Blast From My Past

For more than 25 of my 32 years in harness at the Collegium Excellens, I was involved in distance education. From 1974-2000, I either developed or coordinated telecourses (pre-recorded video courses supported by text materials and a study guide) for thousands of students. Most of the students were employed or homebound and a telecourse allowed time-shifting so that the student did not have to juggle an on-campus course and job- or home-conflicts. Early on, I was a True Believer. The telecourses—especially those courses produced by video professionals (writers and TV people)—were better organized and richer in content than the traditional courses offered in the same fields at the Collegium Excellens. Most of the professors at the Collegium Excellens were fugitives from K-12 institutions. They now were teaching in college and the last thing they could admit (to either themselves or others) was that a prerecorded video course was superior to the stuff they were offering in the classroom. On more than one occasion, I offended one of these pretenders by pointing to the superiority of the telecourse I was offering them over their traditional content. Sometimes, the truth hurts. It is a dirty little secret of beginning college courses that the content of a survey course is so broad that NO professor can possibly claim expertise in all of those areas of study. That is why—that at elite institutions (Harvard?)—most survey or beginning courses are NOT taught by the most senior members of the faculty. Those superstars are teaching courses in their specialties, NOT broad, more general courses of study. The nature of beginning courses demands that the teacher borrow (actually steal without attribution) material from textbooks other than the one assigned in the course. The students have no idea that they hearing another textbook's author's words and attribute what they are hearing to their professors' brilliance or expertise. In a two-year college, especially, this common fraud feeds the ego of the teacher.

Now, telecourses are dinosaurs. The Internet has sent video courses to oblivion. However, distance education is distance education, not matter the medium. When I supported a telecourse, I supplemented the prerecorded content with material of my own devising and made that material available to students via a Web site. Again, the protests against online courses are grounded in ego-protests that college teachers will lose prestige. If those college teachers will do the work to add their own components to online courses developed by others, they will have the best of all worlds; a win-win result is the best way to go in any situation. If this is (fair & balanced) pedagogy, so be it.

[x The Chronicle of Higher Education]
More Professors Teach by Using Other Colleges' Online Courses
By DAN CARNEVALE

New efforts help institutions trade curricula, but some faculty members are wary

John R. Marks, a professor at Zane State College, doesn't have enough spare time to convert his classroom courses to a form that could be delivered online. And the college, a two-year technical institution in Ohio, doesn't have the resources to develop as many online courses as it would like.

So Zane State officials decided to buy a couple of ready-to-deliver online courses from Kirkwood Community College, in Iowa. Now Mr. Marks teaches the courses -- on treatment of wastewater and drinking water -- as if they were his own.

"I simply did not have time to do the online development myself, and I think there are a lot of faculty out there who are in that situation," says Mr. Marks, who teaches in the departments of environmental science, safety, and health and of parks, recreation, and wildlife. "Why develop my own from scratch if there's something else out there?"

Many colleges that want to beef up their online course offerings are beginning to use online course materials developed by other institutions. Smaller institutions, especially community colleges, often cannot afford to develop distance-education materials -- which experts say are expensive to do well. And some colleges have an extensive selection of courses that they are willing to share with other institutions.

Now the haves and have-nots are beginning to swap or arrange to buy for-credit online courses. Proponents say that sharing online materials can help colleges save thousands of dollars as they create online-education programs, and several groups are now pushing the concept:

• Last month a nonprofit group called the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, in California, started an effort to create the National Repository of Online Courses, which will allow courses to be traded among institutions.




• The League for Innovation in the Community College has helped many institutions exchange courses through a project called Specialty Asynchronous Industry Learning, or SAIL, which was started last year.




• Carnegie Mellon University spun off a for-profit subsidiary in 2002 called iCarnegie that sells online courses to colleges so they can deliver the courses to their students. Carnegie Mellon is also developing an Open Learning Initiative, which provides free ready-to-deliver courses to other institutions.




• The Learning House, another for-profit company, has also been selling online courses to colleges.

But some faculty members object to the idea, arguing that professors should take an active role in developing the courses they teach.

And there are several logistical obstacles to the practice, officials say. So far, there are few ways for college officials to find out what courses are available or to publicize their own materials. Also, requirements about what material belongs in certain courses vary from state to state and college to college, bogging down the free marketability of these courses.

Exchange Programs

Some colleges find that buying online courses from other institutions is the best way to create extensive online-education programs. At Zane State College, which until June was called Muskingum Area Technical College, Mr. Marks is using the online materials he purchased from Kirkwood to teach a hybrid course. Students still show up in a classroom for lectures and labs, and they go online to learn other material and take quizzes. Mr. Marks uses the lecture time to answer questions or clarify lessons and to take students on field trips, such as a recent visit to a nearby water-sanitation station.

