Virtual Campuses
Written by Christopher Prawdzik
MAE 2010 Volume: 5 Issue: 1 (February)
WHY ARE MORE AND MORE SERVICEMEMBERS
PURSUING EDUCATION ONLINE?
It’s not as cryptic as it sounds. These e-mails come from military personnel who, while completing and participating in a mission overseas, are also continuing their education, participating in University of Phoenix degree programs right alongside their military experience.
In another time, advanced education opportunities could be somewhat limited for military personnel. Arranging class attendance around military schedules is difficult enough. Add a few deployments and base changes every three or so years and an individual would never complete a degree program before moving on.
It’s not that way anymore, though. Thanks to a burgeoning Internet, software programs, remote teaching modalities and an increasing number of educational options, military student are now churning out bachelor’s and advanced degrees in conjunction with a military career, better preparing most for careers after the military, armed with the education and skills needed to take the next step in life.
MAKING IT WORK
Located near Fort Bliss, Texas, Janowski’s two campuses are just two of more than 100 University of Phoenix campuses across the country. Fort Bliss personnel, she said, are free to take classes in person at one of the university’s campuses, but they now have many more options.
“Let’s say they go and get orders and get called up— they can transfer to the online modality,” she said. “That’s the beauty of the setup … the student who is a soldier can continue on with his or her education while overseas.”
For University of Phoenix, the undergraduate classes last just five weeks, with graduate classes lasting six weeks. The class and student can follow each other. “They can time the transfer to work with their orders,” Janowski added. “And it’s the same degree program, the same degree series that they would need to take, so if they were doing, for instance, a bachelor’s degree in business administration at a ground campus … they would have the course sequence [when they transfer].”
And if a troop returns to a location such as Fort Bliss and wants to transfer back from the online experience to a brick and mortar classroom system, it’s up to them. “It depends on what the student wants and how they learn the best,” she said. “We want to make sure we’re getting the right student in the right modality at the right time.” It’s a flexibility, Janowski said, that just wasn’t there before.
But the flexibility of an online or virtual classroom environment doesn’t diminish the impact or learning experience for an individual. In some cases, the experience is more intense. For instance, with an online course, an individual can’t just go online one day a week. It requires sometimes daily participation in online discussions.
Tom Peterman, vice president for distance learning at Park University, agrees. Park University, founded in 1875, has 43 campuses across the country, but also has a heavy online presence. Peterman said the school has done some virtual classroom research, and in the mid 2000s, the university received feedback from about 80,000 students. About 90 percent of the respondents said they worked “as hard or harder in an online course as they did [in a] face-to-face course … They just said it was more demanding.”
He said one of the main reasons for this is likely the fact that the computer is always there. “[If] you’re taking a face-to-face course, you’re there Tuesday night, and you walk out of class Tuesday night and you start thinking about it [next] Monday,” he said. “An online course, you have to participate every couple of days, and every time you walk by a computer, it’s calling you.”
The school’s online presence began in the mid-1990s when the president told Peterman that the school needed to look at better technologies to meet the students’ needs. “Ultimately … we homed in on the Internet,” he said. “We determined that it was scalable [and] flexible. It met all the needs that our students had.”
It began with one section, one course and 20 students in 1996, he said. It has grown now to about 10,000 enrollments for each of the school’s five terms each year. The face-to- face courses are also heavily attended. He estimated that about 60 percent of students are online students and 40 percent attend classes at a campus.
SHEER NUMBERS
The number of class offerings online is quite large. “We’ve got between four- and five-hundred courses online,” he said. “And each term we offer six- or seven-hundred sections of those courses.”
That the courses are the same whether online or not, he said, provides flexibility to students, such as those in the military. They can mix and match their online experiences, but the courses appear exactly the same on a transcript.
When discussing online and virtual classroom environments— just as there might be a misconception about difficulty and time involved—Peterman emphasized that, “online courses are not glorified correspondence courses.”
He said another misconception is that drop rates are higher for these courses, but after surveying this, Park found that between 94 and 97 percent of those who pass the “add/drop” period during the first week stay to get a grade at the end of the term.
With a strong relationship to the military, Peterman said a focus on the “nontraditional student—the adult student,” along with eight-week terms and good faculty training has contributed to the success of the institution.
