New York Times

April 4, 1999, Sunday, EDUCATION LIFE SUPPLEMENT
Distance Learning; Education.com
By Peter Applebome (NYT) 3704 words

With his silver hair, V-neck sweater over a crisp Oxford shirt, genteel European accent and background as a conductor with orchestras from Israel to Boston, David Sonnenschein is no one's idea of a technogeek.

But after 25 years of teaching music at Northeastern University, Dr. Sonnenschein finds himself happily in the thick of things on the digital frontier. Students who sign up for his Music 1101 -- ''Music: A Listening Experience'' -- agree to study Mozart's minuets and Beethoven's symphonies entirely via computer. Dr. Sonnenschein describes his course as a ''stand-alone, self-paced, computer-mediated, interactive multimedia program'' designed to introduce nonmusicians to classical music. Students listen to recorded music, read text, follow programmed ''listening experiences,'' take tests and communicate with him by computer. When they study rondos or sonatas, for example, they listen to the music on their computers and try to match it to the technical forms shown on the screen.

''This is not about technology, it's about learning how to listen and how to understand what you're listening to,'' Dr. Sonnenschein said as he waited for his Power Mac to boot up in his office overlooking Centennial Circle on Northeastern's campus. ''I can lecture on musical forms, but to many of them I might as well be speaking Chinese. But when they learn at their own pace, they can listen over and over again until the aha! happens -- until they get it on their own. I took the technology up late, but I'm happy I did. It's a very effective way to teach this course.

A 70-year-old conductor and composer teaching Mozart through computer programs and the Internet to students who could just as well show up in class is not the stereotype of on-line education. But at a pace far exceeding what most people expected, on-line education is becoming a defiantly mainstream academic experience.

It is setting in motion an academic gold rush that is making universities think more like Amazon.com than Harvard.edu. It is exciting professors like Dr. Sonnenschein, who see it as an innovative teaching tool, and scaring the mortarboards off many others, who see the excesses of the marketplace invading the sanctuary of the academy. It is helping to create a new academic environment in which entities with names like Anheuser-Busch University, Jones International University and Western Governors University are jockeying along with Stanford, Oberlin and the University of California at Los Angeles for a share of the education market.

While some institutions want only to supplement on-campus offerings, the goal for many others is true distance learning on a scale unlike anything before, attracting students around the globe who will never set foot in a classroom -- if there is a bricks-and-mortar campus at all. That potential is attracting both traditional institutions and a wave of new ones, hoping to devise an entirely different educational model.

Despite some flamboyant predictions, almost no one expects virtual education to replace the world of ivy-edged campuses. Courses like Professor Sonnenschein's are certain to proliferate for a generation of students who are more comfortable with the Internet than the library. But traditional undergraduate education, where the social experience is as much a part of the allure as the educational one, will probably be the least affected, most experts say.

Still, growth in education is not residential campuses for 18- to 22-year-olds. Only about 15 percent of college students fall into that age group and live on campus; 45 percent are older, nonresidential students, most of whom work.

Instead, the growth is in M.B.A. programs for middle managers who cannot take two years off from their job and family; undergraduate degrees for working mothers; courses for engineers and computer technicians whose knowledge becomes outmoded every year, or French Impressionism or religion for boomers who wished they had paid better attention when they were undergraduates in 1970.

No one really knows who the most successful players will be. And there is a raging debate about whether the rise of on-line education is a welcome development. But almost everyone in education is casting glances -- nervous or covetous -- at the on-line world.

''There is great angst out there,'' said Andy DiPaolo, a senior associate dean at Stanford University's School of Engineering, whose distance program is a conspicuous early success. ''People are not sure what this means. Universities are saying, 'I think we need to be in this, but I don't know.' There's been a tradition through the industrial age of students coming to the campus, and now we're told that in the communications age, the campus will come to the students. That's a big challenge to universities who typically don't think along those lines, but more and more, everyone is having to think about it.''

Teaching outside the classroom did not start with the Internet, of course.

