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Indiana Alumni Magazine

In the age of three-career lives and the Internet, traditional students and classrooms are now accompanied by lifelong learners and...

Learning Online

by Rita Colorito

Two years ago, if Kathy Trier, then an associate professor of sociology at IPFW, had walked by Shelly Gilliland on campus, she wouldn't have recognized her. Even though Gilliland had taken two of Trier's courses, the student and professor had never met. That's because the classes weren't on campus but online. Gilliland, AGS'00, and Trier are just two of a growing number of IU students and professors who interact not in a traditional classroom of blackboards, lecterns, and desks, but in the brave new world of the Internet, desktop computers, and electronic bulletin boards.

In the last six years, online learning has become an increasing reality in America's colleges and universities. IU first began offering online courses in 1995, starting with one course each at IU Bloomington, IU East, and IPFW.

"We already had video classes before that, but students expressed their frustration with the lack of interactivity of those classes," says Deb Conklin, MS'90, director of credit programs for the School of Continuing Education at IPFW. The campus now offers about 25 Internet classes and hopes to soon offer more.

Professors like Trier, comfortable with computers and eager to embrace this new medium of course delivery, developed these early online courses.

"I've gotten to know my online students a lot better than those who take my in-class courses," says Trier, who has met only about 2 percent of her online students.

Although she's taken a new position conducting clinical trials for Biomet Inc., Trier still teaches her online courses as an adjunct professor at IPFW. She says she teaches the same material online as she does on campus.

Online students not only participate more, Trier believes, but they also outperform their on-campus counterparts, primarily because they are older and more mature. "They also know that this is probably the only way for them to get an education, so they are a little more serious," she says.

The online discussions are also archived. "If a student says, 'Why did I get this class participation grade?' I can look back. I don't have the ability to do that on campus," says Trier, who has been working on a comparative analysis of online versus in-class courses for the past three years.

Marrying and having children at a young age, Gilliland thought she could never fit college into her hectic schedule. She took her first class at IPFW in 1985. But working full time while being a mom and a student took its toll, and she postponed college once again. "I thought, 'I'm never going to get done. I'll be 100 before I get my degree,'" Gilliland recalls.

She vowed to return to college before she turned 40. That was four summers ago, and Gilliland stuck to her promise. The second semester after her return, she took Trier's online course Sociology of Poverty. "It was a way to get another three credits, but it was much more flexible," says Gilliland, who works part time as coordinator of IPFW's offsite location in Warsaw and lives in Pierceton, an hour's drive from the Fort Wayne campus. "When I have time, I can get on the Internet versus needing a four-hour chunk of time to go to Fort Wayne and sit in class."

Gilliland, 44, who received her associate degree in May 2000 and is working on her bachelor's, typifies the online student. Most are women, 35 years of age or older, work part or full time, and live outside the immediate campus location. These so-called lifelong learners want a convenient way to get a degree. In the past that meant correspondence or video courses. Now, Internet courses provide an increasingly attractive option, one whose pocketbook demand has grown quickly, spawning a cottage industry of online universities.

THE JONESES ARE DOING IT

Online learning is proliferating at such a rapid pace that many universities are grappling with what this means to the future of education. Distance education is not new to IU. The School of Continuing Studies has a long-standing tradition of videotaped and interactive video courses. Its award-winning correspondence courses have been around for almost a century.

To deal with the demand and concerns, IU created the Office of Distributed Education in 1999 to oversee all forms of distance education, but in particular, education through information technology. Erwin Boschmann, a professor of chemistry at IUPUI, serves as the university's associate vice president for distributed education. His goal is to mainstream distributed education in teaching and learning. IU is embracing online education for several reasons. Quite simply, says Boschmann, "The Joneses are doing it." Some 1,500 colleges and universities now offer online courses or online degrees. MIT recently announced that over the next 10 years it will make all its courses free online, although the MIT degree is not free. If IU doesn't offer online education to students who are at a distance, says Boschmann, some other university will.

"We have to go in that direction," Boschmann says. "The educational environment in this country, maybe worldwide, is really changing. Once there was a feeling that if you go to college for four years, you've got it made for life. In today's environment, learning is really a lifelong experience."