Kirkwood Community College hosts the courses on its computer servers, and the Zane State students log in from a distance. Mr. Marks says he has full control over the courses, teaching the lessons in any order he pleases -- and cutting some material that he feels is not relevant.

"Instructors have the ability to individualize it," Mr. Marks says. "I was able to maintain control over the course by going to the hybrid format."

Zane State pays Kirkwood $50 for every student who takes the course, a cost the college passes on to the students who enroll. Mr. Marks says he doesn't know how much it would cost to develop the course in-house, but he estimates that the college saves thousands of dollars by outsourcing.

He emphasizes, though, that the biggest saving is in his time. It would take him months to develop a course, and while doing that he would not be able to teach as much. "I have virtually no time in my current role as a faculty member to develop anything like that," he says. "It's not like teaching in high school where you have substitutes who can take over."

Douglas C. Elam, project manager for environmental technology online at Kirkwood, says the college provides online courses to hundreds of institutions, most of them using the material on a noncredit basis. "We should share each others' curriculum as much as we can," he says.

So far, Kirkwood has not used course materials from other institutions on its campus, but Mr. Elam says the college is evaluating some materials from other institutions and may do so in the future.

Cost Savings

Proponents of the idea argue that course swapping will catch on quickly once colleges realize the benefits.

A college can save money by purchasing online courses instead of sinking the resources into developing them, says A. Frank Mayadas, director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's grant program for online education, which is financing projects to help spur the exchange of online courses, including a $225,000 grant to Project SAIL.

"In order to get to the next level of scale, you're going to have to look at sharing," Mr. Mayadas says. "Sharing is going to become more and more important."

Mr. Mayadas says nonprofit colleges are applying lessons learned from for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix. He says that that institution has become successful, in part, by having content experts develop online courses, and then training other adjunct professors to teach them.

"There was an idea that this was a great thing to do from practically the very beginning, and it has been slow to take off," he says. "And it has been slow because it's not in higher education's nature to buy things. They tend to handcraft things."

Rhonda Epper, director of online program development at the Community College of Denver, says her institution has been able to buy and sell courses, letting the college expand some online programs while helping others expand theirs. The Denver college teaches a public-security management program that it got from Kirkwood Community College, and it is providing nursing courses to Central Arizona College.

The Arizona college is paying $1,000 for two-credit courses and $1,500 for three-credit courses per semester. That is compared to the $10,000 that the Community College of Denver spent to develop each course. The college that purchases the courses can customize them as professors see fit, but the institution isn't allowed to resell the courses to anyone, Ms. Epper says.

Buying the courses proved much easier than developing the courses in-house, she says -- and the quality was just as high. "The primary motivation for us is solving immediate needs for work-force and training development," Ms. Epper says. "We don't have to spend the resources to develop a new program if it's already developed."

Threatening Faculty Roles?

But some professors don't want nonprofit colleges emulating for-profit enterprises. The American Association of University Professors, a faculty union, is opposed to having faculty members teach courses they did not create.

Donald R. Wagner, who was chairman of AAUP's distance-education committee, says having professors teach online courses they did not create undermines their role at their institution.

"It cuts to the heart of what a faculty member is," Mr. Wagner says. "When an institution of higher education hires a faculty member, the faculty member is supposed to teach, participate in university affairs in some way as a form of service, and participate in scholarship."

Mr. Wagner is also a professor of political science at the State University of West Georgia and is its director of special programs there, including the distance- and distributed-learning programs. He says that he is not concerned about the use of the purchased material for noncredit courses, which do not intrude on the role of professors at colleges.

But for-credit courses should continue to be developed by the professor who plans to teach them, he says. Even if the courses are online and professors gets additional help in development, Mr. Wagner says it is important for the professors to be involved throughout the creation process. Otherwise, he says, the quality of teaching could suffer.

"If it's something you haven't developed yourself, you're simply a talking head," Mr. Wagner says. "It may be a cost-saving measure in the short term, but in the long term it reduces what the faculty member is."

Mr. Mayadas says he has not heard much opposition to course-swapping at campuses that have tried it, however. But he notes that the concept is still new and has not been widely discussed. "Occasionally you'll hear grumbling within institutions," he says. "You'll hear more grumbling if it begins to become a significant trend."

Sally Johnstone, director of the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, says the professors who are most opposed to buying online courses are not the ones teaching at a distance, so she doesn't expect too many complaints in the years to come.

"The reality is most traditional faculty are not the primary folks who are teaching online," Ms. Johnstone says. "It's not a big issue for them. It's not in their classrooms."

