Copyright 1998 EDUCAUSE. From CAUSE/EFFECT Volume 21, Number 2, 1998, pp.28-31, 36-37. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the EDUCAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of EDUCAUSE. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Jim Roche at EDUCAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: [email protected]
Distance Education: Effective Learning or Content-Free Credits?
by Gregory D. BothunIntroduction
In the past three or so years, the Internet has rapidly penetrated American households. Development of Web browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer has allowed more people to access the rich array of products now available for downloading. Such functional access opens new markets for the commercial sector. In turn, this has led to a significant congestion on the Internet, which, in part, has motivated a consortium of universities to form the Internet2, or I2. Part of the justification for I2 is the opening of distance education (DE) markets.1 Almost every major American university has some DE offerings on the Internet. While earning college credit via correspondence is nothing new, one hopes that the use of network technology will provide considerable rigor and value to this process rather than simply offering credit by e-mail. Whether Internet-based DE actually does is the genesis of this article.
For two-and-a-half years, the University of Oregon has offered four ten-week DE classes, including Physics 161: Energy and the Environment; Physics 162: Alternative and Renewable Energies; Astronomy 121: Solar System Geology; and Astronomy 123: Cosmology and the Origin of Life. To date, about 150 students from around the world have taken these courses; it is their feedback that supplies the data used in this paper to assess the condition of Internet-based distance education as well as its market potential.
These four classes were not developed specifically for the distance education market; rather, they are regular University of Oregon classes taken by hundreds of students each year. Web-based textbooks were written for these courses and tested there before they were offered as DE courses.2 As a result, the distance education student is exposed to the same course material as the in-class student and has the same homework assignments and examinations. This facilitates a direct comparison of the range of performance between the DE population and the in-class students. Students in the in-class population, however, generally take these courses to satisfy a Natural Sciences requirement for graduation and may not be particularly interested in the material when they enroll. In contrast, some of the distance education students select the courses because they are interested in the specific material. We factor the effect of each kind of selection into our analysis.
Questions to assess in distance education
The University of Oregon's foray into the distance education market was done very much as an experiment. This experiment was designed to yield data on the following issues:
Can DE students reliably and efficiently access all the curriculum materials so they can complete the course requirements in ten weeks?
Of the 150 DE students enrolled in the four courses, 125 completed the requirements in eight to ten weeks. This proves it is possible to deliver courses in this manner, which reflects the information-oriented nature of survey courses. Such courses require little student mentoring, which more easily allows students to work at their own pace.
Does DE technology allow students to become reasonably engaged with the material?
Responses from distance education students varied on this issue. Many students reported being significantly more engaged than the on-campus students and prepared content-rich Web pages as part of their coursework. These students asked many questions through e-mail and seemed genuinely interested in the topic. Others, however, admittedly tried to coast through with minimal effort and rarely had substantive questions. Often, these students were difficult to keep in touch with and ignored exam deadlines. Further, there is a weak but important correlation between homework quality as well as student engagement and the reliability of Internet access. Some students had poor ISPs, resulting in unreceived e-mail. This caused noticeable performance problems.
Is there a significant difference in homework and exam grades between DE students and on-campus students?
DE students tended to receive higher grades than on-campus students for the same courses, but it should be noted that many of the DE students are self-selected and therefore highly motivated. Indeed, the initial onset of this experiment drew mostly this population, and their performance was always in the top 5 percent compared to the on-campus students. As time wore on, however, less motivated students began to enroll in the DE classes; they earned lower grades than the initial respondents. That helped fill out the bell-shaped curve. Table 1 summarizes the grade distribution of the in-class and DE populations.
Table 1:
Grade distribution, in-class and distance education studentsPopulation Number Mean GPA Dispersion In-class 2000 2.83 0.68 Distance Education 125 3.08 0.45 Formally, the difference between the two mean GPAs is significant. However, twenty-five DE students received a grade of Incomplete. If those Incompletes were converted to Fs, the mean GPA of the DE population drops to 2.58, and the dispersion significantly increases (although the grade distribution would no longer be normal). For the DE students who completed the course, the lower dispersion and higher mean shows that few earned grades lower than C-plus.
Are there special difficulties associated with administering exams in DE courses?
In general, students take exams by e-mail at scheduled times. Instructors e-mail a few questions at a time to DE students. Once answers to those questions are received, more questions are sent. In principle, each exam has a time limit. But there are several problems with this approach. First, some students fail to log onto e-mail at the appointed time. Second, there is significant variability in the reliability of the students' ISP e-mail service. And finally, there is a limit to the kinds of exams that can be given via e-mail.
