(Links to sections of the Case Study)

This was a learning experience for the instructor as well as the students.

A brief and selective history of the use of information technology for education.

Online is a specific subset of Distance Education

A course taught using the tools described in the course!

Being a Pioneer: The University hadn't thought through the registration information it needed from online students in order to get the course started. Like e-mail addresses to provide the instructor.

There was one class meeting, organized by the instructor the first Saturday of classes.

The elements of the online course:

Frequent interaction was considered essential.

Ask Bob was an half way device to replicate a small part of what would have been in a lecture.

Assignments that had to be submitted each week.

Extensive use of the Listserv.

Going into the course, students overestimated their existing Internet skills.

The open ended course evaluation was a rich vein of feedback. Some students thought there was more community online line in a classroom.

The instructor's course evaluation: "More labor intensive than I imagined."

Further developments in the technologies are needed for a more robust online teaching environment

Online courses have a place in university education. The technologies will continue getting easier to use, cheaper to provide, and both students and teachers will become more comfortable with the process.

For now, online education should be viewed as a means for serving specific niches, not as a replacement for the traditional classroom.

Universities need to address a number of policy issues is they want to offer online courses.

In May 1997 Robert Marshall, a professor at an urban East Coast University, was submitting his grades for his course, Introduction to Cybermedia. It was the third time he had taught this course he created in 1996, in response to the growing influence of the Internet and World Wide Web in his mass communications discipline.

But most of what was on his mind was how to evaluate and describe the experiment he had just concluded. For this semester, Introduction to Cybermedia was taught totally online. There was one class meeting. All the interaction between him and his students was electronic. The only formal contact students had with each other was also online.

How did the students feel about this approach to education? Were they well served by the online format? How did he feel about this pioneering journey? Was it satisfying? Would he recommend the technique be expanded at the University? What worked, what was missing?

Robert Marshall was not a computer expert.. But over the years he had found that various computer applications had helped him in his research and writing at the universities where he worked and taught. In early 1995 he had his first experience with the World Wide Web. His first, second and third impressions: this medium is not a fad. It had substance and depth.

The subject of the course was the the process that was employed for conducting it -- the Internet and the World Wide Web. The course was officially in the School of Communications at the University.

Dr. Marshall created the course and first taught it in a conventional class room setting in the Spring 1996 semester. It was repeated again as a classroom course in Fall 1996. This time it was held in one of the University's new "Smart Classrooms," which included multiple network-connected PCs and a large projection display.

In the first iteration, only about one third of the readings were available online. For Fall 1996 Marshall was able to find more material online. By the time of the online course the only two books that the students used were Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital and Learning to Use the World Wide Web, by Ernest Ackermann.

At the end of the course, both students and instructor had some very firm opinions and observations on the pros and cons of teaching and learning online. From Marshall's perspective, the negatives outweighed the positives. But, as described below, for some students anything lost by going online was more than compensated for by what they gained. For some students, half a loaf was better than none.

First, some background on how an online course came to be offered at a traditional university. Then some detail on how the students evaluated their experience. Finally, Marshall's take on the "virtual classroom."

Prologue

Information technologies have been changing education since the development of written language. Writing and books replaced the oral tradition in most societies. The printing press made books and periodicals more widely available. The stream driven press and trains helped make free, mass education a reality.

But these developments were the result on long trends, spread over decades or centuries. More recently we have lived through several "revolutions" in technologies that some predicted would fundamentally change formal education. In the short term at least, they have been more bust than boon.

There was Thomas Edison's 1930s prediction that film and recordings would replace books in schools. Wrong. The early predictions of television were about its impact on learning and teaching. We have learned from television, but not always in the way that educators and technologists envisioned.

Sunrise Semester notwithstanding, television has proven be to be niche player in formal education, even 50 years after its commercial introduction.

By the 1960s there was great hope for the computer as a center piece of the new education. Control Data Corporation lead the way, with the Plato program. This relied on a massive (for the time) main frame computer with dumb terminals in schools around the country. Students could use various programs for drill, programmed learning and a variety of "student friendly" options. To oversimplify, high costs did it in. (See Anthony G. Oettinger, Run, Computer Run Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1969, for insights into what the author calls "The mythology of education innovation.").

