Going the Distance
by Erica Schloeder
They call it “distance education,” but you don’t have
to go very far to find it.
These days, educators recognize that many students – especially
students in New Jersey – have to work while they earn their degree
to keep up with the high cost of living.
The University of Phoenix, “the largest private university in North
America, with nearly 200 convenient locations, as well as Internet delivery
in most countries around the world,” as stated on the school’s
Web site has had online programs available since 1999.
“All of our degree programs can be obtained entirely online,”
said Timothy Moscato, University of Phoenix’s regional vice president
for the Northeast. “Right now, really the most popular (online degrees)
are business programs. ... At associate levels, (they are) health care,
criminal justice and accounting.”
When asked how it is possible to achieve health care degrees online, he
said some of the programs do require some lab hours, and that what the
university will do is set up clinics at local hospitals for the students.
Not all health care programs require clinics; however, many of the jobs
in that field are administrative.
Dr. Phil DiSalvio, executive director of Seton Worldwide, Seton Hall’s
distance education learning program, agreed that the business and health
care professions garner the most interest in their online degrees.
“It’s the future,” DiSalvio said. “Because nurses
today really don’t have time to conform to a schedule that is traditional
in nature… I think that’s part of the reason for the popularity
of the programs.”
Seton Hall’s online degree programs, which were launched in 1998,
according to DiSalvio, uses a lot of multimedia, PowerPoint, and video/audiotaped
lectures; and ongoing discussion between the students and teacher in the
virtual classroom is what holds the courses together.
Transferability of the online course credits varies at the discretion
of the school being asked to accept them. Students wishing to obtain full
degrees through online programs would do well to research the regional
accreditation of the school.
Accreditation of these schools is not regulated by the United States government,
but is done by accrediting agencies – private regional or national
associations that have adopted criteria reflecting the qualities of a
sound educational program. Procedures have been developed for evaluating
institutions or programs to determine whether or not they are operating
at basic levels of quality.
Nonetheless, the U.S. Department of Education Web site, www.ed.gov,
posts a list of the schools that are accredited and have been deemed legitimate
by designated accrediting agencies. It also offers some insight into the
steps students should take when considering obtaining credits toward their
degrees via online courses.
“To determine if a school or program is going to meet your needs,
in addition to checking the accreditation status, contact the institutions
to which you might be interested in transferring, prospective employers,
and if possible, visit the school.”
In addition to the aforementioned degrees and programs, there are also
institutions that offer continued education courses online toward licenses
and certifications. These are typical among – but not limited to
– people who already have careers that’ may require refresher
courses to keep their credentials up-to-date.
Access Training has been offering online courses in environmental health
and safety training for the last two years in an effort to keep up with
the growing popularity of online education.
“We had been losing trainees to online portal training, so we decided
it was the market we had to get into,” said Mark Schlager, who helped
to found Access Training 13 years ago.
He went on to say that the certifications offered through Access Training
are typically OSHA compliant refresher courses including hazardous waste,
construction safety and hospital safety just to name a few, and that they
can range in time from two to 40 hours to complete.
Ed Davies, director of operations at the American School of Business,
a school that began offering online courses in 2004, said availability
was the catalyst for their online courses.
“In 2004, the Department of Banking and Insurance in New Jersey
expanded their guidelines to allow for online insurance continuing education
programs,” Davies said. “That was the start for us.”
From an educator’s standpoint, teaching an online course is a different
experience from teaching in the classroom. Justine Sanchez is an online
instructor and curriculum content provider for Solar Energy International,
a non-profit education and training organization that has been offering
online training programs since 1998.
“As a teacher, it has been a great experience for me to be able
to teach and interact with students from across the (United States) and
from around the world. It truly gives me hope for a sustainable future
as I see our students interact with one another and take this knowledge
into their homes, neighborhoods, and corners of the world,” said
Sanchez.
While online courses and programs are referred to as “virtual,”
they do not just materialize out of the vastness of Cyberspace. A lot
of time and money goes into creating online programs, and schools will
often turn to third-party agencies to coordinate and implement these programs.
Compass Knowledge Group is one of these agencies, and began working on
creating a distance learning program for the University of Florida back
in 1996. Dan Divine, CEO of Compass Knowledge, said creating and marketing
an online degree program can cost “hundreds of thousands, sometimes
millions of dollars.” But a successful program is worth it, he added.
“We’ve had a tremendous amount of success,” Divine said
of the online programs Compass Knowledge currently offers for about 13
schools. He said as long as the school can provide the faculty to teach
the online courses, the third party will do everything else.
“We’ll look at a marketplace … identify one to five
education programs (that would do best online), put those programs online,
generate students’ interest,” Divine said, adding that they
will also “work with prospective students and assist them through
the process.”
Considering these distance learning programs are growing exponentially
in popularity, some third-party agencies will go so far as to front the
money to start up the programs.
Bart Levitt, senior vice president of the Ontario-based Embanet, said
launch times may vary with the goals of the university and faculty objectives,
but that programs can be launched more aggressively if the university
desires.
“We provide marketing services to recruit interested students for
our clients. What makes us unique is that we make this investment with
our own capital with no outlay by our university clients,” said
Levitt. “We attract thousands of students each year with our understanding
of the online student market and a sophisticated media buying team.”
He also mentioned that Embanet offers its own education portal “to
attract interested students looking for college online.”
While distance learning may, at the moment, seem like the wave of the
future, as New Jersey and the rest of the world increase in pace of life
and population, online courses and programs will no doubt become more
available and diverse. And judging by the volume of students and prospective
students in New Jersey alone, the future is now.
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