Clearly, e-mail is a poor vehicle for an exam; this is perhaps the most unsatisfactory part of Internet-based distance education. To address this, the University of Oregon has developed a robust and clever Java exam applet, which is timed and self-proctoring. Initially, most of the DE students claimed their browsers could not run the applet. However, because of the applet's tremendous flexibility and its ability to allow for a fairly rigorous exam, we will soon require each DE student to have a Java-aware browser as a condition of enrollment. This will aid the instructor in other ways, as well, as many of our Web pages have embedded, interactive Java applets as an integral part of our courseware.3
Is the instructor's time investment manageable or prohibitive?
Demands on instructor time vary hugely from student to student. Some DE students are independent, think about the material, and ask thoughtful questions. Others require more hand-holding and are less efficient at getting through the course. Because of this, it's impossible to scale Web-delivered DE courses. Having six distance education students in a term, for example, is more than twice the work of having three students. In general, DE students are more of a challenge to the instructor than the in-class student. They ask more questions and want, quite naturally, more interaction with the instructor. As the interaction is asynchronous, it becomes a significant time drain when more than just a few students are enrolled. For these reasons, the University of Oregon caps enrollment at fifteen DE students per ten-week term in Internet-based courses.
Demographics of the DE market
The demographics of the 150 DE students taught to date allows a natural division into five groups. These groups and their percentage contribution to the total empirically define the DE market and are described below:
Group 1: (20 percent of total) This group consists of professionals who are older than twenty-five and seeking continuing education to help in their careers. Members of this group perceive the courses as having the potential to make an immediate impact on their careers. Most took Physics 161 and 162 and are employed in the energy industry.
Group 2: (10 percent of total) This group consists of so-called life-long learners. Most of its members are age fifty or older, and retired or nearing retirement. And for most, these DE courses offered them their first exposure to the Internet. The ability to engage in a learning mode while using the Internet was a major motivating factor for these students. Often they would find substantial new material relevant to the course all on their own.
Group 3: (25 percent of total) This group consists of the non-traditional student who has tight time and place constraints. Often, these are students who work nearly full time, have young children, or do not live near campus for one or more terms. This group was split evenly between one-time traditional University of Oregon students who had evolved by circumstance to become DE students, and students who live in other states and countries.
Group 4: (25 percent of total) An increasingly large component of our DE classes since January 1997, this group is made up of high school students seeking college credit.
Group 5: (20 percent of total) This is a new group that emerged in September 1997, when the university's schedule of classes inadvertently listed DE classes as Independent Study courses. The error resulted in a large demand for these classes by regular, on-campus students. These enrollees seemed to believe that taking DE classes would be the easiest and cheapest way to fulfill their course requirements.
Student performance vs. demographic group
Individual performance in DE courses is linked strongly to the student's demographic group. Some illuminating feedback from students in each demographic group is contained in the Appendix. Far and away, Group 1 students were the most responsible, asked sensible questions, accessed the material in a timely manner, and were generally a pleasure to work with. They were clearly motivated to learn and apply the course material and had no problems with the format. Students in Group 2 also were easy to work with, but were motivated more by this new process of learning than the actual course content (although they generally received good grades).
In sharp contrast, the students in Groups 3, 4, and 5 exhibited a wide range of performance and motivation. Many had difficulty pacing themselves and had to cram much of the coursework into the last two weeks of class. It's clear that these students require a more structured format than the self-paced, free-form process the Internet allows.4 Students in these demographic groups simply lack the self-discipline and time-management skills of individuals in Groups 1 and 2. As a result, managing these students takes more time than teaching them. Because students from Groups 3, 4, and 5 form the bulk of the DE market, however, it is vital for the university to develop a more structured mechanism. This is particularly true for the high school seniors in Group 4, most of whom received grades of Incomplete because they did not access the material on a regular basis. In general, these students did not seem to have the emotional maturity or parental guidance necessary to efficiently handle a self-paced course. In some cases, the parents of these students blamed the instructor for their children's failure to access the course material. As a result, the university has instituted a pre-screening procedure for high school students who want to take DE courses. They must enter into a "contract" with the instructor, attesting that they have reliable Internet access and promising to do the work. Although the pre-screening process has reduced enrollment among these students, those who do enroll are more successful.
Conclusions and future directions
The previous analysis sets the stage for putting our empirical results into a broader context. Doing so allows the University of Oregon to offer some strategies for colleges and universities that offer distance education courses via the Internet. Our experimental data allows for partial answers to three fundamental questions:
1. Does effective learning occur when using the Internet as the primary means of delivering a course?
The answer is a qualified yes. The quality of learning depends on the student's level of motivation. Some students--notably those in Groups 3, 4, and 5--do not seem to grasp the concept of a self-paced course; that is, they had trouble understanding that they had to access the material, do the assignments, think about the information, and ask questions of the instructor via e-mail. It seems pointless for students without that skill set to attempt these courses. That they enroll anyway suggests that their primary motivation lies in the perception that Web-based courses offer an easy way to get university credit.
