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Plugging in to the Electronic Campus

Long-distance learning isn't going to put Harvard out of business.
But computer-linked classes are spreading, for better or worse.

This article by Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe appeared on page 20 of the Globe's Sunday Magazine on April 11, 1999. The following is reprinted with permission from the Boston Globe.

The television camera is Leonard Evenchik's most demanding pupil. It sits perched between two rows of seats in Evenchik's classroom, a mini-amphitheater carved into the foundation of Harvard University's Science Center. About 80 people sit here, too, most of them middle-aged professionals at the end of a hard day's work and a tough drive through Cambridge traffic. They, or their companies, have paid $1,200 to benefit from Evenchik's two decades of experience in computer networking and his 10 years as an instructor at the Harvard Extension School. They flinch and whisper, glance around the room, signal their understanding or their boredom with their eyes.

Dr. Joseph Marks (left) instructor of CSCI E-207 Theoory of Computation, taught one of five leading-edge computer science courses over the internet last year.

But the camera just sits there, its single blank eye fixed on Evenchik. And so the usual habits of the college lecturer are denied him. There will be no strolling back and forth across the academic stage, coating the blackboard with abstruse graphs and equations. Instead, he's rooted to the left side of the room, within range of a wall-mounted floodlight and the long black lens.

Evenchik gets two hours a week with his students and isn't inclined to waste any of it. He wraps up the usual classroom preliminaries about homework and class projects and has just begun the evening's discussion of internet protocols when a door opens just to his right.

"Stop!" says a slender blond woman. She strides into the lecture hall, her heels clicking against the bare concrete, and marches over to the camera. It's a problem with the sound--some mysterious, unbridged gap between the wireless mike on Evenchik's lapel and the audio input of the videotape recorder. The students had heard the beginnings of a lucid explanation of 32-bit network addresses, but the sound woman had heard nothing, and so everything halts until some loose wire is plugged in.

A couple of minutes later, the sound woman signals that all is well. Evenchik looks past the lights, out into the classroom and into the dark, blank eye of the camera. "Good evening," he says, as if everyone had just arrived. "This is the ninth lecture in the course on communication protocols."

Miles away and days later, Gary Kratkiewicz puts aside his work, starts his computer's Web browser, and goes to school. Kratkiewicz knows nothing of the loose wire or of the five-minute class delay. He'll never meet over coffee with his fellow students after the lecture. For that matter, he can't pop down for a quick after-class chat with Evenchik, who for Kratkiewicz is just a business-card-sized image on a computer screen and a low-fidelity voice with a trace of classroom echo to it.

But there are compensations. Kratkiewicz can stand and stretch whenever he wants to, stroll over to the window and gaze out at the wintry woodland outside the Cambridge office of GTE Internetworking. He can even stop to write the software he's being paid to write. And he can discuss the class with his wife and fellow student, Kendra, whose Harvard classroom is a beige cubicle at Eastman Software in Billerica, adorned with taped-up art prints and the primitive scrawls of the Kratkiewiczes' 5-year-old daughter.

Gary and Kendra, and 11 other students scattered from Pennsylvania to Sweden, are part of an experiment that delivers Harvard Extension School classes over the Internet. Evenchik's words, his gestures, the notes he projects onto the classroom wall--they've all been magnetically freeze-dried, ready to be reconstituted whenever these remote students have time to study.

It's called "distance learning"--college education delivered over the Internet to wherever the student wants it. That counts for a lot with the Kratkiewiczes, who live in Billerica, 30 miles from the Harvard campus, and have two young children.

Before the kids came, Gary and Kendra had moved from Florida to California so that Gary, an engineer trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could get a master's degree at Stanford. These days, getting to campus is just too much trouble. "I prefer taking the courses in person a lot more," Gary says, "but in the cases where that's not possible, I think distance-learning courses, especially like the one at Harvard, are really valuable."

Kendra, an MIT graduate in computer science, took Evenchik's course to gain credit toward a Harvard master's degree in information technology. She expected to hate the course. Now she's sorry that Harvard doesn't offer more of them. "This is a much better substitute than I thought it would be," she says.

