PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 23, No. 15, March 4, 2004

Students benefit from online distance-learning options

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@uiuc.edu

Photo by Bill Wiegand Distance learning Online learning courses’ threaded discussions are ideally suited for developing students’ critical thinking skills and fostering class participation, say Burks Oakley II (right), U of I Online director and associate vice president, and Jeff Harmon, UI online marketing director.

At first glance, Sonya Chappell and Daniel Jacobsohn might not seem like typical college students: They have full-time jobs, children, and at ages 42 and 31, respectively, do not fall into the demographic that is often referred to as “college age.”

But on the “virtual” campus of U of I Online, Chappell and Jacobsohn indeed epitomize typical students: adults age 30 or older seeking professional development or a career change who are precluded from attending traditional classes by geography, work or family responsibilities.

U of I Online courses enable Chappell, a staff secretary at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, to earn her bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and sciences, which she hopes to obtain this spring, nearly 15 years after she first began taking college classes.

U of I Online offers students about 400 different courses, including four complete bachelor’s degree programs, 14 master’s degree programs, a doctorate in pharmacy and numerous continuing education courses and certificate programs.

Some of the certificate and degree-granting programs are delivered entirely online, such as those offered by the College of Engineering as well as the master’s degree in global human resource development and community college teaching offered by the department of human resource education.

Other curricula, such as the master’s degree offered by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, require students to visit the Urbana campus for orientation or other brief face-to-face sessions with their classmates and instructors.

Online classes are typically delivered by way of course management software such as Blackboard and WebCT, which is known as “Illinois Compass” on the Urbana campus. The academic units on campus design their own courses, choose the instructional media to deliver them and provide technical support for their students.

Classes may meet “virtually” on designated days and times using streaming media connections to broadcast instructors’ lectures and guest speakers’ presentations. Text-chat features allow students to ask questions of their instructors during class and even “whisper” private messages to one another, just as they might in a regular classroom.

At other times, students can log on at their leisure to view any archived lectures, assigned readings or other course materials. Using forums such as bulletin boards and text chat, students can discuss various concepts, post questions for instructors or teaching assistants and collaborate on team-based projects with colleagues hundreds or thousands of miles away. And just like their classroom-based peers, online students also have access to university resources such as the library and tuition waivers, if they are university employees.

Photo by Bill Wiegand Back to school Sonya Chappell, a staff secretary at the Beckman Institute for Science and Technology, hopes to complete an undergraduate degree in liberal arts and sciences through U of I Online this semester and begin graduate study in the School of Social Work this summer.

Students in the College of Engineering’s online master’s degree programs take exams that are proctored by officials in students’ workplaces or local areas, while students in the GHRD curricula earn their grades through individual and group projects.

Burks Oakley II, associate vice president, has universitywide oversight of U of I Online, and along with Jeff Harmon, director of marketing, helps the academic units launch, fund and market their programs. Online curricula are subject to a rigorous review and approval process at the departmental and college levels in addition to the Graduate College and the Office of Continuing Education. The Committee on Extended Education and External Degrees, the preliminary evaluative body, also re-evaluates programs at five-year intervals.

“We wanted to make sure that the degrees people got online (conveyed) the same quality and accreditation they would get if they were here on campus,” said Laura Miller, interim coordinator of online programs, about the College of Engineering’s programs. To that end, the college records and digitizes faculty members’ classroom-based lectures, then streams them over the Internet to its distance-education students.

Since its inception in 1998, Engineering Online has conferred 117 degrees; it has also awarded 15 certificates since implementing its certificate program in 2001.

“Students in the programs usually cannot come to campus, so they’re very excited about the opportunity to get a degree from a top-ranked institution without actually having to be here,” Miller said. “They really like being able to watch their lecture at 2 a.m. if need be. The feedback that I’m getting is that the courses they’ve taken online meet or beat the courses they’ve taken on campus in terms of quality.”

Chappell, who has earned nearly as many credits online as in classrooms, said that she has learned much more in her U of I Online classes because they demand more initiative.
“You have to really sit down and read the material yourself and take it in and consider what kind of notes you want to take,” Chappell said. “You actually have to apply yourself twice as hard. There’s a lot more writing. And there’s no way around it: You just have to force yourself to do what you need to do in order to get through.”

Students who are accustomed to being passive learners sometimes find the autonomy of online learning very challenging, Oakley said.

“It’s a very different way of learning because students work together to construct knowledge rather than listen to the professor tell them what they need to know,” Oakley said.

Jacobsohn, who is the webmaster at Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES), took an online course on designing universally accessible Web resources for professional development during the fall semester. He said that he especially enjoyed the breadth of experience and perspectives that classmates working in other sectors and geographic locations brought to the discussions.

According to Oakley, many people contend that the level of discourse in Web classes is heightened because threaded discussions foster universal participation as well as contemplation.
“People can think and reflect on what was said. They might go walk the dog, they might go shopping, and then come home and carefully compose something over 15 minutes that is much more than they would ever say in the classroom,” Oakley said.

Online teaching also offers faculty members distinct challenges and opportunities, prompting them to re-examine their roles as teachers, their approaches to courses and the optimal usage of available media and synchronous sessions.

“I’d been teaching for 20 years in the classroom, so in some respects it was like being a novice teacher,” said Linda Smith, associate dean in the library school, about her transition to online teaching in 1996 when the college implemented the Library Experimental Education Program (LEEP), its online master’s degree. It was the first online degree to be offered on campus.
After seeing how techniques such as threaded discussion forums enhance online learning, faculty members often incorporate them into their conventional classes as well, Smith said.
U of I Online includes an award-winning faculty development program that confers a master online teacher certificate to faculty members, promoting their exploration of online learning from a student perspective and their study of instructional techniques and course design.

Jon Gunderson, coordinator of assistive communication and information technology in the Division of Rehabilitation-Education Services, said that a unique challenge facing online instructors is connecting with their students and gauging their level of comprehension – or confusion – without the direct, immediate feedback students often provide in the classroom.

Students may have to exert more effort to ask questions through their keyboards than with their voices, said Gunderson, who is developing Web-based evaluative tools for his course so that students can submit feedback after every lesson.

Despite the challenges of online learning, student retention in the programs is high – 98 percent in the library school’s master’s program and 87 percent overall for the College of Engineering’s programs, for example – perhaps, in part, because mature students have strong personal and professional incentives and clear educational objectives, said Scott Johnson, head of the department of human resource education.

And while some educators are skeptical as to whether online learners develop strong ties with their schools, Smith has few doubts.

A recent alumnus of LEEP initiated the establishment of an endowment and solicited donations from the library school’s 300 or so online alumni to provide scholarships for future generations of LEEP students. The program will probably begin this fall, Smith said.

“It may only help someone pay for part of the program, but I think it’s symbolic of the connection these students and graduates feel to the school,” Smith said.

Back to Index