''We started distance education in 1892 -- before there was the Internet, there was the telegraph,'' said Jim Ryan, a vice president for outreach and cooperative extension at Penn State. ''And it's evolved with the technology. First, there was rural-free-delivery mail, then radio, then television, then a combination of videotapes and audiotapes, then on-line education.''

But, as Dr. Ryan quickly notes, there is no way to compare the old expectations with the new ones.

Penn State calls its on-line program the World Campus and views it as an autonomous 25th campus in the university system. In six months it has grown to 600 students from 70. The numbers should reach 1,200 in June, and the university and various partners expect to spend $10 million to $12 million to reach an enrollment of 10,000 students in four years. By then, university officials hope the program will begin generating revenue.

''It's the Amazon.com approach,'' Dr. Ryan said. ''You want to expand your product and position yourself for the marketplace, so you can be a very large provider of a variety of products. You look at the range of institutions that are looking into this, and it boggles the mind. And everyone seems to think there's a four- or five-year window to really establish yourself, so there's an enormous amount of activity.''

In fact, what is most striking about electronic education is how broad a universe of players is trying to get in on it.

So a reporter's query on the Internet asking to hear from institutions or individuals serving the on-line education market elicits responses from a remarkable array of providers of courses, software, hardware or information.

Ohio University has its M.B.A. Without Boundaries program. The AT&T Foundation is behind a $150 million effort to promote education via the Internet. Thierry Levy, who runs a company called Quiz Studio, touts his Web-based training programs, and Bisk Publishing its courses in business administration, accounting and computing information systems, which the company offers through partnerships with various colleges and universities.

There are responses from familiar names like the University of Minnesota and from less familiar ones like on-line corporate training programs or Jones International University, the first totally on-line institution to receive accreditation from one of the six major regional accreditation organizations.

Probably the most publicized Internet programs come from brand-name schools, Stanford and Duke. Stanford's engineering program offers 100 courses, taught on line to students around the world at 140 percent of the school's normal tuition. It has drawn 3,000 students since it began in 1997. Duke charges a hefty $85,800 for its Global Executive M.B.A. Program, which has attracted executives internationally for a 19-month program that mixes sessions on campus with intensive study on line. Tuition includes a laptop computer, printer, software, CD-ROM's and lodging and meals at five residential sessions.

But a more typical story may be that of Sheila Kaplan, the president of Metropolitan State College in Denver, with 17,600 students the largest undergraduate college in the country and the third largest school in Colorado. Metropolitan State represents the changing educational marketplace. Students' average age is 27, 80 percent work and many find taking courses at home by way of computer, in between car pooling or after work, enormously appealing. When the college began on-line courses in 1996, it began with 30 courses and 420 students. This year's enrollment is 2,100 students in 87 courses.

''It's taken off way beyond our expectations,'' Dr. Kaplan said. ''Ten years ago, I used to give speeches in which I said the two parts of the American economy that would never change would be medical care and higher education. Obviously, medicine has changed radically, and the computer is going to change education in the same way. In a few years, the only thing you won't be able to do on line will be to drink beer at a sorority house, date the student sitting next to you and find a parking space.''

That growth may not be assured. Western Governors University, the consortium of 17 states plus Guam, opened last fall after years of hype. It offers degree programs gleaned from various universities geared to establishing competency in technical and professional areas.

Officials concede enrollment has been well below expectations, saying only that ''hundreds'' of students have enrolled. They won't release enrollment figures until this fall, when they will presumably have a better story to tell. The slow start has led some skeptics to wonder if an on-line glut is already setting in.

To many, the real question is not whether on-line education has a future, but whether it is a positive or a malignant one.

Andrew Feenberg, a philosophy professor at San Diego State University, is qualified to see both sides. In 1981, Dr. Feenberg was part of the team that created what he says was the first on-line educational program. Designed for the School of Management and Strategic Studies at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, it allowed students at their computers to discuss issues like globalization, environmentalism and urban planning.

The technology was primitive -- an Apple IIE with 48K memory and 300-baud modems (multiply by 1,000 and 100 to get the current versions). Everyone figured out teaching methods and on-line protocol as they went along. But years later, Professor Feenberg is still impressed by the ability of on-line education to draw people together and interact.