“The students themselves, being adults, non-traditional, being motivated; they’re a different animal,” he said. “You get that staff sergeant who’s been in for 15 years and is [saying] ‘I’m going to retire in five years; I want to get a degree because I’m going out in that real world,’ he’s motivated, she’s motivated to get that thing done.”
With the maturity level of students often higher, along with circumstances such as the fact that individuals are paying for these courses with valuable time, these students are serious. However, the online course isn’t for everyone, according to Bill Stewart, assistant vice president for Excelsior College. “We’re the first to admit it,” he said. But at Excelsior—named one of Military Advanced Education’s top military friendly colleges for the third year— it’s an option that suits the lifestyles of those often on the move and wishing to continue education while serving the country or after their service is complete. Of the online college’s 30,000 students, about 9,000 students are connected to the military.
“We help them decide if this type of a program suits their needs,” Stewart said. “Our [courses] are asynchronistic,” he said. “You don’t have to be online at a particular hour of the day [or] day of the week in order to participate.” He added that there may be a synchronistic component to a course, but presence is often not required at a specific time. “The obvious advantage is, if you are in an employment situation such as the military, when you cannot guarantee that you will be available … you have the flexibility to participate on the off hours,” he said. “You can study at your pace and at your time so that you can indeed be involved in that course.”
Many of Excelsior’s faculty are residents of other institutions or are specialists in their particular fields, Stewart added. This includes criminal law experts from law academies, industry organization leaders and even nuclear educators who also might work at nuclear power facilities. He adds that there are also the traditional history professors, English professors or others who simply are on faculty at other institutions—basically tenured professors who would be adjuncts to Excelsior.
“When we were founded in 1971, we were created by the New York State board of Regents [as] their external degree program,” Stewart said. “And there was a very simple, yet powerful philosophy that we were founded on: Simply stated, ‘What you know is more important than where or how you learned it.’”
LEARNING ASSESSMENT
An important component to this philosophy is Excelsior’s focus on prior learning assessment. “Historically, students would come to us with credit that they had earned at other colleges and universities [or] through their military training,” he said. “We helped evaluate that to determine how best it could be applied towards a degree program they may wish to be in.”
Then Excelsior’s national faculty determined degree criteria—the number of required credits in each discipline in order to receive a degree. According to Ellen Lahr, director of communications at Excelsior, this program was constructed and was suited for a military lifestyle, which helps explain the heavy military enrollment numbers.
“It’s a very big word of mouth operation for us; we have Excelsior college representatives on key military bases throughout the country,” she said. “So, if you’re a member of the military and you’re at, say, Fort Hood, you can go and talk to an Excelsior college representative about an education plan.”
With all the choices places such as Excelsior, Park and the University of Phoenix offer to students, particularly those in the military, choices then move to the technology behind these education solutions that allow students to get the most out of their individual programs.
With a variety of online solutions out there for colleges to provide a virtual environment, reach more students and execute the ever growing number of course choices, “ease of use” is crucial. Park, for example, uses eCollege, which provides a variety of education solutions for the school and others across the country. Founded in 1996, it began as Real Education Inc. and established an online presence at the University of Colorado.
Excelsior utilizes Blackboard, and Stewart said they are looking at their management systems to figure out new upgrades they’d like to make. He said that the software allows students to log onto secure servers to access courses. This allows communication with faculty as well as working with other students no matter their location.
“It would not be uncommon for someone who could be in the Middle East, deployed, to end up in a discussion group with somebody elsewhere in the Middle East, and certainly with their cohorts in the U.S. somewhere,” he said.
Blackboard itself started about 12 years ago to work with higher education, according to Kevin Alansky, senior director of marketing and professional education at Blackboard. And they’ve also worked with the military. “We’ve been working with [Defense Department] institutions and the Army and the like for probably more than 10 years now,” he said. “So the evolution of the product has really grown as more people have experienced it.”
He said that the amount of training in which the military engages and their success with a variety of programs forces Blackboard to also work hard to support these training needs. But as with any system, it’s only as good as those who can actually use it.
“Even early on, we recognized just as a general principle that unless you make software easy to use and you can get rapid adoption of the software and embrace [it], you’re not going to be successful,” Alansky said. “You need professors [and] instructors to embrace this software to really teach the students.” ♦