Chapter 6: Visions for a Virtual University

A Look at Four Distance Learning Ventures
pp. 212-217

There are several models for distance education worldwide. Many distance education courses are offered as extension courses by major universities; others have emerged as new academic enterprises. To give you a sense of the variety of distance learning projects, we examine four projects that demonstrate some of the challenges and expectations of distance educators. Among the newest academic enterprises are two projects, the University of Phoenix and Western Governors University.

John Sperling, who views education as a service business, founded the "Online Campus" in San Francisco in 1989. He believes that online "computer-mediated education was an outgrowth of the technological transformation of the work place and a response to the increasing use of computers and modems for communication."31 The "Online Campus" grew into the University of Phoenix and currently serves 2,600 students who log-in to Phoenix's virtual classrooms via modem. At the University of Phoenix Web site, Phoenix's designers explain that

we could more accurately be called the "Center for Accessible Education" since our aim is to make distance an imperceptible part of your educational experience. In an age when time and efficiency are at a premium--when it's often more practical to e-mail or call a co-worker down the hall than to locate them--we bring "distance" education as close to working students as their colleagues.32

They argue that they offer a unique service to working students and that Phoenix students

cite many advantages over traditional--and even other non-traditional--campus programs, including more direct access to faculty, superior time management, and freedom from scheduling and location conflicts. Administrative transactions which are time-consuming in a physical setting: meeting with your counselor, registering for class, and buying books, are conveniently and efficiently handled by telephone, e-mail, or fax.33

There is no doubt that the University of Phoenix is working on a for-profit model of education. In an article on Phoenix, Forbes compared this school's operating costs with those of Arizona State University:

It costs Phoenix on-line $237 to provide one credit hour of cybereducation, against $486 per hour for conventional education at Arizona State. The big difference: teaching salaries and benefits--$247 per credit hour for Arizona State against only $46 for Phoenix. Arizona State professors get an average of $67,000 a year. The typical University of Phoenix on-line faculty member is part time and earns only $2,000 a course, teaching from a standardized curriculum.34

Western Governors University (WGU) is another experiment in creating new educational enterprises. In design, WGU is a radical departure from the classic definition of a university. It has neither a campus nor lecturers of its own, but rather acts as a course broker, getting its courses from participating universities, community colleges and commercial suppliers. However, "students will enroll directly with WGU and get their degrees from it rather enrolling in a participating institution."35

The justification for this radical departure is that WGU will lower costs of higher education. As can be expected, WGU has drawn fire from critics, including one who argues that while attempting to make the prospect of lowered college tuition an attractive draw for WGU, the motives behind the plan are sinister:

The corporate and legislative backers of WGU hope to do more while finding a way to lower the costs of education, make quick use of new technology, and absorb booming enrollments. They want to change the definition of a college education. Seat time and credit hours will mean less than what students can show they're able to do by taking tests. The initiative will focus on the needs of students and employers.36

However, not all distance education ventures fit into the model of the University of Phoenix and Western Governors University. The Monterrey Institute of Technology and Advanced Studies in Mexico offers an "Information Technology Strategic Planning" course as part of a master's degree program. This course is the subject of a case study by Hartwig Stein that offers an interesting look at the internal workings of distance education. The thirteen-week course ran from April to June 1997 and started out with a roster of forty-four students located at twelve different campuses. The Monterrey campus was selected for the videotaped portion of the course, and thirteen students acted as the live audience for these taped sessions. During the course of the semester, seven students dropped out and two failed. The students were initially put together into fourteen groups, which became eleven groups by the end of the semester. There were a total of twelve days of satellite classes, each lasting about an hour. The estimates for the amount of time students were expected to spend on the course were as follows: a total of twelve hours devoted to learning activities for each of the twelve modules, including one hour of the satellite class (group work session) and a prerecorded video of ninety minutes, for a total of 144 hours of learning activities. One class was devoted to the presentation of team projects.37

Most of the students had taken distance education courses before enrolling in "Information Technology." Stein, who taught the course, had eight years of experience in distance education prior to teaching this course, and his academic assistant had two and a half years of experience. The administrators were also experienced in this field. The course itself was delivered using a variety of new media, including twelve videotapes, twelve satellite classes, the Internet, newsgroups, IRC chat, and e-mail as well as telephone and fax.