''The quality of on-line discussion surpassed anything I have been able to simulate in my face-to-face classroom,'' he wrote recently in a paper on distance learning.

Having seen the past, he is now witnessing the future. In the California State University system, Microsoft, Hughes Aircraft, Fujitsu and M.C.I. arranged an ambitious plan to spend $300 million on a fiber-optic network that would connect California State's 22 campuses in exchange for the right to sell a projected $3.8 billion in high-tech projects over the next decade to students and to universities. Opposition from students and faculty members killed the proposal, but plans are being reworked for a different form of corporate partnership.

It is one of several corporate alliances washing over public education in California. And it leaves Professor Feenberg profoundly uneasy about where on-line education is heading.

''This has gone from what seemed like a rather impractical scheme of some faculty weirdos and their hangers-on to become suddenly a big-time push between corporations and administrators to cut costs,'' he said. ''What I'd like to see is for the faculty to recover the initiative. Right now, the technology is being billed as doing the impossible. It's not a way to save a lot of money or replace faculty, but that's the way it's being sold. Hope is replacing serious knowledge.''

Indeed, along with the institutional feeding frenzy is a significant degree of unease on the part of many professors, who think administrators see on-line education as a way to cut back on professors and new construction.

At the University of Washington, 900 faculty members signed petitions opposing state officials' ambitious plans for a virtual university. ''We feel called upon to respond before quixotic ideas harden into disastrous policies,'' the petition said. ''Education is not reducible to the downloading of information, much less to the passive and solitary activity of staring at a screen.''

At U.C.L.A., only 30 percent of faculty members complied last year with a new requirement that all courses post a syllabus on the Internet. The American Association of University Professors, which represents the nation's college professors, says that courses taught on the Internet require more class time than regular ones and therefore require more, not fewer, instructors. Professors have also raised issues about what effect on-line courses will have on hiring, whether one-size-fits-all software will replace teachers and whether technology will undermine the relationships at the heart of education.

All universities are also struggling with issues of intellectual property rights -- does the university or the professor own the courses marketed on line?

Critics say on-line education is less about teaching than about cost-cutting and transforming teaching, via mass-produced software, into a commodity, which universities can profit from the same way they profit from research patents. Software can serve as text, study guide and learning exercises, providing all the materials needed for a course.

David F. Noble, a professor of history at York University in Toronto and currently a visiting professor at Harvey Mudd College, argues that because quality will be so hard to monitor, the growth projections are wildly inflated. On-line education, he says, will be no more than a very expensive fad, just like the vogue for correspondence courses, which peaked in the 1920's.

''There's really no case for pedagogical enhancement,'' said Dr. Noble, who has posted a series of three papers on (where else?) the Internet (communication.ucsd.edu/dl). The papers, ''Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education,'' have become ground zero for professorial skepticism about a headlong rush toward the virtual university.

Dr. Noble's qualm is not about French or Japanese executives taking Duke's M.B.A. courses, or farmers taking agronomy courses via computer at the University of Wyoming. It is about the way Internet courses will be used on campus.

One report by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts a huge shift toward electronic courses as a trend toward lifelong learning swells enrollment. The report suggests that software will serve about 50 percent of the total student enrollment in community colleges and 35 percent in four-year institutions. Which raises the specter of a tiered educational system -- green quads, small classes and Gothic touches for the privileged few -- and software for the many.

At the least, the report suggests that the real issue is how to integrate the personal qualities of great teaching with the technological advantages of learning by computer.

Nancy S. Dye, the president of Oberlin College, said she keeps hearing how distance learning in one form or another will reinvent higher education. She cites, for example, the management guru Peter Drucker's prediction that ''30 years from now, the big university campuses will be relics,'' and that the residential university is destined to give way to the virtual university.

She does not worry about that happening at elite schools like Oberlin. What she wonders is whether on-line teaching will expand access to education or whether it will provide a shriveled version to the students who can't afford the gourmet institutions.