But it can be difficult to exchange courses when different states and institutions have different requirements about what the course content covers, says Mr. Elam of Kirkwood Community College. For example, although the principles of wastewater management are the same everywhere, some states have different requirements about what should be included in public-college courses that cover that topic. So when Kirkwood sold online courses on that subject to Zane State College, Mr. Marks had to add some material to meet Ohio's requirements.

Mr. Elam says the red tape can be burdensome, but not prohibitive. "You just have to jump through all the hoops," he says. "As time moves on, people will become more accepting of it."

Connecting Colleges

So far these course exchanges are being brokered by nonprofit organizations studying the trend and for-profit companies. Stella Perez, director and senior consultant for online initiatives in charge of the League for Innovation's Project SAIL, says the purpose of the program is to help colleges find each other so they can exchange courses, and it even helped the Community College of Denver and Zane State College find institutions that provided online courses. "SAIL is about a college-to-college connection," she says. "What we want to do is bring colleges together."

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation financed the program with an 18-month, $225,000 grant. Ms. Perez says the league has just submitted a proposal for a three-year extension.

Currently SAIL has helped foster 18 matches between institutions, with more than 35 courses being swapped. Ms. Perez says it can be difficult to get past the attitude of "not our kind, dear," at institutions. But SAIL has been able to overcome that attitude by focusing on specialty courses -- ones that are not widely available, like archive management for museum studies, heating and air-conditioning repair, and funeral directing. Courses in these topics are less likely to step on toes at any college, she says.

"Most people don't have a funeral-directing program that they're trying to upgrade," Ms. Perez says. "It's not English, and there's not a million ways to teach it."

Last month, the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education received a $1.5-million grant to create its online repository to help colleges looking for ready-to-deliver online course content find institutions willing to provide it.

The grant came from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has financed several higher-education programs, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare project, which makes course materials available free on the Web, though the materials are not designed as ready-to-deliver at other institutions. "There's no question that there's a huge hunger out there for more quality courseware and more quality materials," says Eric Brown, communications director at the foundation.

The Monterey institute, which works to improve the quality and availability of online educational resources, will concentrate on finding college-level online courses and, with a little tinkering, distributing them to colleges, as well as to high schools that need online Advanced Placement courses.

Gary Lopez, executive director of the institute, says the repository would not act just as a virtual warehouse for courses. The institute will also work with colleges and other organizations to fine-tune and help disseminate the courses.

"Our job is to find them, make them useful for students, and to distribute them," he says.

The institute will spend tens of thousands of dollars refining courses to make sure they are ready for widespread distribution, Mr. Lopez says. In order to break even, it will require colleges and organizations that can afford to do so to pay to use the materials. But he says the institute would keep the prices as low as possible.

"We're not looking for anybody to line their pockets with this," he says. "Basically our purpose is to be a break-even organization."

So far, the University of California College Prep outreach program has agreed to provide courses for the repository. And the institute has found at least one customer, the Illinois State Board of Education, which plans to use the materials for online Advanced Placement courses for the state's high school students, he says.

Money to Be Made

As for making money off this new phenomenon, Learning House has a head start. Learning House, based in Kentucky, offers about 90 courses on a variety of topics, including criminal justice, social work, and health care. The company leases the courses instead of selling them, meaning colleges can use them but they do not own the rights to them.

Denzil Edge, president and chief executive officer of Learning House, was a professor at the University of Louisville before he started the company with his wife. He says his customers are often professors who have been told by their administrators that they have to start teaching online. "I've had grown men cry in my office because some administrator tells them they have to go out and build these courses, and nobody tells them what to do," he says.

So Mr. Edge builds the courses for them. He hires content experts and technology personnel to construct each course, which typically costs $35,000 to $55,000 and takes about 300 hours of work, he says. Then he leases the courses to colleges, charging them a percentage of tuition and fees that the colleges make.

Midway College, in Kentucky, became a recent customer of Learning House. This fall the college began providing two of the company's online-education degree programs, in teacher education and in nursing. Midway plans to offer two more -- in organizational management and in health-care administration -- this spring. The college pays Learning House about one-sixth of the tuition -- which can cost about $390 per credit hour -- that it generates through the courses.

Although he would not give specifics, Mr. Edge says the company is doing quite well. "I usually don't talk about profit, but we're way beyond the seven-figure-per-year," he says. "We're very much in the black."

He expects his business to continue to do well as more colleges start buying online courses. "The fastest growing market is obviously the adult-education market," Mr. Edge says. "Small colleges are really being hit because the demographic is changing in their face, and they don't know what's happening."

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education