosing instead to contract out the actual course curricula to the member universities and their faculties. Rather than course planning, the Alliance focuses on the technical innovations needed to create web-based classrooms. While the necessary technology already exists, it needs to be organized and crafted into an effective tool to combine the various movies, sound clips, or outside documents that contribute to the understanding of the topic being taught.

This variety of materials is what makes a web-based system dramatically different from the traditional learn-by-mail programs. While a traditional distance learning class may, for example, introduces a student to Shubert’s "Winterreise", an online course allows the him hear the piece by the click of the mouse. A perfect example of is the Perseus project, an international database classical literature in English translation.

A trial run at Pepperdine University revealed a number of significant benefits to the so-called "e-learning." The students in the program did not to enroll for a class at a particular location. The flexibility saved older, working students the inconvenience of long commutes to the campus. The Internet also allowed them to escape the time boundaries that library hours had traditionally imposed on their research. The web gave students access to materials that would have otherwise been difficult to obtain in the real world. An online chat room and a bulletin board allowed students to discuss their assignments without the peer pressure that can often prove overwhelming.

The common section size of 20 students proved much too large to make an effective chat room conversation. Students were often unable to keep track of the many conversations that were circulating around the chat room. Sections were broken up into eight-person groups that became much more productive.

Even with good discussion sections problems still arise. Jacque Farber (BR ’03) struggled through an Internet math course offered by the University of Illinois despite the fact that several people in her school were enrolled in the same course. "With basic sciences," she said, "you just need someone to draw things out for you," reflecting the notion that real interaction with a professor is crucial in learning a science.

The creators of the Alliance have recognized this fact and, according to Georgia Nugent, Princeton's associate provost, the Alliance will be focusing on "a liberal arts education—education in the professional areas or certification programs."

Because of the exciting prospect of an online education system and because, according to Goldman Sachs, online education will generate over $1.1 billion in revenue by 2002, many top-notch universities in the U.S. are creating similar programs. A collaboration between UC Berkeley, Pennsylvania State, the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin intends to provide educational opportunities to those who have challenges accessing education. Harvard, which has for now opted out of the Alliance, has let its business school enter a partnership with Stanford in order to develop an Internet-based distance education program teaching management skills. The University of Maryland University College in a partnership with Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany is, ironically, offering a Master of Distance Education degree through a completely Internet-based program.

The rise of Internet-based distance education is by no means limited to the US.

The UK has committed itself to creating nationwide Internet distance learning by 2005. Test trials in small towns across the UK are being implemented before the program is extended on a larger scale. One of the major goals of Canada’s second-generation high speed Internet, CA*net 3, is to facilitate medical distance learning. This backbone, comparable to the Internet2 (Abilene) project in the US, will be heavily used to transfer large medical files between universities to teach medical students at various locations in Canada.

The innovations needed to make Internet education also carry over into the real world classroom. While a chat room may not make sense in a setting where the students see each other every day, a class bulletin board is a great way for the class to communicate. The time is not quite upon us when college can be replaced with a virtual reality classroom, but web-based education is definitely acquiring an important role in teaching. While it is not yet possible to go through college in your slippers, you can at least give yourself another excuse to sleep in – just grab the lecture notes from the website.

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