''There is a lot of good in educational technology if we use it right,'' Dr. Dye said. ''But education will always be a social process, and it will always include face-to-face connection. What worries me is that somehow, places like Oberlin will become more the exception than the norm. That's fairly farfetched at this point, but I'm troubled by the enthusiasm with which, say, Western Governors University seems to be embracing that kind of model.''

For now, they come for many reasons.

Alyssa Cooper takes Computer-Mediated Communicationo on line at Teachers College at Columbia University because she broke her leg just before the semester started, and it would have cost a fortune in taxi fares to travel to class. Dianne Taha takes the same course while working full time in the department of instructional computing at the State University Center at Stony Brook, and Martha Luckey takes it from Japan, where she is a counselor at a school for children of American military personnel. All three women are taking these classes toward advanced degrees in instructional technology.

Paul Sikkenga, a business analyst for desktop telecommunications, is working on a degree in computer information systems at the two-year-old Florida Gulf Coast University, taking some classes on line so he does not take too much time from his job and family.

Almost all of these students see a promising but imperfect medium that will work for motivated, self-directed people, which is why on-line education is considered better for older students.

Mr. Sikkenga, like others, finds the technology both appealing and frustrating.

He could not afford the necessary software for his first Internet class, so he had to use a computer on campus. That defeated part of the purpose of taking the course on line. He is also frustrated by the plodding responses in one course's chat room -- students wait while others laboriously type in responses to instructor's questions -- and he misses the real give-and-take of a classroom.

''As this type of education matures and bandwidth on the Internet increases,'' he said, ''integration of streaming video and other types of multimedia technology may make the distance-learning class a lively and participatory experience that may eventually compete successfully with any campus-based class. Until then, I'll be very selective.''

In fact, even the biggest proponents of on-line education say that without technological advances like an increase in Web bandwidth -- transmitting more information faster -- true interactivity will be out of reach. And numerous issues, from the intellectual property rights of faculty members to monitoring test results from a distance, pose vexing problems.

But to students and teachers, on-line education offers more than convenience. For all the mythology of the classroom, many students show up and snooze rather than learn. For all the appeal of face-to-face interaction, it is hard to quarrel with the potential of M.B.A. students on three continents tackling management problems on line.

Dr. Sonnenschein said that part of the dynamic of computerized learning for him is that it forces students to focus, to be active participants in learning rather than empty vessels into which professors try to pour their knowledge.

Many students agree.

''When you sit at a computer to participate in a distance-learning class, you are there and you have already committed to participating,'' Ms. Taha said. ''It's very easy to attend a face-to-face class, but not really be there mentally.''

So if there are plenty of professors who see on-line learning as a threat, there are others drawn to something more profound than the idea of letting tired middle managers attend business school at home in their pajamas.

Mark Schroeder describes himself as an ''atomic city kid'' from Los Alamos, N.M. After graduate school in comparative literature at Columbia University, he eventually became a popular professor of humanities at the University of Colorado in Boulder. But he also became intrigued by the potential of the computer in learning, how databases and computer programs can spur new kinds of cognition that makes students active learners rather than spectators.

Four years ago, he started his own company, Digital Creators, which creates software and training programs for universities and businesses. He left his teaching position a year ago to work full time on it.

To Dr. Schroeder, on-line learning represents a natural evolution of education, from Socratic dialogue to written text to digital. He says on-line education never will -- and never should -- replace the classroom, especially for the traditional college-age market, but the technology's growth is inevitable.

''Students today no longer think textually; they think filmically,'' he said. ''This is a natural evolution. William Blake talked of taking ideas and turning them into icons and worshiping them. What we've done with technology is to turn it into an icon that people worship or they fear. But the technology is merely an extension of our capabilities, a way to expand our ability to learn. I'm not going to be an idiot and say personal contact is not important. But this is something in its infancy, and it's only going to grow.''

Thinking about studying in cyberspace? Here are questions to ask the school and yourself.

Is the program accredited, and if so, by whom? The Department of Education keeps a list of agencies that are approved to accredit schools. It is available by calling (202) 708-7417 or through its Web site: www.ifap.ed.gov/csb