College educators predict tremendous growth in online courses
By GREG KLINE
News-Gazette Staff Writer

   When Thomas Ramage took his job as head of distance education and virtual learning at Parkland College in 1998, the Champaign community college had 12 courses on the Internet.
   This semester, Parkland has 54 courses online and 723 students enrolled, he said.
   Parkland's experience is by no means unique. The online program at Lake Land College in Mattoon has grown from 75 credit hours in 1998 to 1,021 and from 50 students to 500, said Bruce Scism, Lake Land's director of virtual learning.
   Yet he and Ramage don't think the schools are anywhere near the limits of the potential demand for Internet courses.
   Educators and other experts don't see the Internet and the advent of the virtual classroom spelling doom for the traditional brick-and-mortar campus as the new century opens. But the situation does present colleges and universities with challenges, and it is likely to change them in some significant ways, they agree.
   "I think the campus will be here, and I think some students will be here," said Nicholas Burbules, a University of Illinois educational policy studies professor who worked on a UI study of the issue.
   Burbules thinks it's even likely the Urbana-Champaign campus still will be playing host to 30,000-plus students 50 years from now.
   But they're almost guaranteed to be a much smaller percentage of the total number enrolled in UI programs, he said.
   Already, there's a Virtual Illinois Campus on the Internet, funded by the state and housed at the UI, that points students to the online offerings of colleges and universities throughout Illinois.
   The UI's various schools and departments offer Internet courses that run the gamut from "Japanese Tea Ceremony and Zen Aesthetics" to several shades of engineering.
   The UI School of Library and Information Science's online master's program, which started with 31 students in 1996 as one of the earliest Internet degrees to be offered, has about 115 students from 37 of the 50 states, near its target limit of 120, Associate Dean Linda Smith said.
   The UI Computer Science Department's Internet master's program has 132, up from two in 1998. More than 100 of the students are in India.
   The consensus is that this is only a start.
   "It's a huge growth market," said Burks Oakley, a former UI electrical engineering professor who dabbled early in computerizing his courses and has ended up spearheading the university's online efforts.
   The market is growing, in part, as a result of widely available Internet access and relatively inexpensive computers, which have created a new avenue for people to tap educational resources, Oakley and others said.
   As computers and Internet access get faster, and technology such as real-time video conferencing becomes available on a mass basis, the trend is only likely to increase.
   The growing market also reflects an economy in which workers find themselves increasingly in need of retraining and re-retraining to retain a job, advance their careers, or move to different positions.
   "We're seeing people constantly needing new skills, new knowledge," Oakley said.
   "It's not simply shifting how we teach 18- to 25-year-olds so that they don't come to campus," he said. "I don't think that's true at all. We're seeing many more people become lifelong learners. The market for higher education is expanding."
   For one thing, there's more to going to college than going to class. Some demand for the campus experience – for the cheering crowds at the Assembly Hall, the guzzling throngs at Kam's, the concerts at Krannert, the personal interaction with world-renowned researchers – is likely to remain.
   "You've got to think about the college campus experience as much broader than just the courses they take," said Paul Thurston, a UI professor who taught his first class online last fall.
   Still, institutions with less of a campus tradition than a UI or other Big Ten schools, like a Harvard or a Stanford, may suffer declines in on-campus enrollment, some experts believe.
   But at this point, the students on the virtual campuses at the UI and Parkland are largely folks who aren't able to be on campus anyway. They're older; they have jobs, families and commitments. They can't drop real life to add college.
   "For many of our students, they had no other way to get this degree," Smith said of the library school's master's program. "They are people who certainly could not pursue a degree at Illinois."
   At Parkland, one recent student worked on a cruise ship and downloaded her course work when she came to port every three days, Ramage said. The college has students in Japan and Britain and St. Louis, Pennsylvania, Idaho and California.
   "The students who live out of state, we would not see," Ramage said. "Nobody's going to drive here from Idaho."
   The challenges this presents include finding the best ways to offer students the same quality education online as on campus and to fashion course work that takes advantage of the rich, multifaceted communications medium the Internet represents.
   "You can put a textbook up on the Net and what you'll have is a textbook on the Net," said Sylvia Manning, who headed up Internet education efforts at the UI before becoming interim chancellor of its Chicago campus. "And it might be a superb textbook. But it isn't a breakthrough, and it isn't instruction."
   Oakley, who himself is taking an online class from the UI Springfield this semester, has been impressed with what his instructor does, from streaming audio lectures with Powerpoint slides to creating a virtual student lounge where class members can share news and jokes, just as they might in the hallways on campus.
   Nor is it only new methods of teaching online that faculty members are being pressed to consider.
   Daniel Reed, head of the UI Computer Science Department, said computer and Internet-savvy on-campus students want similar online resources.
   Reed, in an article last fall for the UI's Engineering Outlook magazine, envisioned a campus in the not-too-distant future wired to the hilt, where students view lectures, receive assignments, gather information, collaborate on a group project and turn it in, all over a computer network, probably wirelessly.
   Already, many on-campus courses at the UI have an online component, and some mix on-campus and online students in electronic study groups and group projects.
   In that kind of environment, Reed said, instructors need to find ways to make class sessions a "value-added" experience just to keep students coming.
   Beyond such operational questions, the virtual campus also raises questions that go to the heart of the concept of the university, public universities in particular, Burbules and others note.
   The issues range from affordable access; to competing with each other and with commercial education providers on the Net; to accommodating non-traditional students whose outlook on education is more consumer-oriented; to faculty ownership of class materials, the tenure system and academic freedom.
   "This is a very early stage in a new endeavor," Manning said. "It's very transitional. But it's very exciting."
   And while virtual campuses may leave the Ivy-covered halls standing, they're unlikely to leave the institutions unchanged.

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