The faculty at Syracuse University has begun to tap into the potential created by new technology for the expanding world of distance education. But despite growth in distance education, SU is still behind the curve in offering online courses to undergraduate students, both at a distance or on campus.

SU is one of many higher education institutions to see an emergence of new distance learning programs in recent years.

The School of Information Studies offers an award-winning distance education program and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications offers the independent study degree program in communications management. The Martin J. Whitman School of Management offers a master in business administration program and a Master of Science program online. And various other programs around the university offer online courses to full-time and part-time students in a variety of different areas.

But apart from specific degree programs, Syracuse does not offer a large amount of online courses in comparison to similar-sized schools, said Bruce Kingma, associate provost for entrepreneurship and innovation, and chairman of the University Senate curricula committee.

‘This isn’t a campus that has a lot of online courses, most of the courses we see are campus-based’ Kingma said.

Although distance learning is more common for professionals seeking graduate degrees, it is not limited to that. Full-time, undergraduate students frequently take advantage of online courses to pick up extra credits during the summer or to help accommodate crammed schedules during the fall or spring.

‘There are full-time students who seem to work really a lot of hours in a week, as many as 30 or 40 in a week,’ said Kay Fiset, director of credit programs at University College. ‘So for students like that, or for students who are taking a lot of credits and have trouble fitting everything in, an online course is a godsend. It really helps them.’

But full-time students at SU can face a number of problems when they look to go online for their classes. In fall and spring semesters, part-time students are given priority in online classes, and in some cases, classes may fill up completely with part-timers, leaving no room for full-time undergraduates.

In the fall 2006 semester, only 64 main campus students signed up for an online class, compared to 90 University College students.

In addition, only a limited number of courses are offered online. For a course to be offered online, it must be approved by the University Senate, a process that Fiset said can be time consuming.

Some courses are created specifically to be taught online, while other existing courses are put into an online format. Despite these limitations, the number of main-campus students enrolled in an online class more than doubled from 64 in fall 2006 to 151 in spring 2007, she said.

In selecting courses to be taught online, the senate curricula committee considers a variety of criteria for an online course. The popularity of the course and its subject are key in deciding whether or not a course should move to online format, Kingma said.

The recent growth of online education is a direct result of the advancement in communication technology made available to educators. Web-based learning systems like WebCT and Blackboard are adding new technologies to their servers to help teachers. These systems mesh well with more technology-oriented college students.

Though opponents of distance education argue there is no substitute for in-class, personal communication, new technologies made available to teachers are beginning to challenge this conception.

Jing Lei, assistant professor in the School of Education, is able to hold office hours for the online courses she teaches through a chat room-like setup offered through WebCT, an online course management system.

Lei said she also uses instant messaging to be available to her students on an individual basis. In the future, Lei said she hopes to see video conferencing technology made available to professors to help close the gap between them and their students.

While it may be counter-intuitive, distance educators are often more accessible to students than professors who teach campus classes, said William Walsh, assistant professor of accounting at Whitman who teaches in the iMBA program he graduated from in 1989.

Walsh personally e-mails all of his students and provides them with his cell phone number. He thinks this results in more communication than a campus-based class, he said.

‘If you’ve got 50 students in a class, granted you see them twice a week, but you don’t necessarily hook up personally with them,’ Walsh said. ‘They have no need to come see you, they might be in your class but you may not get to know them. In the iMBA, that’s not true.’

At Whitman, the iMBA program, a distance education MBA degree program, encompasses more than 250 students from a variety of locations throughout the world, said Pam Suzadail, assistant director of external programs at Whitman.

Since 1976, the iMBA program has transformed from a correspondence degree, a degree obtained through the mail, to a hybrid program – a mix between on-campus classes and online classes.

iMBA students are required to spend time in Syracuse attending certain classes and taking exams at the beginning and end of every semester. Classes are taken online for the rest of the semester. This model has been a success in the iMBA program, and Whitman has applied the same model to the new iMS program, which started this semester, according to Suzadail.

‘I found that the independent study model worked perfectly for me,’ Walsh said. ‘Probably that model gave me a lot of incentive to do it because I could do it time-wise.’

He said he was first attracted to the iMBA program when he struggled to balance his job as a partner in a Rochester, N.Y., accounting firm with part-time classes at the University of Rochester.

As a professor in the program now, Walsh finds most of his students are in similar situations to his when he enrolled in the program. Walsh still holds a job as a partner in an accounting firm in addition to his teaching job.

Distance education is appealing to business people because many of them travel often and cannot get to a campus for a weekly class, he said.

Distance education has also given SU the ability to offer classes to a wider array of students than in the past. Lei, who teaches in the School of Education, remembers a student enrolled in her class from Korea. She was able to help him obtain a degree while he maintained his job as a teacher on the other side of the globe.

‘That was unimaginable before,’ Lei said.

Roger Hiemstra, a retired Syracuse professor who now advises colleges and universities in distance education, said distance learning helps colleges and universities better reach their students, who often learn better in an online setting.

He said the older generation of faculty sometimes shies away from distance learning, but as professors become more technology savvy, distance education will be more prevalent.

‘I’ve spent some of my time trying to help faculty members understand that, in fact, the learner has an expectation of being to access information 24/7,’ Hiemstra said. ‘And with every mobile hand-held device that they normally use, then they have to think of ways that they can accommodate that.’

Published on April 25, 2007 at 12:00 pm