The personal computer has made serious inroads into the schools, as well as the home. But its value in the delivery of education remains to be writ large -- it certainly has not yet had the fundamental impact of writing or the printing press - though it may. Much of the use of PCs for education has been as an aid, such as for word processing or calculation or as a vehicle for data bases. In higher education it has been finding practical uses in the sciences for modeling and simulation. But much of the software for computers has been updated versions of old flash cards and tutorials for reading: far form worthless, but not really fundamental.

Then came the Internet. Essentially this brought together the personal computer, less than 20 years old as a viable product, with the telecommunications network, well over 100 years old, but never closely associated with the education process.

The glitzy part of the Internet is the World Wide Web. Although its genesis dates back all the way to 1991, its popularization can be traced to the commercialization of the graphic browser by Netscape in 1994. There are three characteristics that made the Web such a promising development that earlier uses of the computer missed.

1. First, unlike Plato and other early computer-based models, the Web is extremely decentralized. It did not require a single service provider to create the content. It did not rely on one or a few "publishers" to create the content that teachers would need.
2. Second, it is cheap. It relies on the economics of packet switching, greatly reducing the telecommunications costs of older models of mainframe and remote terminals that used dedicated leased circuits. It revolves around personal computers, which are affordable enough to be bought by the dozens in even the poorest school districts (Left for another venue is the degree and import of so-called "information gaps" between richer and poor schools and students).
3. Third, compared to previous systems, it was easy to use.

What has so far been the "killer application" of the Internet -- the reason more people initially set-up and log-on -- appears to be electronic mail and the related forms of communication, such as distribution lists and UseNet groups. Although information providers like to believe that the Internet is about content -- and it may be some day -- the content most people claim to desire for now is that which they create and receive in the form of personal and targeted messages.

Electronic mail, like old fashioned print mail, is an asynchronous form of communication. That is, unlike a telephone conversation (but like an answering machine or service) it does not require that the participating parties be "online" at the same time.

The World Wide Web component of the Internet is certainly compelling. There is a vast array of information and entertainment available, ranging from highly academic and technical to trivial to obscene. In a word, it is as democratic a mass medium as society has ever seen. Although mass media companies and commercial concerns have reportedly spent millions of dollars to develop and maintain their sites, an individual can have a fully operational Web presence with an investment of under $2000 and an incremental cost of $20 per month. The arcane commands of the HTML symbols that define Web pages can now be bypassed with software, such as Microsoft's FrontPage, that make creation of Web pages about as complicated as using a word processor.

Online Course vs Distance Education

Distance Education (sometimes Distance Learning) is a phrase that applies to any number of techniques that evoke the notion of students and teacher being in different places. The original distance education format was a correspondence course, using the mail service.

Telephony and broadcasting added another possibilities for conducting at-a-distance courses. Most popular has been various video approaches. Some early versions, such as Sunrise Semester in the 1950s, involved using one-way broadcasting for the instructor to reach the students, then mail for submission and return of materials.

Video conferencing has been the latest iteration of distance education. Using satellite or terrestrial links, an instructor in one location can meet with a class in a distant location. The return path from students to teacher might be a simply telephone-based audio hook-up. But with increasing capability of computers and telephony, systems such as Intel's ProShare and elaborate networks, such as LearnLinc, are making two way video between instructors and multiple remote sites feasible.

Distance education courses using video conferencing, however, are like traditional classes in that that are synchronous, or real time. That is, students have to be in the remote classroom or at the connected PC at the appointed day and hour for the class.

An online course, on the other hand, is asynchronous. Like a correspondence course, students can work whenever it is most convenient. The instructor need not be at a specific place at a designated time. This has the advantage of allowing students to participate whose work or personal schedules did not allow them to attend a fixed-time day class. It also means that students need not travel to the site of a video conference, opening up the course to an infinite range of locations.

Introduction to Cybermedia

As offered for the Spring 1997 semester, Introduction to Cybermedia was totally online. No weekly class meetings were held.

Marshall's personal aspiration for the course was that it would be a vehicle to attract a true distance insensitive class. For him, the value of an online format was to provide the wherewithal for those who could not come to a classroom at the University at an arbitrarily fixed time several times a week to take the course.

The University did little marketing for the course. Marshall put out some news of the course on a Listserv of journalists, and others involved in online news and had several responses, from as far away as Seattle and Toronto.

