Clark Atlanta Moving Toward Online Education

Technology-steered teaching, known as distance learning, is taking a major leap at Clark Atlanta University. But experience shows that the program is not for everyone.

The distance learning pilot program, a vision of Associate Provost Dr. Betty Clark, will assure students the opportunity to take needed courses online through Web-enhanced, or distance learning courses.

Clark said the program was initially designed to attract more students to the university without requiring an in-class presence.

"We allowed students who were already enrolled at the university to take distance learning courses as part of our pilot program to determine the feasibility of offering distance learning courses to the external population," she explained. "Our plan is to offer our first set of distance learning courses to the external population in January 2003."

The program currently involves 20 pioneer faculty members and 47 courses. It is expected to offer video teleconferencing equipment that will enable the center to offer two-way live video courses to seven sites simultaneously.

A Clark Atlanta student in Africa or India could take courses where they are.

"The major objective for DL courses is not just for CAU students, it is to meet everybody," said Dr. Young H. Kim, professor and chairman of decision sciences for the School of Business Administration, who also participates as an online instructor in the Web-enhanced and distance learning courses at Clark Atlanta.

Many students and faculty see such courses as encouragement to go to college.

"If you live in Macon, Ga., you wouldn't want to drive to Atlanta to take a course," reasoned George Wright, associate director of distance learning at Georgia Tech University. "Not everybody has the luxury of being able to go to college and be in a class all day long."

Georgia Tech, which has had distance learning since 1977, sees the program primarily as an educational fishing net to hook prospective students. "It's added more students. The program is growing tremendously," Wright said. "These are people who are working full-time, so with the program, they are able to get a Georgia Tech master's without ever having to come on campus."

In Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University has used distance learning for three years, but it is not well-advertised and does not have a large enrollment.

"Students who are enrolled in the class anyway, they live in the Boston area and they would use the Web component to enhance their learning. So it increases our class sizes between 10 and 20 percent," said Dr. Shawn Murphy, professor of neurobiology at Harvard University's Medical School. "There's a certain fraction of people who don't have any other alternative than to do DL. People do DL because it's the best they can do," he added.

The students taking the Harvard online courses are known as "hyper-students," older students with families, or employed students whose company is paying for their education. "It's got a limited repertoire of people that it services. I don't think it's going to get hugely bigger," Murphy said.

There are negative concerns, he said. "We receive a lecture, and there's a lot of technical things that can go wrong, like the thing can just crash in the middle of it, which makes it kind of tough for the students," Murphy said.

And although there are online video conferencing centers from around the world, class group chat rooms and prerecorded tapes of lectures that can be viewed at any time, "you can't raise your hand to ask a question," Murphy said.

"It was challenging not having one-on-one contact with a professor," agreed Allastir Hayes, an MBA graduate from Clark Atlanta's class of 2002.

"We had to learn how to do HTML to do a Web site, and had no contact with anybody." added Hayes, who took Decision Sciences online.

"We receive, relatively speaking, not favorable feedback regarding the course," acknowledged Kim of Clark Atlanta's School of Business Administration. "Our customer students, they don't like 100 percent DL courses, so we encourage Web-enhanced. The DL course is ongoing online communication between instructors and students, even though the faculty does not have to show up to the classroom."

Clark, the associate provost, said that "the university's technological infrastructure is still being upgraded and has increased its bandwidth, which will allow students faster and easier access to their distance learning courses and instructors."

She has asked the distance learning task force to develop a student evaluation of the instruction for online courses. The instrument is set to be administered this semester. As of now, Clark sees the success of the program coming from student efforts.

"DL courses should be taken by those students who are self-motivated and independent. Students who have need to see and to be able to talk to their instructors should not enroll in DL courses," Clark maintained.

Murphy, who opts to stick to tradition, sees technology as no substitute for the fruits of a classroom. "Can't nothing replace the in-class experience, there's nothing like it. In a play, the audience doesn't interact wit the players and in a class you get a lot of interactions."

Georgia Tech's Wright agreed. "There's times when you have to put all the stuff aside and say, 'OK, let's break into groups."

Linda Hobbs is a student at Clark Atlanta University and writes for The Panther newspaper.