His case study emphasizes the significant time outlay required to launch a distance education course. The creation of the course involved several critical production specialists as well as many hours of work. Thirty-three hours per person were devoted to the overall course design, including the production of the videotapes and graphics for the course. Additionally, the teacher and academic assistant on the project logged fifteen hours each on the academic design. During the course of the online semester, both the teacher and the academic assistant spent 430 hours facilitating the online learning process. "This averaged to fifteen hours per person per week spent in reading and writing . . . electronic mail, revision of newsgroups, structuring of groups, individual feed-back, answering questions and administrative issues."38 Despite the initial estimates of how much time students would spend on the course, "some students reported that they invested between 8 and 14 hours every week in the course and that they did their activities throughout the week."39 Stein concludes that a successful distance learning course "must have clearly defined objectives whose accomplishment is easy to validate, such as seen in successful training courses in the business sector."40 He emphasizes that it is critical for teachers contemplating teaching distance education courses to understand that

the model of transmission of information from teacher to student practiced by both conventional institutions and the large, autonomous distance teaching universities is no longer sufficient in a society where knowledge is changing rapidly, and the skills needed both at work and in our social lives are becoming increasingly complex. People need to know how to communicate effectively, work in teams, search out and analyze new knowledge, participate actively in society, and generate as well as assimilate knowledge.41

It is clear that in order to be effective, distance education courses need to focus on student activities. Activities that demand reading, analysis, synthesis and evaluation are likely to involve students in worthwhile learning experiences. A top-down teaching style will not work in this teaching medium. Students must have guidance throughout the entire course to maintain their motivation.42

The UNIWORLD virtual university project is a Hungarian distance education venture launched in 1997 by the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The aim of UNIWORLD is to organize and manage a wide range of Internet-based distance education activities. The most important of these activities is the launch of master's degree courses in September 1998 in cooperation with the University of California, Santa Barbara. Students of the pilot courses are regular undergraduates at Eötvös Lóránd University in Budapest and Janus Pannonius University in Pécs, Hungary. Both universities have agreed to accept these courses as equivalent to traditional courses. UNIWORLD will provide university courses leading to an American master's degree. As with any university, participation in a UNIWORLD program will require an application, enrollment, payment of tuition and examinations.

The master's degree programs offered by UNIWORLD include the following: cross cultural communications, which combines technical and humanistic studies as well as theoretical and practical approaches; international migration studies, which focuses on international population movements, labor migration, refugee problems and legal and illegal immigration; and internet studies in religion, which will combine traditional studies in religion and the history of religion with electronic communication and particularly networked communication. Of the latter course, the designers explain: "this subject is warranted by the ever-growing presence of religion in the various newsgroups, discussion groups and Websites on Internet. The new religious environment requires a new group of practical experts."43 A master's program in environmental management studies will address issues that have become increasingly global in scope, such as hazardous waste, the threat of nuclear catastrophes, pollution, deterioration of soil and deforestation.

In each case, UNIWORLD's designers have given some thought to the Internet not just as a means of delivery, but also as a critical teaching platform with global reach. The programs in international migration studies and environmental management, for example, attest to the uniqueness of this platform for their subject matter. In the case of degree programs in cross-cultural communications and internet studies in religion, there is an implied rationale that the Internet is a place where a specific discourse is yielding topics worthy of examination.

László Turi of the Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and editor of Internetto Webzine, helped launch UNIWORLD's pilot program of two courses in communication philosophy in 1997. We asked him to describe some of the challenges of setting up this ambitious project. One question was whether new faculty would have to be hired to teach the courses, or whether UNIWORLD organizers were going to hire faculty who were trained in traditional classroom teaching. Turi explained: "UNIWORLD was initiated outside the university, because Hungarian higher education is fairly conservative. So far, these universities have not offered any financial support for the project. However, despite this obstacle, UNIWORLD organizers are trying to attract high quality teachers and lecturers who have experience in traditional forms of education."44 Turi explained the educational model that the UNIWORLD designers had in mind for the delivery of online content:

We have studied and are still studying a number of existing virtual universities that can be accessed on the Web. On this basis we set up a simple communication system that attempts to model traditional classroom communication channels. Separate communication channels (i.e. Web pages) were provided for teacher-to-students communication (i.e. for lectures), for discussions of the lectures and for the recommended readings and also for student-to-teacher communication, that is for the paper assignments. This system proved to be functional in Prof. Nyíri's online philosophy classes, however, it is clear that it needs further refinement and development for disciplines that are more practical than philosophy.45

We also asked Turi to comment on the unexpected problems UNIWORLD designers encountered during the pilot phase of the project and what strategies they developed for problem solving on the project. Turi explained that one unanticipated problem was that it quickly became clear to the designers that a face-to-face meeting needed to take place during the course:

It had to be realized that face-to-face meetings must be organized at least once a term. Since some of the students are not Budapest residents, we are trying to set up an online videoconference system for the occasions of the meetings. Otherwise UNIWORLD is based on asynchronous communication methods. We have made an attempt to create a Web-software for the purposes of class-management but the attempt failed. It is a recurring problem that students' Internet access is limited due to the lack of proper infrastructure.46

Distance learning ventures of the scale envisioned by UNIWORLD's designers typically require a significant investment of start-up capital. We asked Turi to talk about the financial aspect of the project and to give us a sense of when UNIWORLD's designers expected to see a "profit" with the on-line courses. Turi responded that UNIWORLD's designers anticipated that it would be at least four to five years before they saw a profit. However, he made it clear that the start-up capital for the project was modest: "A commercial bank . . . provided us some modest support to cover basic organizational costs for about a year. However, this support does not cover the actual costs of education."47

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