In the end, most of the students, however, turned out to be matriculated undergraduate students. One student lived in another state and was trying to finish his degree without having to be on campus. As it happened, he was also blind. Another student, Marshall learned, took courses on campus but was confined to a wheel-chair. For him, the online format reduced the days he had to be on campus. Several other members of the class made it clear that because of their daytime jobs, they could not have taken this course. For the most part, those enrolled did so because they wanted or needed this course and they learned incidentally that it was being conducted online. They didn't seek out this format.

The Hazards of Being a Pioneer

The seven Online Learning (OLL) courses the University offered in Spring 1997 were the start of the OLL program. A few previous forays involved several course that mixed regular class meeting with online elements or were established from the start as continuing education courses.

This meant that the OLL office, staffed by a part-time faculty member and several graduate student assistants, did not really have all the contingencies and policies in place for organizing online courses.

Some examples:

• The University did not have a procedure to collect e-mail addresses from students who signed up for online courses. This meant that Marshall could not get in touch with the students before the start of the semester -- or for that matter at all.
• The University had not really thought through what tuition scheme would be appropriate for out-of-state nonmatriculated (being state supported, in-state tuition for traditional students was lower).
• The "handbook" that was mailed to online student before the semester did not adequately address the types of questions an online student would have: how do they get in touch with their instructor? How and when did the course actually "start?" What was the URL for the homepage for the course?
• The University did not have have in place a method for evaluating the effectiveness, the success, or failure of an online course.

Based on some reading he had done about online conferences and literature about the benefits of personal contacts making later telephone conversations more effective, Marshall decided very early that he would schedule one class session the first week of classes. Months before registration, Marshall included on the homepage for the course-to-be that there was a required three hour class on the first Saturday morning of the semester for anyone living within 150 miles of the University.

The first hint of the problems Marshall would face came during the semester break that stretched from early December through mid-January. He wanted to make sure that all those who were registered know about the Saturday meeting. Marshall contacted the University, asking for the e-mail addresses of those who were registered. He learned they didn't have them. After several weeks, the University faxed him a list with email addresses of most of the students, with postal addresses for those who did not have e-mail.

He signed them on to a Listserv he had set up and started a series of email messages. Marshall told them about the class meeting and asked that they e-mail me confirmation of receipt. Not much happened.

Marshall eventually learned that the list of -mail addresses was not from self-reported addresses. Instead, the computer people simply "fingered" each student and copied the e-mail address they had been assigned by the University. There were several problems with this.

1. Many students had several accounts on different University servers. The one that Marshall was sent was necessarily the one they checked regularly.
2. Quite a few students didn't use their University accounts at all. Because the University had provided PPP connections only starting late in the Fall term, many motivated students had opened commercial account, with America Online or Internet Service Providers.
3. Because this was semester break, those students who did not have their owns computers (about half the class) could only check e-mail when on campus. They were not around to do this until the first day of classes, four days before the scheduled Saturday meeting.
4. Finally, even those students who Marshall sent letters to did not respond. In some cases the address was that of a parent, not the apartment where the student lived. Or they were away over the break. or they had moved altogether.

Thus, it was not until the first several days of classes that Marshall began getting e-mail in response to his Listserv and e-mail messages of weeks earlier. In other cases, students heard nothing (they were not checking their long-forgotten University accounts) and called or came by his office.

The Class Meeting

Prof. Marshall had five goals for the one class meeting:

• Give everyone an opportunity to see each other in person, including letting the class see and hear him, get a sense of his "voice" and his mannerisms. Marshall asked each student to be prepared to say something about themselves: why they took the course, their familiarity with computers and online, what they thought they would do after they graduated.

• Take a photo of each student with a digital camera to include with the home page each student was asked to create.

• Be exposed to an introductory lecture on the course's objectives as well as some basic material about the nature of Cyberspace.

• Provide a very basic tutorial on using the Web for those students who had minimal experience.

• Conduct a baseline survey of the students to learn their experience and comfort level with computers and the Internet.

Ultimately, the session was well attended, though not everyone in the class got word of it, for reasons already explained.

By and large Marshall believed the goals he set were achieved.

The Course

Introduction to Cybermedia online covered the same territory as the former in-class versions. The readings themselves were updated to reflect the rapid developments and issues in the WWW and the Internet. Also, due to the online nature, all readings except the two books (and a novel, Neuromancer) had to be available online. Here is the syllabus.

There were six distinct pedagogical elements in the online course, some typical to any class, others unique to an online course.

• Readings. There were weekly assignments, mostly hyperlinked articles. The CyberTimes sections of The New York Times' online version was particularly valuable. Other assignments were from the required books.