Why do they seek easy classes? The answer lies in an honest appraisal of our customer base. Students in these classes typically have little inherent interest in the subject matter and are enrolled to earn a grade in order to fill some distribution requirement of graduation. By the measure of the distribution of grades, one could say that adequate learning had occurred in the DE circumstance, and that the value added of the physical lecture in assisting them to obtain a decent grade is nil. As a result, the nature of Internet-based distance education is a hybrid of effective learning and easy credits. The difficulty of giving rigorous exams in the DE environment certainly contributes to this. But the same is true for the on-campus version of these classes.
In general, independent of the medium, an instructor can sense when a student becomes a learner--rather than merely an absorber of information--by the kinds of questions he or she asks. Significantly higher-level and more frequent questions emerge in the distance education setting compared to on-campus lectures. While that is not proof that more effective learning can occur in the DE environment, the combination of self-selection and the DE student's need to question the instructor can promote more effective learning for some students. This is the real educational value of distance education. Rather than simply increasing the credit count, colleges and universities can offer courses to motivated and interested students who otherwise would not have a means of learning the material.5 As long as some balance between real learning and easy credits is maintained, the distance education enterprise is worth pursuing. The concern is that, in an attempt to ramp up the DE market for revenue or other reasons, the balance will shift in favor of the easy credits.6
2. What is the nature of the market for distance education?
The distance education market is not yet focused toward a particular demographic, but is rather diverse. Colleges and universities should therefore exercise maximum flexibility when designing their DE offerings. For instance, offering a topical class like Physics 162 is an excellent way to respond to a new learning need in the commercial sector. This suggests that feedback from the commercial sector on course offerings could increase the chances for success in the DE market. Still, the market for distance education courses is not large. While the University of Oregon limits enrollment to some extent so as not to overburden instructors, the school gets fewer than 500 inquiries about these courses a year. It is clear that motivated, self-selected students will do well in distance education courses. But are there enough of these students to sustain the market?
3. How far should distance education go as a substitute for the on-campus experience?
There are two issues here. The first one is the demand the college or university places on its faculty when it adds distance education courses to the mix of class offerings. Treating DE courses as an add-on to normal teaching duties is clearly inappropriate. A separate support structure needs to evolve for this activity, and instructors should be assigned to either distance education classes or regular classes, but not to both in the same term. Student enrollment in DE classes is not scaleable, in terms of workload, in the same way that it is for regular classes. Moreover, it is clear that the bulk of the distance education market is made up of students who are not best served in the classic continuing education model (e.g., Groups 1 and 2), but instead is composed of more mainstream students who want to take lower-division undergraduate courses to satisfy the general education/distribution requirements of the university (e.g., Groups 3, 4, and 5).
The second issue revolves around the kinds of courses that are best suited to the distance education enterprise. There is no electronic interface that duplicates the mentoring process. The strength of a college or university lies in its face-to-face mentoring process; that has clearly worked to produce superb graduates. In contrast, the physical lecture for large, information-oriented survey courses may add no value to the student. Doesn't that translate into an obvious direction? Shouldn't universities simply develop more-or-less-automated survey classes to accommodate the flexible needs of many students and free faculty to teach more meaningful courses and mentor students?
For at least fifty years, many lower-division courses have been taught by lecture to students who attend simply to fulfill a distribution requirement for graduation. It is unclear why we need to keep doing this in an era of viable digital alternatives. In the long run, these alternatives can save institutions from spending money on constructing additional 200-seat lecture halls to accommodate an outmoded style of teaching. The ironic triumph of distance education may well be an increase in general mentoring activities on college and university campuses and the overall revitalization of faculty who long ago burned out on service teaching.
Appendix
Feedback From Real Distance Education Students
The following are excerpts from conversations with five DE students.