In fact, lifelong learners are replacing the traditional 18- to 22-year-old on-campus student demographic. Traditional students make up less than 20 percent of the worldwide market for college, according to Boschmann.

In addition, corporations, who want their employees to receive just-in-time education, spent $1.1 billion on online training last year. That amount is expected to reach $11 billion by 2003, according to industry analysts.

"We as a university have to be ready to help them design a course that would be helpful to their folks," Boschmann says. "They aren't interested in credits. They are interested in practical information."

IU now offers 193 online courses and six degrees (see box) either entirely online or with minimal on-campus hours required for orientation. Every semester, about 2,000 students enroll for online courses. Approximately 1,500 courses offer some portion online, even if it's just a syllabus. Dozens more Web-based courses are being added each semester. At the end of spring semester, the School of Continuing Studies at IUB added 10 new online courses. It eventually hopes to have all its courses offered online, although not solely online.

THREE SCHOOLS LEAD THE WAY

The schools of education, nursing, and business currently offer the most courses online. With the exception of the South Bend and Northwest campuses, each IU campus offers at least one online course. The ODE is funding the development of 15 online courses at IU Kokomo. This semester IU Southeast unveiled an online course in environmental physics; it uses interactive video as well. "A lot of campuses are ready to go into this," says Boschmann.

The School of Nursing at IUPUI offers about 20 online courses to already registered nurses. About 80 percent of all other courses are Web-enhanced, which means that although the classes are held on campus, the faculty and students are using the tools of the Web to complete the coursework.

The Nursing School draws many of its students from Indiana's contiguous states — Kentucky, Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio — and even overseas, from Malaysia, Europe, and the Pacific. "These courses are accessible and convenient," says Diane Billings, EdD'86, the school's associate dean for teaching, learning, and information resources. Billings is an IUPUI campus representative on the planning advisory committee for the ODE. "We want students to be Information-Age ready," she says. "It's a means as well as an end."

Ann Haddix, ASN'89, a nurse at Riley Hospital in Indianapolis, can be considered an online veteran. She has completed eight graduate courses online through the School of Nursing. Her varying work schedule and family and church commitments make it difficult to take an on-campus class. But she can squeeze in online classes between her shifts and once even did her schoolwork while on vacation in New Orleans.

"I just loaded up the laptop, and as long as I could get Internet access, my work could be completed anywhere," says Haddix. She admits that she originally thought online courses would be similar to correspondence courses. But, she reports, "I have found that online courses follow a definite schedule and a definite semester and involve interaction with others and the instructor."

Lest you worry that health professionals are learning their craft over the Internet, Billings says online courses are didactic in nature. "We aren't teaching them to insert a needle in a patient," says Billings, who has taught four online courses. Because of the need for practical training, the school doesn't offer a degree completely online.

Neither does the School of Education. Indiana requires teachers to earn six college credits every five years to renew their certificates, and most teachers take those classes online. But the school does not award certificates or undergraduate degrees through online coursework. It still requires that students complete their in-classroom teaching component. Although the school's foray into distance education began with video courses in the early 1990s, online courses now outnumber those. Last semester the school offered a dozen video courses, but about 30 online. The bulk of its online courses are taught by the department of language education. Demands on teachers' time have become ever greater, says Larry Mikulecky, making online education necessary.

Mikulecky, who teaches an online course in young adult literature, says he has found more diversity online than on campus. He's had students from inner-city New Jersey to Native American reservations in Colorado, from teachers in Honduras to editors in New York publishing houses. "You would never find that kind of range on campus," he says.

When he first offered his Web-based course, Mikulecky required all students to participate in each online discussion. "We'd have 500 pages to read at the end of the course," says Mikulecky, who now requires that students participate two-thirds of the time. Because students have longer to think and respond, he says, the level of discussion and thought is higher.

HOW IT'S DONE

Usually the first assignment in many online courses requires students to find their way into a chat room or other electronic area and post something to it. That way the professor knows they can navigate online. With an electronic syllabus, students know when all assignments are due. Most online classes are asynchronous, so students can complete the reading on their own. Tests are timed, with a window of 24 to 48 hours to log on. A simple click on a "Done" or "Finished" button, and the test is automatically scored.

ODE serves as a quality control for online courses. "When you put a course on the Web, it's not just a course," says Boschmann. "It's also a statement about what Indiana University is all about. We want to make sure it's a good image that we put out there."