• Ask Bob. This was a modest attempt to replace the substance usually provided by lecture. It was in the form of a chatty question and answer session, where the instructor took the role of both student questioners and teacher respondent. The objective was to highlight two or three important points on that week's subject that may not have been covered or emphasized adequately in the readings.

• E-mail responses. In a traditional course class sessions are a modest incentive for students to physically "show the flag." As a substitute, each week there was an assignment that required students to submit a written response to a question or research item to the instructor. Although the rigor of weekly written assignments did not exist in the in-class incarnation of the course, it was needed here to replace the "class participation" component in student evaluations.
  
• Listserv. Discussion groups are increasingly common in traditional courses. However, in a totally online course it was deemed essential to involve the students. They were regularly required to respond to a question from the instructor on the Listserv as well use it to discussion with each other.
  
• Papers. This is perhaps an anachronistic term for longer written assignments that students had to submit by e-mail. Maybe "digitals" is a more appropriate term. These were more extensive assignments than the e-mail responses. Still, they are a familiar type of assignment in most traditional courses. One "paper" was a WWW scavenger hunt. Another was a report on the book Neuromancer.

• Exams. Though a traditional part of most courses, the exams here had to be offered online. There were two exams and a final. Due to technical limitations, it was impractical to design online exams based on cgi scripts. Thus the exam questions were open-ended. They were made available as a Web page starting at a designated time (e.g., Tuesday at 11 am). The responses had to be e-mailed to the instructor within 24 hours after the exam period started.

Skills Students Had vs. Skills Needed

In the year between the first offering of Introduction to Cybermedia and the online course changes in technology lowered the skills needed to create the course materials. Foremost this included HTML-creation software that largely eliminated the need to learn and write the code to create Web pages.

From the students' perspective, the cost of personal computers continued to drop, while capabilities increased. Modems capable of 28.8 kps became standard and inexpensive, replacing the 14.4 modems still common a year earlier. PCs with sound cards and speakers, capable of playing the sound transmission offered on many Web site, also were more widespread.

What did not seem to change in that year was the overall familiarity with computers and the Internet that students brought with them to the course. The baseline survey Marshall conducted in both 1996 and 1997 found that while most students claimed to have a reasonable comfort level with PCs, they greatly overestimated their capacity to use the WWW.

For example, most students claimed to use e-mail at least weekly prior to the course. But for many of these, this meant accessing their university accounts using the primitive UNIX-based ELM or PINE software, in ASCII mode. This is what the university offered on most of its student-accessible computers. Few students had learned how to use graphical e-mail programs that allowed them to cut and paste into and out of the mailer. Few had ever sent or received an attachment or set up filters.

Students who had initially claimed familiarity with the Web came to realize that they did not really know how to use it beyond the very basics. For example, they had little experience with searching capabilities or techniques.

Moreover, in the end of semester student survey (and only then) did many students complain of how uncomfortable it had been to read so much from a screen. Some students, as well as the instructor, routinely printed hard copies of most readings. Print not only has higher resolution than the screen, but it offers portability and accessibility for later review. As it turned out, many students who used the university computer labs could not (or did know think) they had the capability to print out the many pages of readings that they were assigned online.

Instructors of new online courses also need a set of skills that go well beyond the subject expertise they presumably have. Regardless of the course content, instructors need to be able to create Web pages using HTML or application programs that add the coding. They must understand and then learn still nascent elements of Web site design: when and how to use tables as a formatting device, using frames, adding graphics, perhaps audio as well, and creating hotlinks. They must learn the arcane commands for uploading files to the server housing their site. (If available, they could also employ a knowledgeable student assistant to handle this. Of course, it adds to both the financial and logistical cost). And they must master the subtleties of e-mail systems using filters, signatures and auto-reply messages to be able to efficiently deal with the onslaught of e-mail generated by an online course.

Student Evaluation of the Course

For the last assignment of the semester, Marshall required the students to submit a rather detailed and open ended evaluation of the content and the process of the course. The traditional student course evaluations are, of course, done anonymously. As students had to submit this evaluation by e-mail there was no way getting around the fact that they knew Marshall would know who submitted each one. To encourage candor, he addressed this issue directly. .

In reading the responses, Marshall felt confident that students used the "voices" he learned to hear from them over the course of the semester. There may have been some punches pulled or some padded praise, he knew. But by and large he felt that the students were happy to have this chance to complain about what they didn't like. There were also general patterns of approval and criticism that convinced him that, as a group, the course evaluations were a valid measure of student opinion.