InterEd, an Arizona-based research firm, estimates that there were a million people taking online college courses in the United States in 1997, compared to 13 million traditional college students. By the year 2000, InterEd figures there will be 3 million online students.

Prestigious universities like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford are cautiously experimenting with distance learning; nontraditional, for-profit schools are diving in. Kaplan Educational Centers, a subsidiary of the Washington Post Co., last year launched Concord University School of Law, offering the first all-online law degree. Or consider the University of Phoenix, where 5,000 of 53,000 students never set foot on campus. Students can earn bachelor's and master's degrees in business administration or nursing entirely over the Internet.

It all sounds delightful to technology gurus, futurists, and some college administrators. Peter Drucker, the legendary philosopher of corporate management, has even gone so far as to predict the demise of traditional college education. "Universities won't survive," Drucker argues, calling them inefficient and overpriced. "The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast."

That's exactly what worries faculty members at many colleges, who fear that the distance learning movement is about money, not scholarship. They see schools looking to teach more students with fewer resources, being sucked into an unholy alliance with technology companies eager to sell their latest whiz bang gadgets. Partisans of distance learning say that only a minority of Americans will be educated this way. And Drucker notwithstanding, nobody is predicting the demise of the major universities. "You can't replicate an entire Harvard education," says Henry Leitner, Director of Academic Computing at Harvard's Division of Continuing Education. "I'm not sure you'd want to."

University of Washington historian and distance learning critic Jim Gregory agrees. "Students want to go to the best universities, and they want to sit in real classes," says Gregory. "Talk to any 19-year-old. Talk to anybody on any college campus and ask them if they'd rather be sitting at their kitchen table."

What worries Gregory is the thought that millions of dollars, which might have bought more books or hired more faculty, is instead being spent on what may merely be the latest dead-end educational fad. "Everything else will be degraded," he warns, "if funds are shifted out of the traditional existing institution into the dream of a digital university."

Perhaps. But thousands of students seem to believe that a digital university is better than no university at all.

Distance learning is nothing new, of course. It began with the correspondence courses that sprang up in Europe and the United States in the last century. Students studied everything from locksmithing to law, with the post office as their only contact with the instructor.

Correspondence courses have never had much of a reputation. Few are offered by top-flight schools, and many have been whipped up by fly-by-night phonies advertising on matchbook covers.

Besides, one of the strengths of the correspondence course is also one of its chief weaknesses. In technical jargon, correspondence courses are "asynchronous." That means that the teaching and the learning don't happen at the same time. This lets the student do classwork when it's convenient rather than when it's scheduled. But it also means that there is no direct contact between student and teacher, or between the student and his peers. Discussion and debate, a major part of the learning process, is nearly absent in traditional correspondence courses. Got a question for the teacher? Write a letter and wait a week.

But what if that question to the instructor arrived in seconds, not days? What if you could hold discussions with classmates scattered around the world, without leaving your living room? When correspondence courses go on-line, they gain some of the immediate feedback of a real-world classroom.

Or so it seems to Moodie Coletti as he hunches over a cocktail table in his two-bedroom apartment in Brighton. His fingers dance over the keyboard of an IBM laptop. The screen is aglow with messages from his classmates, a lecture from his instructor, a list of the week's reading assignments. It's all there, ready for instant response.

The laptop belongs to his company, Dentsply, a dental supply firm where Coletti works as a salesman. Dentsply is also paying for Coletti's MBA--17 courses at $1,275 a course--as long as he keeps getting A's. Coletti got a bachelor's degree in business administration from Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California. But it's not enough, he says. "I feel like, in a few years, a BA will be like a high school diploma. Everybody's going to have it."

Which is why he's going after his MBA, but not by heading to night school after a long day's work. Instead, he logs on to the electronic campus of the University of Phoenix, one of the nation's most unusual schools.

Not many colleges are for-profit businesses. Just try asking your broker to buy you 100 shares of Harvard. But the University of Phoenix's parent company, Apollo Group Inc., is a publicly traded firm that made $46 million last year providing education to 53,000 students. About 10 percent of them, like Coletti, never set foot on campus.