The Office of Distributed Education wants Web-based courses to engage students in three areas: with faculty, with the course material, and with other students. "We want to make sure that no course goes out that is just text or just a talking head," says Boschmann.

For some foreign language classes, where low enrollment cannot justify the expense of the course, Boschmann says online education provides a way to increase enrollment and keep the course. In one joint project, IU and other Big Ten universities are exploring pooling their resources to offer online some of the less common African languages, like Twi or Zulu.

Online learning benefits people who don't have a type A personality. Trier tells the story of two nontraditional women students she'd had in her upper-level classes. Both always performed well, but only one spoke up. The other student was fairly shy.

"Whenever I'd ask her a question in class, she'd turn bright red and struggle for the words to answer," Trier says.

When both women signed up for one of her online courses, the professor noticed a profound difference. The online experience changed how the students participated. "The one who never spoke up did extremely well online," Trier reports. "Online she was engaged. The other student did well, but later on she said she preferred the interaction in the classroom."

The most common criticism of online courses is the lack of face-to-face interaction. "I just have not sensed the degree of collegiality and intimacy that my undergraduate nursing class developed," Haddix says. And she reports she doesn't feel the close connection to IU she experienced as an undergraduate taking classes on the IUPUI campus a little more than a decade ago.

To address this isolation, some online professors require classes to meet in person once or twice during the semester. Professor Trier encourages her students to develop their own Web pages, with photos and biographical data, so they can get to know one another in the virtual environment.

Technology itself can sometimes be a problem. Gilliland says she was "pretty panicked" about her first online class, even though she considered herself technologically literate. She recalls her shaky start: "I left for a weekend thinking I had turned in my assignment in plenty of time and got home to find out that the professor couldn't open the document." But, she says, the professor understood.

Online professors expect technical glitches, and IU offers a 24-hour help desk, reachable by e-mail or telephone, to troubleshoot problems. Students can also handle most of their course transactions, like registering or buying books, from home. IUB has a part-time librarian who helps online students with materials they need.

IPFW offers online tutoring in math and English, an online writing center, and résumé development. To acquaint students new to this form of learning, its distance-learning Web page offers motivational tips and information on time management and what to expect from an online course. IPFW doesn't yet offer a fully online degree, but it is seeking approval to grant an associate degree in business via distance learning. Gilliland was concerned when the professor assigned a group project. She remembered bad experiences with such in-class projects, when groups couldn't agree on a time to meet or one person ended up doing all the work. She was surprised to find the group project working more smoothly over the Internet. "We could use the chat room to talk if we wanted to or needed to," she says. "In all of my Internet classes, we did a group project, and we never met face to face."

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE

Two years after Gilliland first took Trier's online Sociology of Poverty class, the two finally met. Trier asked Gilliland to become her online teaching assistant. With experience on both sides of the computer screen, Gilliland has observed some differences between her online and on-campus classes.

"In a classroom of 30 or more, you can be anonymous. In a lot of classes, a lot of lectures, there is no Q and A. It's strictly lecture," Gilliland says. "Online you can't just sit there. If you just sit there, you are not going to get your chat points so your grade is going to suffer."

"In an on-campus class, typically three-fourths of the students don't talk in class," says Trier. "Online, everybody talks."

Online courses may also be smaller. While her on-campuses courses are capped at 40 students, Trier limits her online courses to 25 to 28 because of the time required for the live chat sessions. She limits the chats to six to eight students per session.

"It's like having a mini class within a class," she says.

"The matter of engagement is just a phenomenal pedagogical transaction that's taking place here," says Boschmann enthusiastically. "We've often approached learning as a matter of going to a large classroom where you sit with hundreds of other students and take notes from the faculty member.

"Online is a huge change. The faculty member is invisible. It's a 'force-behind-the-curtain' kind of thing. And that is a good change." "We are in an information society. People who know how to access and apply information benefit," says Conklin. "It's no longer just an advantage. It's a necessity."

Who knows? In five or 10 years, Conklin muses, "Maybe we won't be talking about this as online education. It will just be part of our learning environment."

Rita Colorito is assistant editor and advertising manager for the Indiana Alumni Magazine. She has yet to take an online course.

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