The things students liked most:

Flexibility. Above all, students appreciated the flexibility the online format afforded them. They expressed this in several ways: (All bulleted items following are direct, unaltered quotes)

• The flexibility was fantastic. No set times to access the material, the complete accessibility of the material from anywhere and as for contact with the instructor, you were available anytime through e-Mail....
  
• By being able to work at anytime, it allowed me to take the course. If there were set times I would not have been able to take the course.

• The first thing that I really enjoyed about this course was the convenience factor. I loved the way that all the readings were given to us in link form. Not having to rummage through the net and find everything.... With as much as so many students work, the flexibility of a 24 hour window within which to take the exams was a huge benefit.

• This class has been a *God-Send* to me. When the time came for me to pick out classes for my last semester of my Bachelors Diploma, I thought that the online learning experience would be a good one. My expectations were almost completely satisfied. The flexibility of the devoted hours worked out to be just the way I planned. I was able to work full-time and take two classes this semester.

• While some may claim there are disadvantages to online learning, I found that it had many benefits for me. The main reason why I chose to take online courses to finish my program toward a broadcast communications degree due mainly to distance. Traveling from [my city] to [the University] is both time-consuming and expensive, and I wanted to save some transportation money. I find it appealing that there is no class meeting schedule; I am free to check email at 8 in the morning before starting work or at 9 at night before heading off to bed.

Community. One of the most frequently heard criticisms of the Internet (mostly it seems from those who have spent little or no time using it), is that it will "isolate" us. People will stay in front of the computers for their entertainment, shopping, information gathering.

Although many students lamented the lack of classroom time, they also found that the extensive use of e-mail and the Listserv made them feel closer to their classmates than in a traditional physically-based class. Here is how some of them expressed this sense.

• With the Listserv, I was not only able to communicate with my "cyber-mates" (classmates), but the instructor was also able to intervene and add interesting info when he deemed necessary. My interaction with the other students in the class was interesting. We were able to discuss numerous topics (about the course) via e-mail and also when I was in doubt about a certain topic I was able to contact either the list-serve or an individual and be able to expect a response in a relatively short amount of time. This probably would not have been possible in a 'regular' course.

• The course was enjoyable in that we as a class were able to share things we found on the web, that may be of interest to each other. I definitely discovered a lot of new resources and possibilities on the Internet. It also offered some new avenues of learning outside of the old text and lecture format. Also, it enables students to post their thoughts on an issue in a more planned, and uninterrupted fashion. With the Listserv we were able to compose short responses to ideas, where in a classroom we may not get the chance to finish our thoughts. Of course, much can be said for the benefits of back and forth conversation.

• I really felt in no way isolated to my computer here at home. I had access to all of the other students, you, the BTMMUG [a Listerv for students in the broadcasting, mass media and telecommunications department] and discussion list too. This was more a "little community" than a loner type class. I also appreciate how promptly that you and all the other students would respond to e-mail questions and such. It really reflected everyone's commitment and interest.

• The thing that I must have enjoyed the most was reading all of my classmates varied opinions on all of the topics that were discussed. There were those who had so much to say and those who rarely spoke. The ability to interact with the instructor and the classmates allowed me to feel more comfortable with this class, especially since we were not in a crowded classroom where the teacher or students are in a rush, being bombed by questions from other students at the same time, etc.

The things students liked least:

Desire for classroom: Despite the feeling among some students that they were able to get much from the interaction online, there was at least as great a feeling that they missed the characteristics of the classroom experience. It was expressed in different ways:

• I did not like the lack of interaction with the professor in person, because I really didn't feel like I got all of the information I could have if the professor were "live." There is something to be said for bantering back and forth with a fellow classmate and the professor. By reading something in email, you sometimes lose the significance of the ideas. Someone might post a thought in the evening and I might not see it until the next morning. Often the relevance would be gone at that point.

• I enjoyed the camaraderie with the students (even though it was on a limited basis). This also could be attached to the thing I disliked about the course the actual lack of actual physical personal interaction with the other students. They had names, but no faces, this goes without saying.

• I found that the worst part of being on a fully online course was the fact that I did have a lot of trouble in the beginning, and it would have been helpful to have just a few class meetings with the professor. This could have meant even once a month group meeting to get other students help on some assignments.

