INFORMATION & TECHNOLOGY LAW
A New Future for
Distance Education
By Jon M. Garon*
As published in Interface Tech News, August, 2002
Great changes are again taking place in the highly promoted but still unprofitable world of distance education. Proposed new rules from Educause, the nonprofit entity tasked with administering the restricted .edu top level domain offer the promise of opening the coveted ".edu" ranks to educational institutions that have been shunted to the less prestigious ".com" world. Universitas 21 promises to reinvent international accredited higher learning, and many of the original high-flying premiere Internet educators have reinvented themselves rather than closing their virtual shop. Despite all this change, the question remains whether anyone is learning the lessons being taught.
The debate involving the .edu domain serves as a metaphor for the broader role of online distance education. Generally speaking, academic attempts at providing universities on line have been marketing failures and academic distractions. New York University, Temple University, and other famous universities have closed their virtual doors, moving the remaining online courses into existing adult-education programs. Highly touted start-ups such as Columbia University's Fathom.com and Western Governors University, have continued to provide some content, but dramatically downsized the attempts to provide online degrees and to obtain meaningful financial returns.
In contrast to the academic experience, online training has become a boom industry, saving corporations tremendous money, travel time, and resources to provide employees the skills needed to complete specific tasks or undertake new responsibilities on an as-needed basis. Companies such as Smart Planet, New Horizons and many others provide training, certification, and other practical skills for professional development. While computer training has been the most prolific for online training — an obvious platform since the computer used for the training also serves as the focus of the education — business strategies, human resources, accounting and other stills are also available in online training programs. E-Learning Magazine has predicted that worldwide online training market to reach $39 billion by 2006. Many of these training sessions are short modules designed for the participant to learn about a specific task or practice a narrow skill. Students can earn certificates but not the academic credentials that open professional opportunities.
Training, then, is not education — at least not accredited education. Academic accreditation comes from one of six regional agencies approved by the U.S. Department of Education. In addition, certain advanced degree institutions are accredited by professional associations which monitor that specialty. Engineering, law, medicine and others are accredited through this more stringent process, often in addition to the regional accreditation process. Educause requires that .edu entities be accredited to fit within the .edu domain.
Formalized learning, however, is not so neatly divided into on-the-job training at one end and accredited, graduate or post-graduate degrees at the other. Also on this continuum are the community colleges, lifelong learning programs, and specialized education. These may provide the key to online distance education. In its first act as Registrar, Educause expanded the availability of the .edu to include the community colleges which had previously been left out of the closed domain.
The community college teaching module is much closer to training than classical education. Classes are generally shorter, more highly focused on particular skills, and more relevant to the training sought by the student. This is a far cry from the idealized notion of the broad, liberal education and yet the dollars being spent by students suggest that this training is more valuable than that of the Ivy League schools. For-profit successes like University of Phoenix and DeVry University are much closer to large, national community colleges than traditional four-year colleges, but the model serves their community of adult learners well.
Ironically, the community college model may prove to be the saving grace even for the prestigious university's foray into brand expansion. UCLA, for example, has historically provided an expansive extension program reaching out to adult learners on a variety of topics. Institutions with these extension programs can readily adopt online training techniques and slowly migrate the traditional full-time enrollees to these courses once they have been academically validated. Indeed, the market may be giving the traditional universities a wake-up call that it is time to reconsider the nature of traditional education to make it more responsive to the learning of the students.
This is more than a merely academic exercise. A recent study showed that three-fourths of today's undergraduates are no longer traditional students. Undergraduates are older, taking longer than four years to graduate, working part-time throughout college, and bringing an infinitely diverse background of racial, geographic, economic, and educational experience to the classroom. The outrageously expensive, gentrified Ivy League education no longer serves the community of students that actually attend.
Educause is therefore faced with a significant dilemma. It can rely exclusively on the definitions adopted by the Department of Education or it can begin to create its own criteria for admission into the .edu domain. The policy it adopts may shape the choices made by colleges and universities as they attempt to use the interactive benefits of online training in a manner that promotes quality education rather than reinforces the status quo.
Whether the next wave of online distance education will fare any better than the previous attempts, however, requires more than the magic of the .edu domain. The lessons learned from the business of online training must be expanded to the skills and values that serve as the core of collegiate education. The technologies developed for the corporate training room must be adapted to a university curriculum even as that curriculum adapts to better fulfill the needs of its students. These universities must also come to recognize that the students being taught include a far more diverse group than that which attended a generation ago.
Perhaps we have reached the point of change in both the students and the institutions so that online education will be used creatively to accomplish what it does well rather than limited to what it does cheaply. Educause has the opportunity to play an important role to develop the technology and academic community, but if only it adopts the right lesson plan.
*Jon M. Garon is admitted in New Hampshire and California.
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