Stony Brook University to grant electrical engineering degrees

Long Island Business News, Jul 15, 2005 by Ken Schachter

Want to get an electrical engineering degree from a prestigious university without setting foot in a classroom?

That may sound like a come-on from a diploma mill, but the proposition - and the degree - is very real.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will provide $300,000 to the State University of New York to create what officials are calling the world's first fully online bachelor's degree in electrical engineering.

Students enrolling in the program will choose a home campus from among SUNY Buffalo, Binghamton University and Stony Brook University.

The Sloan Foundation has been supporting online learning since 1992, before the emergence of the Internet, said Frank Mayadas, the foundation's program director.

The foundation catalogs more than 700 degree programs and has helped to support more than 100 schools in delivering distance learning, he said.

With distance learning taking hold, Mayadas said, the foundation has been seeking to fill the gaps. A grant to the University of Illinois, for instance, helped that school develop online degrees in history and philosophy.

As we looked at others, we found no undergraduate engineering degrees fully online, he said.

Mayadas held discussions with officials at SUNY, which has 106,000 online students enrolled.

To check on demand for such a degree, Sloan officials contacted Brookhaven National Laboratory. Officials there confirmed the need, Mayadas said. At any of these industrial facilities, they have technicians who may have a partial degree, he added. Once you drop out, it's hard to go back. Our purpose is to make this available anytime or anyplace at a reasonable cost.

The grant money will go to convert teaching materials used in bricks-and-mortar classes into a form that can be used online.

This program represents the first online SUNY degree created cross-institutionally, State University Provost Peter Salins said in a news release. We will be pooling faculty resources of three campuses to achieve something no one institution could do on its own.

In a separate grant, Stony Brook has won $830,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop an always-on system for monitoring and securing system software.