Phillipe of Montreal: Age 30+ -- Group 1 (Physics 162)
I have to tell you that the course has provided me with a lot of interesting basic information on alternative energy, which is bound to be further developed in the years to come. The province of Quebec has a new energy policy that opens the door to alternative energies, such as biomass and wind power. I work as an environmental consultant and have worked on environmental planning for a number of hydroelectric projects. More recently, I have participated in environmental feasibility studies for co-generation projects. It has been a very pleasant experience to follow this course through Internet and it has allowed me to find a number of interesting [Web] sites on the matter.Al of California: Retired Coast Guard -- Group 2 (Physics 161)
I really enjoyed the objective way this material was presented. It helped confirm some of my instincts. Even if scientists are funded by the government, I tend to believe them first, so I do believe we are running out of oil and a replacement is needed soon. I think the barrels game is being played to help the disinformation machine gain more ground in the public arena. I hope the scientists that work on this problem don't fall for any of the B.S. the � governments put out. I appreciated the way you delivered the straight poop and I liked many of the Internet sites I found. It gives me something to do in my golden years.Carlos of Argentina: Age 21 -- Group 3 (Astronomy 123)
I guess we come to an end of this course. I want to thank you for your stimulating guidance through this course. I never imagined it would be that interesting. I learned lots of new things, I confirmed some others, I discarded wrong concepts, and it was fun. I have been reading about astronomy and related topics but somehow without much order. This course helped me to straighten things up. And I found many doors to open in the future (which I plan to do).Karen of California: Age 39 -- Group 3 (Astronomy 123)
Distance education via the Internet is only for those who are self-motivated and willing to do their own research and a lot of extracurricular reading on their chosen subject. Or, at least, that was my experience. You are hampered by not attending a lecture and being able to ask questions and have them answered on the spot. It takes a bit of the spontaneity out of the learning experience. I, myself, did not miss interaction with other students, because I'm older and quite honestly, probably a lot more serious about the learning experience than they are; I have a better perspective on the value of time and how I want to spend it. The best things about it: the opportunity to go into depth with a subject, even though it is a basic course. In a regular classroom setting at the undergraduate level, you don't get this opportunity. Working at your own pace is nice, as well, although I would have liked more homework assignments. At the same time, working full time, trying to run an adult life, and taking astrophysics was certainly a challenge! Utility-wise, it's a great choice for people like me who are pursuing, in my case, a second bachelor's and then a master's degree. It allows me to work full time and go to school without having travel time or taking up my weekends. I really enjoyed it.Matt of Oregon: Age 16 -- Group 4 (Physics 161,162)
For someone in a small community, the Internet distance education program is a blessing. My high school and the local community college have limited courses, especially in areas unrelated to the average worker. To continue my education in science, the only option open to me was distance education. As soon as I found Internet-based courses, I immediately enrolled. The difference between Internet courses and conventional distance education is fast communication. When I was ready for the next section, all I had to do was click a hyperlink. If I had a question, all I had to do was send e-mail and I would usually have an answer within hours, if not sooner. Another plus is the wealth of information that the Internet provides. Often I would find hyperlinks in the lectures that pointed to sites that had more in-depth information on certain subjects. After all of the research that this class required, I am convinced that now I could find just about anything on the Internet. I would have to say that there are very few bad factors to this program. The only thing that I struggled with was the flexibility of the schedule. It is easy to get behind when no one is pushing you forward. However, for someone who is willing to rise to the challenge, I think that this type of class is a learning experience in responsibility, independence, and research, as well as the subject material.While the above requires little comment, this feedback does reinforce two important points: (1) Topical classes like Physics 162 are an excellent way to respond rapidly to a new learning need in the commercial sector. This strongly suggests that success in the DE market depends on feedback from the commercial sector in terms of course offerings. (2)Self-motivated students will do well in the DE enterprise. The comments from Karen and Matt are particularly telling in this regard. This, of course, is obvious but begs the key question: Are there enough students like them to sustain the market?
Endnotes
1 Ted Hanss, "Internet2: Building and Deploying Advanced, Networked Applications," CAUSE/EFFECT, Summer 1997, 4-7.
2 G. D. Bothun, "Teaching via Electrons: Networked Courseware at the University of Oregon," CAUSE/EFFECT, Winter 1996, 37-43.
3 Greg Bothun, Stephan Kevan, Stanley Micklavzina, and David Mason, "Networked Physics Curriculum: From Static Web to Dynamic Java," International Journal of Modern Physics 8 (1997): 79-91.
4 Andrew Lawlor and Jeanne Rodier Weber, "Learning about Distance Learning," CAUSE/EFFECT, Summer 1997, 61-63.
5 Karen L. Smith, "Preparing Faculty for Instructional Technology: From Education to Development to Creative Independence," CAUSE/EFFECT, Fall 1997, 36-44, 48.
6 G. D. Bothun, "Seven Points to Overcome to Make the Virtual University Viable," CAUSE/EFFECT, Summer 1997, 55-57, 65. James J. Duderstadt, "Transforming the University to Serve the Digital Age," CAUSE/EFFECT, Winter 1997-98, 21-32.
Greg Bothun ([email protected]) is a professor in the Physics Department at the University of Oregon.
