Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?: Uses of Educational Technologies to Serve Non-Traditional Students
Hannah Choi, Adam Fein, Faye Lesht, and Tony Suttle (Academic Outreach)
In this Brown Bag, prominent staff from the Academic Outreach division spoke about how the Urbana campus has engaged in distance education and various forms leading up to e-learning for over 70 years. The session reflected on how evolving educational technology has served students on and off the Illinois campus and how that impact will take shape in the future. The first speaker, Faye Lesht, noted that this is the 75th anniversary of Academic Outreach on this campus, with the first distance learning program founded in 1933 and the first online master's degree program in 1996. Today, there are 9 online masters degree programs offered to adult part-time students. There are online certificate programs as well as undergraduate courses. All in all, 7000 students were enrolled in 400 courses last year. The increased use of a valuable course delivery tool, Elluminate, has further led to the transition of off-campus programs to an online format. The number of courses and enrollment has continued to rise steadily in recent years. The greatest growth has been in the online sector. They explained that further growth will require Academic Outreach to continue to work hand-in-hand with faculty, as they described their operation as "faculty-oriented." They depend upon faculty for course "content capture" – the biggest challenge they face. In order to be effective, they need a strong partnership with academic and administrative units for content capture as well as credit distribution.
Adam Fein, a Program Director for Education and Human Services, described his role as bridging the gap between faculty, students, and staff. He also discussed effective uses of educational technology to reach non-traditional students. There are three program directors primarily serving as liaisons for coordination and management as well as market researchers. They also must have a strong working knowledge of technology, as they are heavily involved in training. As program managers, they manage a staff of graduate assistants.
Tony Suttle, Instructional Media Planner, spoke about the technologies they have used and future implications. The newest technologies include videoconferencing, on-line tools (Compass, Moodle, Elluminate, Streaming video). In the near future, he envisions growth in delivery to personal devices as well as on-demand content involving the web, cable, and satellite.
Hannah Choi, specializing in Education Instruction Design, shared ways by which they have worked with faculty to deliver high-quality online offerings. This involves filling the gap between the instructional needs and the newest technology. In this way, they are actively involved in helping achieve learning objectives. The use of e-reserve materials is one example of how they work to deliver online content for instructional needs.
Finally, Peg Wherry discussed the student perspective. While being faculty-oriented in organization, they are quick to acknowledge that they have to be sensitive to the needs of its students. For example, they have recently developed programs with the purpose of enhancing learning of people off-campus. She emphasized that time as big a barrier to access as geography. In particular, many working people have complicated schedules leaving them with few options.
In the Q&A session, challenges and opportunities of online and distance education were explored. Interdisciplinary courses and studies may be particularly well suited for an online format given how it allows contribution of content from many different sources or simply shared courses. From a student perspective, it is common to find that in on-line courses there is more direct one-on-one teacher-student interaction than in the traditional classroom. Copyright issues may present challenges, but that can be overcome by different strategies including using technology to allow many people to access a "single instance" of a work rather than engaging in multiple reproduction of that material.
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