Apollo Group has been selling scholarship since 1974, concentrating on adults with no time for traditional college education. In 1989, long before it was trendy, the company decided to offer courses over its own dial-up computer network. Terri Hedegaard-Bishop, the university's vice president for distance learning, was the head cheerleader for the project. She helped get the school's first online ad, which was posted on Prodigy, one of the biggest public computer networks in the days before America Online dominated the industry. "I believe we had something like 2,000 responses in the first couple of days," says Hedegaard-Bishop. "That told us back in 1989 that there must be a need here."

And that was in the days when only a handful of people hung out on public computer networks. Today, about 60 million people regularly use the Internet in North America alone. So it's no surprise that the University of Phoenix online learning program is its fastest-growing offering, and the school is one of the nation's top providers of distance learning.

The Phoenix approach to internet education is low tech compared to Harvard's. Evenchik's course uses some of the latest internet technologies to enhance the feeling of being in a real classroom. There's the video, for instance. "We didn't feel that a nonvideo presentation would give them the sense of participation," Evenchik says. And the Harvard students can hear Evenchik's lecture, not just read it on a computer screen. "It helped it feel like a real class experience," Kendra Kratkiewicz says.

But Phoenix students must make do with only the written word. There's no flashy multimedia--no pictures, no sounds. Just written lectures and reading lists from teachers, and "bulletin boards" where students and faculty members hold the equivalent of classroom discussions.

Yet, ironically, the Phoenix approach is far more radical than Harvard's. All courses last just five weeks. No class has more than 13 students. And although the Harvard class offers students an on-line meeting place to exchange messages, few students bother to use it. In the Phoenix program, every student must log on to the system and engage in a class discussion at least five days per week, with the student's typed comments forming a major part of the grade.

Leona Lobell Torkelsen formerly taught at New York University, where she earned her doctorate in comparative literature. Now she teaches ethics and communications courses for Phoenix from her home in Connecticut. Torkelsen says she often develops greater rapport with online students than with people in her real-world classes. "I think one of the things that amazed me after doing this for over a year is the intimacy of the on-line environment," Torkelsen says. "The closeness, the bonding, more than compensates for not seeing the person."

There's another consequence that undermines a misconception about distance learning. Due to small class sizes and the need to maintain a high-quality computer network, the University of Phoenix has found that there's nothing cheap about providing education via the Internet. "The truth is," Hedegaard-Bishop says, "technology education frequently costs more."

Beyond questions of class size, teaching methods, and money, there's a bigger question. Do distance learning students really learn? Thomas Russell, Director of the Office of Instructional Telecommunications at North Carolina State University, certainly thinks so. Russell surveyed 355 studies undertaken from 1928 to 1996 on the performance of students using various forms of distance learning--correspondence courses, televised classes, and internet-based learning. The title of Russell's book on the subject, The No Significant Difference Phenomenon, bluntly sums up his conclusions. Nearly every study he examined found that distance learning students who apply themselves learn as much as traditional students.

But these reassuring claims don't mollify a legion of academic critics, who fear that the internet education movement isn't about education but exploitation--of students and faculty alike. College faculty members who aren't totally opposed to distance learning are nevertheless dismayed by their schools' eager embrace of the idea. These teachers say the idea needs closer study.

Then there's historian David Noble, who thinks the idea needs a decent burial. He has already begun wielding the shovel. "A year from now, you and I won't even be talking about distance education," he says. "It's over."

Noble is no Luddite. People with fanatical hostility to technology don't spend ten years teaching history at MIT. But his concern about the misuse of technology made him a leader in perhaps the first organized faculty revolt against distance learning.

Noble, author of the book The Religion of Technology, is currently a visiting professor at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. But his home base is York University in Toronto.

York faculty went on strike in March of 1997 to demand higher pay and an end to departmental budget cuts. But that wasn't all. Faculty members were also irate about plans to deliver more of the university's courses over the Internet, instead of using traditional classrooms. Noble and others were particularly incensed by a plan to create internet-based courses that would carry the logo of a corporate sponsor, who would pay the university $10,000 for the privilege.