• I believe it was ... who brought up the point of maybe getting together to meet the members of this class and be able to put a face to the comments we all read. I believe that meeting weekly would have been too much, but a few times during the semester could have been arranged. I enjoyed the certain mystique that this course offered and perhaps meeting often would have taken that away.

• The contact would have added a more personal touch to the course. Just seeing the others in the class is a little more comforting. Also seeing the instructor would have given insight to the kind of teaching to expect.

• Finally, in the future this course should meet at least twice a month in the ... computer lab.

Lessons Learned

Every teaching experience is unique. Even the same course, in the same classroom, differs each semester. Factors such as the unique chemistry of the students, perhaps the time of day the class is offered, what else is going on in the instructor's professional or personal life may all affect the outcome of a course.

Bearing in mind that some of Marshall's observations may be the result of these types of artifacts, he distilled some of the lessons to be learned from this pioneering venture. Some, as he notes, should become less salient as the procedures for offering such courses get ironed out. Others will improve as the technologies involved are honed and become more widespread. But other variables are likely to be need permanent attention in any move to online formal education.

1. E-mail management is critical. This is a weightier issue than it may seem to those who have not used e-mail often. But it may also surprise those who are experienced with e-mail.

A class of 25 students is likely to generate in excess of 50 pieces of e-mail per week -- occasionally far in excess. The e-mail comes in at least three flavors:

• responses for specific assignments made by the instructor
• messages to the class Listserv from students, either in response to an assignment or self generated.
• ad hoc notes from individual students.

Assuming that the instructor is already receiving e-mail from colleagues, friends, and other Listservs, the need to filter and file e-mail from the students becomes critical. The instructor needs to be able to respond to questions from students, keep Listserv discussions on track or add his or her own comments, and most of all to make sure that required assignments are accounted for.

Employing e-mail software that allows setting up of multiple level filters is a a minimum requirement. Then it is crucial that students be instructed how to send mail. For example, if an assignment is about looking at online newspapers, the instructor must require students to use as the subject something like "Subject: Online newspapers." Left on their own, they might use any subject and the e-mail will either get buried or will require the instructor to manually transfer dozens of messages into the appropriate mailbox folders.

2. Confirmation/receipt of important assignments. For assignments that matter -- that is, become a measurable part of a grade -- Marshall learned that he must acknowledge receipt of each student's assignments, lest they argue later that it was sent but never received -- the digital equivalent of "the dog ate it." The Eudora Pro e-mail program he used allowed him to set up a reply message that automatically was returned to the sender when a message had a specified subject. But even that had its holes. For example, if the assignment was to send a review of the book Neuromancer, with the book title as the subject, a student may send the instructor a message with that header, but the message may be a request for permission to submit the assignment late or a question about their assignment. Even so, the student would get the canned reply, "I have received your Neuromancer assignment."

Still, if students are informed that all assignments will be confirmed when received, they have some grounds for inquiry if they get no reply.

3. Labor intensive. An online course course is far more labor intensive than a traditional course. This is due to four elements that differ from an a typical class.

• Need to create and keep current the Web pages. Forget about state-of-the-art design, Java, and even HTML coding. Just committing much of what the instructor says orally in class must be written and formatted for the Web. Links must be created and kept current. Files must be created and maintained. They must be FTP'd to the appropriate server.

As with any course, subsequent presentations of the course will take less effort. But unlike changing some notes in a lecture by crossing out and inserting, any change in a Web site may involve new files and uploads, new hot links, or discovery of links that no longer work.

• Need to discover, learn, and for now improvise new pedagogical devices to displace and replace the devices of the traditional class, including lectures, immediate feedback from students, spontaneity of all sorts. Marshall felt that the "Ask Ben" feature was a primitive move in this direction. Having student Web pages with their photos was another.

• The almost tutorial nature of an online course. Imagine if students in a traditional course could phone the instructor or stop in his or her office several times week or even a day with questions or comments. In a traditional class, students ask questions during the class time. Moreover, in answering the question or responding to a comment, the instructor in the classroom may be addressing similar but unspoken questions and comments from other students.

In an asynchronous online class, each student's queries must be addressed one on one. Netiquette says one must not answer individual questions on the Listserv. Of course, sometimes it is appropriate to "broadcast" a response that may be in response to an e-mail that has broader application than to one student. To a great extent, however, everything is one-on-one.

See also the first point. Typing out responses to these written notes is generally more labor intensive than a few sentences in class.

