Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Online class enrollment increases by 40%, study says
By Jillian Jorgensen
The Daily Free Press (Boston U.)
11/20/2006

(U-WIRE) BOSTON — The days of going to office hours in old brick buildings and having in-depth conversations with professors may be on the decline as virtual professors and online classes have increased in popularity by more than 40 percent, according to a recent study.

According to a report released last week conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group for the Sloan Consortium, nearly 3.2 million students were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2005, an increase of approximately 800,000 people from fall 2004.

Although the 2004-2005 year yielded a lower percentage enrollment growth rate than 2003-2004, the report read that there "has been no leveling of the growth rate of online enrollments [and] institutions of higher education report record online enrollment."

The study also found that most online students are pursuing undergraduate degrees.

"Online learning in the U.S. is growing," said Jeff Seaman, the Sloan Consortium's director.

Institutions with more than 15,000 students are more likely to offer online courses than smaller schools, the report said. More than 96 percent of these large institutions offer some online courses, which is more than double the rate of online courses offered by the smallest institutions.

Martin Snyder, director of planning and development for the American Association of University Professors, said he has been teaching since 1965 and just started teaching online this year at the University of Maryland University College.

Snyder said online teaching is mostly a positive experience, but the quality of online education varies from institution to institution.

According to Snyder, problems arise when part-time professors who feel underpaid at universities and are offered no benefits choose to teach online courses and therefore do not earn teaching credit, tenure or promotion.

"[Some] universities are absolutely shameless in the way these part-time professors are exploited," Snyder said.

Snyder said many professors must teach multiple classes each semester just to reach the poverty wage level, forcing them to cut back on their research and class preparation time, leading to poorer-quality classes.

Snyder said that when handled correctly, online courses are just as valuable as courses taken in the classroom and even have certain advantages over traditional courses. Online, Snyder is able to teach students in Japan, Germany and across the United States in the same class, he said.

"It's not just about delivering data," Snyder said. "There needs to be a very high level of teacher participation in the class."

Snyder added that when he teaches a regular three-credit class, he is in the classroom approximately three hours a week. However, for his online class, he spends a minimum of eight or nine hours a week teaching.

"It's a much more labor-intensive operation, and yet the universities are trying to operate them on a shoestring budget," he said. "It's going to backfire."

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken a different approach to online education by offering course material for most of their undergraduate and graduate courses for free to anyone with an Internet connection. The university does not grant any credits or degrees for these online courses.

The program, called MIT OpenCourseWare, was founded in 1999 when then-MIT Provost Robert Brown, the current Boston University president, asked the faculty committee to determine how MIT should "position itself in the distance education or e-learning environment," according to Anne Margulies, the executive director of MIT OpenCourseWare.

MIT's OpenCourseWare program is different from other online courses because "MIT OCW is not a credit-bearing, or a degree-granting, initiative [and] there is no registration process or enrollment required for users to view course materials," Margulies said in an email.

"MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based publication of MIT course materials, not a distance-education program," she added.

Margulies said MIT faculty felt it was important to make the materials studied by MIT students available to everyone who was interested in learning.

"We see knowledge as a public good that should not be restricted to only those who can afford to attend MIT," Margulies said.

Yet, using MIT's course materials through OpenCourseWare for self-education is not the same as an MIT education Margulies said.

"A real MIT education happens when MIT students are on campus together, helping each other and interacting with MIT faculty and the research they do," she said.

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