Noble and other faculty members saw the idea as a direct assault on their independence as scholars. "If McDonald's decides to put their logo on something," says Noble, "there is a distinct possibility that . . . they might want to make some determination about what courses they want to sponsor." Worse yet, he says, the corporation might actually begin dictating the content of particular courses--warning environmental studies professors, for example, not to spend too much time on that Exxon Valdez thing.

The York strike lasted 55 days, the longest academic strike in Canada's history. Faculty members got only a minuscule pay raise. But they did come away with a pledge that York University would not implement any new learning technology initiatives without the approval of the affected faculty members.

This was barely enough to suit Noble. He sees the distance learning movement as one noxious part of a larger pernicious trend--the commercialization of higher learning. "If you walked into a church, and you saw Christ on the altar wearing Calvin Klein jeans, wouldn't you do a double take?" he asks. "People would find this offensive, as a defilement of a space that is not about commerce."

In Noble's eyes, higher education is just as sacred, and to preserve its independence, colleges must not become shrines to capitalism. Yet he believes that this is precisely the goal of the distance learning movement. "This whole thing with virtual education, distance education, and the like is not about education," he says. "It's about finding new markets." Cash-strapped colleges are packaging online versions of their courses in order to peddle them around the globe, he says. This way, they can spread the cost of producing knowledge over a larger universe of customers, and even turn a profit on popular courses.

Noble also casts a baleful eye on Titans of the computer industry such as IBM and Microsoft. These companies see higher education as a vast new market, and they're eager to saddle colleges with billions in technology, whether they need it or not. "Schools and parents and taxpayers are throwing billions of dollars at this garbage," he scoffs.

Plenty of other college faculty members have protested their schools' eagerness to launch distance learning programs. Last year, Governor Gary Locke of Washington suggested that traditional state university courses could be replaced by various kinds of online learning. Nearly 900 faculty members at the University of Washington replied with an open letter objecting to the proposal.

Jim Gregory, one of the signers of the letter, stresses that distance learning is well and good, in its proper place--a supplement to traditional schooling, mainly used by working adults. But Gregory fears that college administrators, bedazzled by gadgetry and desperate to cut costs, are being suckered into a vision of "virtual universities," where the modem replaces the classroom.

"The thought of putting 19-year-olds and 20-year-olds into a program where they have no contact with teachers, no contact with fellow students, no contact with libraries, no contact with the atmosphere of a university--it's very disturbing," Gregory says.

It's exactly this kind of blossoming skepticism about distance learning that has turned Noble into an optimist. He loves to cite last year's launch of Western Governors University, a distance learning consortium sponsored by the computer software company Novell Inc. and a host of state universities. "They opened for business this fall expecting 5,000 people to enroll," he gloats. "They got 10 people."

Noble expects similar results at many other college campuses, as even adult learners prefer traditional classes to internet study. That will leave the colleges saddled with a multimillion-dollar investment in distance learning hardware and software. Noble predicts the schools will try to recoup by trying to use internet-based teaching for their traditional on-campus students, turning dorm rooms into classrooms. "The real market for this," says Noble, "is the captive markets on the campuses."

But parents and students won't pay $15,000 a year for that kind of education. And so, in Noble's vision of the future, distance learning will fade into history as one more failed educational fad.

But adult students aren't playing along. Even if Western Governors University hasn't taken the world by storm, other schools like the University of Phoenix are attracting thousands of pupils.

And some of the nation's top-flight institutions are embracing the trend. Duke University's prestigious Fuqua School of Business offers an MBA program in which students spend just 11 weeks on campus, with the rest of the coursework done via the Internet. Stanford University has gone even further, offering a master's degree in electrical engineering that can be earned entirely via the Internet.

And then there's Harvard. The school doesn't offer an internet degree yet, to Kendra Kratkiewicz's regret. This semester, she's forced to make the long drive from Billerica to Cambridge as she toils toward her master's degree. Nothing would please her more than a chance to complete her Harvard education without having to show up at Harvard. "I definitely hope they add a lot more courses," she says. And David Noble to the contrary, she'll probably get her wish.

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