• What e-mail giveth, e-mail taketh away. E-mail is very convenient, usually fast and inexpensive. But it also does not take off weekends and evening. Students do their assignments at what may be termed "nonbusiness hours," i.e., evenings and weekends. They write notes are 2 am and Sunday afternoon, asking about some detail of an assignment. They expect responses in short order.

It is presumably possible to inform students that the instructor will respond to e-mail only on weekdays during some "virtual office hours." But this approach goes against the grain of the Internet. It is analogous to a newspaper with a Website edition continuing to update content only on the same 24 hour cycle that was acceptable for the old print newspaper. The technology allows for greater currency. This does translate into a higher level of user expectation. Marshall found e-mail from students waiting for him at all hours and days. Even when traveling he checked in with his notebook computer.

4. Frequent feedback needed to and from students. College students usually have quite a full plate. Given the demands on their time, they tend to concentrate on that which is most urgent, not necessarily on what is most important. With no set class to attend, no traditional need to show up to listen to the pearls of wisdom from the instructor, they can easily put off dealing with a nearly invisible course. As one student wrote in the course evaluation:

...The convenience of this course didn't work for me according to plan. See, I took advantage of this convenience in the beginning because there wasn't the same discipline as there is in classes that meet with the professor. I would put off doing assignments, and would end up doing them at the last minute.

Thus, instructors who are used to assigning a few papers, a term paper, a midterm and final will find a need to be more concrete in their assignments. Students should be expected to "raise their hand" at least once a week. Using the Listserv or other discussion group programs can further replace the "class participation" component of a traditional class.

Students also need feedback from the instructor. This may be in the form of comments to posts in the discussion groups. Marshall was unsure of how often or substantively he should jump in to the class' online discussions, usually on the subjects he initiated as assignments. He received an answer from one student's evaluation comment:

I wished I could have heard more from you personally on the Listserv with feedback on our comments. You were excellent in delivering class news about readings, exams etc. but I would have liked more opinions from you about what we discussed or debated: "David, I agree but have you considered this point -" or "I disagree, and here's why." Perhaps you feel your opinions are irrelevant to this course, but I don't agree. You have a lot of experience and knowledge about this field and I would have liked to have known your position on some of the things being discussed.Perhaps you could have shed light on something that I or others were missing.

Needed Developments for Online Education

Online courses have a place in university education. The technologies will continue getting easier to use, cheaper to provide, and both students and teachers will become more comfortable with the process.

The Web -- and its users -- have come a long way in a short time. It would be a mistake to write off online education based on the limitations of today.

Still, several developments will need to come together before the Internet will likely be able to go much beyond a vehicle for serving education niches.

1. The addition of audio and video. Both, of course, are available today. Audio exists as downloadable files, as well as the more convenient format of "streaming" audio and video such as that provided by Progressive Networks' RealPlayer. But the server software is not as widespread as the client software for displaying the output. Moreover, although new PC's include sound cards and video cards with the two mb or more that are needed for decent video, there are many computers still on desktops, including in university labs, that are not sufficiently equipped.

Furthermore many instructors do not have the skills needed to create audio files, yet alone video files.

Finally, audio and especially video files, even with the strides made so far in compression, still take up large chunks of disk space. One minute of video typically requires about 3 mb while a similar length of audio is about 640 kb (this can vary depending on the compression used and the resolution and fidelity required). Even with the falling price of mass storage, storing extensive audio and video files can quickly mount up.

2. Widespread broadband. Audio, video and even more use of graphics will not accomplish much at 28.8 kps access. Even at 56kps, both video and audio are unreliable. Video is displayed in a jerky two inch window. Streaming audio can stop and start.

Students using a university's network have some advantage. But the point of online learning is that it should be accessible from remote sites.

Thus, until some broadband pathway or pathways become economical and widely available, the audio and video needed to help make online education comprehensive will have very limited application.

There are indications that broadband is happening. Several cable TV companies and consortia are finally moving forward with cable modem service. These included TCI-lead @Home, Time Warner Cable's Roadrunner, and MediaOne Express. Hughes Electronics, largely responsible for the DirectTV satellite TV service, also offered an Internet service called DirectPC. It had announced the availability for 1997 of a single dish that would combine both services. And the telephone companies, having botched their potential of 128kps ISDN service, were experimenting with ADSL, a broadband technology using existing copper wires to the end user.

