Eugene, Oregon
May 13-15, 1998
Muriel Oaks, Director, Extended University Services
Washington State University
The perspective I bring to this panel is one from a traditional, land-grant institution that, before the World Wide Web was available and before there was good access to the Internet and other technology, made the decision to initiate an undergraduate degree program through distance education. When I look back on it now and recognize what we went through, I'm surprised we ever did it. But we did, and I think that's kind of important.
So I'm going to talk about our program and show you some video clips to illustrate where we are, but I am also going to talk to you about the impact of technology and networking on programs and distance education. There are a lot of things that are available from a higher education point of view and there is a very strong tendency and temptation to use all of these technologies to deliver programs no matter who you're delivering them to. I think we have learned some lessons that may be helpful to others.
As I mentioned, Washington State University is a land-grant institution. I'm sure many of you know where Pullman is, but for those who don't, if you picture the state of Washington as a sort of rectangle and recognize that the Pacific Ocean, Seattle, and most of the state's population is on the left side, we are on the right side eight miles from the Idaho border about halfway between Canada and Oregon. It's not a population center there. Even though we have 17,000 students on our campus, the impetus we have in terms of serving the state as a land-grant institution is from the point of view of this rather rural and isolated part of the state.
In about 1990, when we had spent a lot of time putting together a telecommunications system that served some of the urban areas of the state and establishing branch campuses to serve some of those underserved areas, we recognized that there were still large areas of Washington State where students could start a higher education degree through the good community college system, but they didn't have a way of completing a four-year degree unless they moved to Seattle, Ellensburg, or Pullman.
As a result, we did a needs assessment at a time--I think it was '91 when we did this survey--when people didn't know what distance education was. When we asked the question, "Would you be interested in completing your degree from Washington State University using this distance education delivery?", an overwhelming number said yes, they would be interested in that.
However, as it came out, we are talking rural areas. We are talking small towns and isolated areas where, if we had to deliver courses on-site--which is what distance education meant to a lot of people at that time--there would be no way that we could serve those people. So our challenge was to come up with a program that was a quality program. The point Bill Durden made earlier about quality is very valid. We went into distance education with the idea that it would lead to a valid Washington State University degree; it wouldn't look any different on the transcript from that of our campuses, but delivered in a way that students never had to come to campus.
We developed a degree completion program. We built in interaction in a variety of ways. We started out with the telephone because that was the technology that people had. Just to give a little background, when we started we were delivering our courses, through what was then Mind Extension University.
And we naively looked at the satellite systems and cable access around the country, a footprint that goes over the entire United States, and felt that this was the ideal way of getting to all the people in rural areas. At the time, we did not think about the fact that 1) not every cable company in this state carried Mind Extension University, and 2) those people who had satellite dishes in their backyard very often had them pointed at one specific place, one which was not Mind Extension University. They had no way of getting these courses. We recognized that we had to find a way of getting to students in a way that they had access to us. So we redesigned courses to be delivered on videotape.
Our focus, of course, was on adult learners. These distance learners are not the generation that we are dealing with now in our campus-based programs--they are not younger students who have been brought up on technology. These are adults. The average age is 37 years old. These people are intimidated by technology. Again, recognizing our audience and coming up with a delivery system that works for that audience was an important lesson for us to learn. These students are working people. They are members of communities. They can't pick up and move from where they have been.
The first degree that we offered was the social sciences degree because it gave a lot of options to students. Primarily, the courses are delivered with pre-produced videotape. The same faculty who teach the course on campus redesigned those courses for us, worked with us as a team to put them with the combination of videotape, print, and interaction on telephone and a sophisticated voice mail system.
As things have changed, technologies have been improved, and access to those technologies increases, we have tried to integrate those into our newer courses. So, certainly, we have tried to use the Web where it's available, interacting with e-mail. But the issue is that still, still today and I think for the near future, for many of the students we are trying to reach--rural, working people, of which about 80 percent are women, many of whom are single mothers--money is a big issue. So access is just not there to allow us to assume that, if we put courses on the Web or require web access, it will be available to our primary audience.
I didn't feel like I could come to this group without talking about library access for these students, because that support system, as Bill Durden already mentioned, is a crucial part of making this program successful. Our students have told us this over and over again. We did provide funding for a part-time librarian from the very beginning of this program. As a result, we are able to offer reference assistance by free telephone and e-mail. That librarian has a toll-free telephone line that goes directly to the library.
In terms of classroom delivery, we have a course that was developed for library user education specifically and a password so the students can get into our databases. We can then mail things to them within six days. Again, while we are serving the state of Washington, these programs are available nationwide and about a quarter of our students (currently about 700) are outside the state of Washington. So, we have reciprocal borrowing privileges as well as a lot of access to libraries and to on-line databases. Working with the library and working with the on-line capabilities that we offer, we are able to build these capabilities into the courses as they are designed. And when we do a team approach to course development, the library is part of that team.
One of the things that is important when we talk about the quality of education is the ability to offer things to these students on video that students in a classroom don't now get. When we talk with our faculty about developing video courses, one of the real motivators for them is when we say, "Here are some things we can do, some video we can put together for you, that you can use in your regular classroom. You can use this to serve your regular on-campus students, as well."
For example, this video starts with a clip from an English literature course on women writers in the West. We sent a videographer and the faculty member down to the ranch in Nevada where this author lives, and she not only talks about what she does and how she writes, but it gives the course a perspective that really underlines the West and the atmosphere in which this author writes.
The next clip is from a History of the Civil War course. We were able to access both Civil War photographs and also some reenactment video. These were things that we were able to get at no cost to put into this course, and the faculty member has just loved it. He's also been able to use it a lot with his on-campus courses.
Our goal is to retain the value of video while incorporating newer technologies and to realize the value that can happen when those interact. This result isn't as good right now as we'd like it to be. So that's a direction in which we are trying to move.
I want to mention a couple of network limitations that we are dealing with and that we have dealt with in this program. First of all, as I mentioned, it just wasn't available initially. We started our program in 1992, and computer interaction wasn't available. And the cost of this is still an issue for our audience. More than half the students in our program are on financial aid. Money is always an issue for them.
There are a lot of totally online programs, but those programs are not offered with the assumption that they can provide access for everybody. As a land-grant institution, our value and our whole purpose is trying to reach people in isolated parts of the state. We now have a lot of urban people in the program, but the original audience was those who live in the rural areas of the state. There are still long-distance charges in some parts of our state for the Internet services provider. So not only are there initial costs for rural users, but there are also the ongoing costs that are greater than just the monthly fee that most of us pay.
We are working toward a couple of solutions. One is that, as we are developing courses now and incorporating the network, we are also offering the video version for those students who don't yet have Internet access. In a way this is a push-pull kind of thing. We are encouraging the students to get computers, to get access, and we are giving them courses for which there will be some value added for that kind of an access.
The second thing we are doing--and I think it's an important thing--is providing and making available public access computers in places where students can go to get online access if they don't have their own computers. And we are working through cooperative extension offices, many of which are now being expanded in terms of their service to Washington State University, where people in those communities can go and have access to computers.
We've made a lot of progress, but we also have a ways to go in order to make this network environment available to everyone. In the meantime, it's very important for us to keep the rural audience in mind as we plan network learning programs to be delivered outside of our physical universities.
Thank you for your time.