Will Cyber-School Pass Or Fail?

Insight on the News, June 12, 2000 by Aimee Howd

As supporters and critics of online education debate the quality of degrees earned on the Internet, at least 1 million Americans already enjoy the freedom of virtual learning.

To be at school or not to be at school? That is the question: Whether to attend college lectures in a classroom or at a computer terminal after the kids have gone to bed; turn in a paper at your professor's office or just send an e-mail; hang out with your classmates in person or in a chat room. It is estimated that 1 million students nationwide are taking virtual college courses and the number likely will more than double during the next two years.

According to the International Data Corp., Web-based training was only a $300 million industry in 1997, but it will exceed $5.5 billion by 2002. With this kind of money at stake, companies of all stripes are rushing for gold on the new academic frontier.

Each industry entering the fray claims to have the necessary ingredients to perfect the efficient delivery of high-quality credentials and the constantly changing job skills demanded in today's information economy.

Software developers claim the online classrooms they create will dominate the market because they have the technical know-how to create a comfortable interface for students and professors to meet together online. Telecommunications companies counter that they have the essential infrastructure for electronic learning -- the digital bandwidth over which information travels. They are talking with brick-and-mortar schools, promising, for a fee, to provide a technical makeover by consultants with end-to-end solutions. Publishing companies, on the other hand, say their expertise in creating content makes them uniquely fit for launching and marketing the online courses. And so it goes.

Traditional universities seem to be scrambling to partner with the private companies to put their courses online. This year at least 75 percent of colleges and universities will offer courses on the Internet, and a growing number will offer degrees earned entirely in that way. Even elite institutions such as the Harvard Business School and Columbia University are planning to offer degrees through cyber-based learning centers.

According to InterEd, a company that analyzes online education, 95 percent of schools offering online programs have yet to graduate their first cyberstudent. So it remains to be seen how hard they will have to work to sell learners and employers on the idea that, all things considered, a degree earned in front of a computer screen is just as valuable -- personally, professionally and financially -- as a degree earned on an ivy-covered quad.

"The most obvious advantage of online education is access and cost. Students can reach it from the most remote areas and it will be cheap to deliver. What worries me is quality. Quality is easy to deliver online on certain topics like mathematics or computer programming where information is factual and methods are very precise," says Jerry Martin, president of the higher-education watchdog group, American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA. "The problem is that to have those skills is not to be a fully educated person."

Maybe, maybe not, say proponents of the move to college.com. It depends on the definition of "fully educated" and who the "person" is. They claim studies show that most workers with college degrees will be uncompetitive in the workplace this year without fresh training to keep pace with high-tech changes. Therefore, corporate America is willing to pay for innovative solutions to keep their employees up to cyberspeed as long as they believe such solutions work.

For students seeking a publicly recognized degree that will be widely accepted by employers as well as other colleges and universities, accreditation of the new schools from one of the six regional U.S. accrediting bodies is essential. State licensure and regional accreditation boards are responding by trying to update their traditional guidelines for brick-and-mortar universities -- for example, library-volume requirements and square footage per student -- to accommodate long-distance electronic learning while keeping standards rigorous.

The Massachusetts State Board of Education, for instance, is reviewing an application filed last November by Harcourt Press, a textbook publisher, to grant degrees through affiliated schools to majors in business, arts and sciences and information technology -- all under the auspices of its start-up, Harcourt Higher Ed. "We're following all of the traditional regulations even though we're a nontraditional entity. We're the first group that's applied to the Massachusetts Board of Education that wants to deliver all courses online. It's been challenging, but the state has been very cooperative," says Robert Antonucci, chief executive officer of Harcourt Learning Direct, the company's 120-year-old distance-learning program and head of its wanna-be online for profit university. The state's cooperation might have something to do with Antonucci's 1992-98 tenure as commissioner of education for the Bay State. He observes, "I think you'll see a number of changes in licensure and accreditation standards because the boards will have to respond to the market."