3. Expectation of access from each dorm/home. By 1997 most colleges and universities had extensive Internet access. Initially it was from clustered sites in libraries or "labs." Many were completing wiring to dorms as well.

But it is access from the home that gives online education its fuller potential. In 1997, somewhat over 40% of U.S. households had personal computers. But more than 50% of households with school age children had PCs. Although that includes older PCs without modems, virtually every PC sold by major vendors for the past several years have included modems. And at $200 or less for a 56 kbs modem, it is a small expense compared to the PC and the Internet access service.

Moreover, PC prices continue to fall, with the cost of Internet-capable PCs available for under $1000. WebTV, the label for a set-top box to turn any TV into a Web-capable station, is under $400.

These trends suggest that there should be a growing expectation that the universe of online learning capable homes will continue to grow over the coming decade.

The Future of Online Education

Reflecting on his foray into online learning course, Prof. Marshall came away from the experience convinced that online education had place in the quiver of delivery alternative for higher education. But he also felt strongly that it was as a supplement to traditional class, except for some niches, where it could complement campus-centered education.

High cost option. Administrators should disabuse themselves of any illusions that online courses will be labor saving. Quite the contrary. The almost tutorial nature of this format actually supports a position that faculty should be responsible for fewer online students than in-class student in the same course.. Figures from instructors who have been through the experience have proposed that the optimum number of students for an online course today be in a range from 15 to 20 students. Marshall agreed that beyond this number teaching assistants would be needed to assure that communication with students is maintained.

Online may create new possibilities for what used to be known as extension courses. To the extent that students who otherwise could not attend a local campus could enroll in an online course, universities can expand their enrollment.

As an adjunct to traditional classes. Many of the techniques and tools used in an online course are also useful, of course, as an adjunct to traditional classes. Many instructors are employing Listservs and other discussion groups. E-mail is becoming routine. Providing assignments using the Internet for research and for links to readings can supplement and enhance many courses.

Marshall felt that instructors who continued to resist using the Internet and Web would be short-changing their students. There was no subject where a Listserv, discussion groups, or links to resources could not be used to enhance communication and learning.

Indeed, it is far more likely that in the foreseeable future online will do for a traditional in-class experience what other technologies, such as the steam driven rotary press, wood pulp paper, graphite pencils, paperback books, and film and audio tape did in earlier generations. They are among the tools that teachers can use to enhance the learning of subject matter. While the Internet may have a greater impact than than many of these (and at least comparable to the press), it appears unlikely that it is poised to replace the classroom as the primary teaching and learning environment.

As a substitute for class only when distance is truly impediment.

Marshall's University initially offered its online classes as a substitute for offering a traditional class. That surprised Marshall, who had expected the classes to be marketed more widely as a way of attracting nontraditional students: those who wanted or needed a course but because of distance or physical limitations could not come to campus.

As it turned out, only one of his students truly fit that category, a blind student who lived in another state. Several others were matriculated students who had full time day employment and previously had been taking courses offered only in the evening. As a course only offered during the day, they were able to take it due to its online incarnation.

For these students, the limitations imposed by an online course were likely outweighed by its benefits: a half a loaf is better than none equation.

But the bulk of the class, many of whom claim to have enjoyed the experience, were otherwise candidates for the in-class version of the course, as offered in previous semesters and scheduled for future semesters. They could still have had their assignments on a Web pages and used hotlinks to the readings. They could have submitted assignments by e-mail and participated on the Listserv. Exams could have been offered online, with a flexible deadline.

Moreover, they would have queried Marshall and he could have responded, in real time, to the class. No amount of asynchronous broadband capability can substitute for the spontaneity and serendipity available in the interaction of a group time people reacting in real time. At least, that’s where Prof. Marshall came out of his experience.

University Policy Issues

College and universities that want to offer online courses will have to address a range of policy issues. Among them are:

• If enough courses are offered, could a student earn a degree solely through online course offerings? An MIT degree? Or Stanford?
• Should state related institutions charge in-state, out-of-state or altogether different per credit rates for online students?
• How can instructors be sure that the person registered for the course is the person who actually submits assignments and takes the exams?
• If the online course has the same name and number as an in-class course, can they be made comparable in content and rigor?
• How, if at all, should faculty course loads be adjusted to reflect conducting online courses?

Although Dr. Marshall says he will certainly employ many of the techniques he used in the online course in his conventional courses, he will wait until these and other issues are ironed out before he will teach an online course again.