From: "Swisher, Bob" <bswisher@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: University With Correspondence History Ventures Onto Net
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 09:01:13 -0500
October 20, 1999
By PAMELA MENDELS
University With Long History in Correspondence Ventures Onto Net
When the governor of Kentucky announced earlier this month that the state
would launch a "virtual high school" project, the news was received with
special warmth by a group of instructional designers, continuing education
professionals and business people in Lincoln, Neb.
That is because many of the inaugural courses at the Kentucky Virtual High
School (http://www.kvhs.org/), an ambitious, publicly financed program to
bring Internet-based high school classes to students throughout the state,
were selected from the offerings of a young Lincoln venture called Class.com
Inc (http://www.class.com/).
"We were thrilled," said John A. Blair, president and chief executive of the
company.
And so were a group of people on a college campus about a mile from his
downtown Lincoln offices. The reason is that Class.com's major -- in fact,
its only - shareholder is the University of Nebraska.
The company was set up in July to market the online high school courses
created over the last several years by a 23-person research and development
unit at the university's Department of Distance Education
(http://www.unl.edu/conted/disted/). Much of the money for that work came
from the federal government, most notably a $15 million grant from the
United States Department of Education.
So far, the university, which offers about 164 different correspondence
courses, using printed material and the mail, has created about 32 Web
classes that Class.com can sell. Over the next year, project officials hope
to put online enough additional classes to be able to offer a complete high
school curriculum over the Internet.
The roots of the Nebraska program go back to 1929, when the university's
teachers college began a correspondence school program aimed at helping
rural Nebraska students who hoped to attend the state university but were
enrolled in schools so small they could not offer classes that were
prerequisites to college.
That first year, 14 students in towns enrolled, choosing from the three
courses offered, among them Latin II.
Over the years, the program has expanded far beyond Nebraska borders, so
that today about 5,500 students from around the world annually enroll in
classes, from advanced biology to fourth-year German. Their reasons for
taking the courses vary widely, according to James E. Schiefelbein, an
assistant director in the Department of Distance Education.
Some are children of missionaries working abroad. Others are military
dependents or children being educated at home. Still others are teen-age
musicians, athletes and actors with careers to worry about.
About five years ago, instructional designers at the university began to
experiment with ways to use the emerging World Wide Web to reach these
students as well as new audiences, namely a growing number of conventional
classroom students attending schools with Internet connections. The trick,
said Kathryn A. Northrop, special projects coordinator at the Department of
Distance Education, has been to develop material that is more than a Web
version of the same classes the university has been offering for decades.
The Internet classes seek to make the most of the technology, incorporating
video and audio technology, e-mail and, when possible, interactivity, she
said.
A course about the crisis in Bosnia, for example, contains video interviews
with residents. A class in essay writing requires students to e-mail rough
drafts of their writings to other students for critiques. And in foreign
language classes, students can record their efforts to speak the new tongue
and send their exercises in computer files to their teachers.
Northrop said designers also have to work to keep the technology from
overwhelming a lesson. Designers try to keep in mind that the purpose of the
classes is pedagogy, not bells and whistles, she said.
The clips from the Bosnia class are one example, said Kevin D. Smith, lead
instructional designer. "When we included video for Bosnia, it wasn't just
to include video," he said. "It was for the kids to get a feel for what
these Bosnian refugees experienced." The University of Nebraska is hardly
the only institution grappling with these kinds of issues. North Dakota's
Department of Public Instruction (http://www.dis.dpi.state.nd.us/), for
example, offers a number of courses online for high school students. The
University of Texas at Austin earlier this year began a high school diploma
distance program (http://www.utexas.edu/cee/dec/), offering some classes in
print, others on CD-ROMs and still others over the Internet. And next month,
Indiana University hopes to launch a full high school diploma distance
program, eventually offering all the classes online.
Meanwhile, the boom in the Internet has seen the creation of a number of
distance learning efforts with no roots in the traditional correspondence
world. ChildU Inc. (http://www.childu.com), a start-up Internet education
company based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is currently concentrating on
courses for younger students, but plans to have a full high school
curriculum online within about a year, according to Scott R. Udine, chief
executive and founder of the company.
No one is predicting the death of the traditional mail high school
correspondence courses anytime soon. But, promoters of the high school
distance courses say, the new technologies can hardly be ignored.
For one thing, officials at the university correspondence courses say they
are getting more and more requests from their students to make class
offerings available online. For another, they are seeing a burgeoning market
in computer-savvy students who are being schooled at home and who need
access to sophisticated course material that may not be available on the
family bookshelves.
Finally, the wiring in recent years of numerous public and private schools
across the country has prompted interest from school officials looking for
suitable online educational material. In Kentucky, for example, the virtual
high school courses are for now being aimed at rural schools that are unable
to offer certain subjects "live," but do have Internet access that enables
them to connect students to online classes.
"The whole area of continuing education is booming because of the technology
we have at our disposal," says Joann A. Brown, executive director of
marketing and communication at the School of Continuing Studies at Indiana
University (http://www.indiana.edu/~iude/frameset-campus.html).