Emma Gordon Blass
Online learning is the ideal way for mature students to further their education
If you are over 25 and considering returning to university to requalify or to get an advanced degree in your professional area, then e-learning was invented with you in mind.
What is e-learning and why is it targeting adult learners? It is the application of advanced information technology in particular the Internet to education, allowing learning to move beyond the physical constraints of traditional classrooms and become accessible to students wherever they are and at times that are convenient for them. What is there to stop South African students from enrolling at virtual universities based in other countries? Nothing as long as they are prepared to pay fees in foreign currency and fulfil certain prerequisites.
E-learning technologies are not just being used for distance education but are increasingly being adopted by on-campus institutions as well to improve efficiency and lower costs of providing student administration services. In the United States, university managers are finding on-campus students like the convenience of using e-learning-type resources, and are demanding access to more online resources, such as e-libraries and course notes on the Internet. The worlds of online and on-campus learning are starting to join together.
There is nothing particularly revolutionary about universities using new technologies to serve their student populations better. What is new is the phenomenal growth of online programmes aimed at attracting non-traditional students, or “mature students”, such as working adults and stay-at-home parents.
Market research in the US indicates that there are currently more than two million students taking online courses at US-based higher education institutions, most of whom are working adults. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, mature students now account for more than 40% of students enrolled in post- secondary education.
The growth of online university programmes is not without controversy in the higher education field. Like the correspondence courses that preceded it, e-learning is tainted by the criticism that it is a second-rate educational experience that robs learners of the rich educational benefits of in-person instruction, personal interactions between students and faculty, and access to on-campus learning resources.
It is one thing for established non-profit universities to offer online components of their degree programmes, but when for-profit private institutions set themselves up as “virtual universities” offering degrees entirely by online learning, the higher-education community starts to cry foul play. Especially when such institutions gain recognition from one of the leading accreditation organisations in the US, as was the case in 2001 when Jones International University was accredited by the higher-learning commission of the North Central Association (NCA).
This event evoked a formal protest from the American Association of University Professors, the foremost representative body for the academic community in the US, on the grounds that the NCA had lowered its academic standards to unacceptable levels by giving accreditation to Jones with its meagre degree offerings, its handful of untenured full-time staff and an e-library. The accreditors defended their decision by saying that Jones had met current standards of quality for distance education. Clearly, recognised accreditation for online universities is levelling the playing field between traditional and non-traditional institutions in the market for mature students.
The accusation that online programmes are inferior to on- campus ones is not supported by recent research studies comparing the two modes. A traditional institution staffed by faculty who do not know how to teach and where libraries are poorly stocked can produce poor-quality education that is comparable to the worst correspondence college.
Advocates of online learning point out that it offers revolutionary teaching methods that address some of the difficulties posed by distance education. For example, online programmes that make use of Internet conferencing facilities can create virtual classrooms that are as dynamic and interactive as the best classroom-based lecture. Better, in fact, according to Darcy Harding, director of UT Telecampus, the distance-learning arm of the University of Texas system, because the virtual conference room is “better than a classroom for the student in the back row”. Every student has to participate in the discussion, she points out, and the discussion format “gives them more time to think about what they want to say”.
The University of Phoenix, an accredited for-profit institution that has recently claimed the title of being the largest university in the US, enrolling more than a 100 000 students, makes use of an unusual curriculum model to cater to the needs of its mature student body. Instead of multiple subjects per semester, students enrol in one course at a time that they focus on intensively for a five-week period. Each week students participate in two or three asynchronous conference-based discussions, and every student is obliged to make a specific number of postings to the discussion, although they can do so at any time during the day that is convenient for them.
According to Brian Muller, chief operations officer of University of Phoenix Online, the highly structured nature of the programmes makes it easier for busy adult learners to complete them. “We oblige them to be involved in the programme in a consistent way,” he says. “This is a very social type of education, not lonely, isolating and boring. Our students have more regular contact with faculty and each other than in conventional programmes.”
Online learning offers the potential for state-of-the art, multi-media-rich learning materials and simulations, although, in practice, most online programmes make small use of this potential, both because these materials are expensive to develop and because they are cumbersome for students who do not have high-speed connections to the Internet.
What counts, educationally speaking, is the effectiveness of the curriculum design, which cannot be replaced by technological bells and whistles. As Harding points out, the teaching faculties that develop these online course materials find themselves learning much more about curriculum design than they knew before. “Most of them had never taken a course in instructional design and didn’t know anything about learning outcomes. You can’t get away with that in online courses,” she says.
Access to full-text library resources from the convenience of your home computer is another clear benefit of online learning for the busy adult learner.
Ultimately, online learning makes similar demands of adult learners as any type of distance education. “Studying online is not for 18- to 20-year-olds,” says Mike Offerman, president of Capella University, an accredited for-profit university that specialises in Internet-based master’s and doctoral degrees in business, education, psychology and information technology. “Online learning is better suited to people who have been out in the workforce”, he says, “because you have to be well-organised and self-disciplined, have good study skills and a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish.”
Emma Gordon Blass is an educationalist, researcher and writer based in Hoboken, New Jersey. She is the CEO of Tutor Suite LLC