A New College Course : As Enrollments Swell, Schools Turn to Distance Education

Meet Michael Forrest, modern-day professor.

Forrest guides Coastline Community College students through earth science subjects, such as glaciers and earthquakes. If you’re taking his weekly night course, feel free to ask him questions--but if you want to leave an apple on his desk, you’ve got to drive about 30 miles to do it.

He teaches at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, and his lectures are piped to a huge video screen in the Coastline classroom. Coastline students can see Forrest crack jokes, courtesy of a maze of hidden telephone lines, and Forrest can see the students on his own screen as they talk to him over a microphone.

It’s all part of a growing movement called distance education, in which students take classes on or off campus with television, video, telephone, fax and computer tools.

Televised courses have reached adult students since the 1970s. But now quickly improving telecommunications technology and the so-called information superhighway make distance education a practice that has budget-challenged university leaders pondering its possibilities.

“This is, in fact, a revolution in the delivery of education,” Coastline President Leslie Purdy said.

Distance education is rapidly evolving at a time when California will soon be faced with a higher education dilemma: too many students for too few classes.

The California State University system expects 150,000 to 300,000 more students in the next decade. Planners would have to build 10 Cal State Fullertons to teach them, an improbable feat during tight-budget times.

“We can’t afford new classrooms, let alone new campuses,” said Ralph Mills, research and development director of the CSU Institute.

Educators are trying electronic teaching techniques to accommodate some of the influx. But even people thrilled about the potential of electronic revolution wonder about the unknown consequences of such teaching, and doubt it will be a magic bullet for higher education problems.

“We’re going to have to get on top of it or it could be out of control,” Pepperdine University President David Davenport said. “It could be very sterile, and you’d just be in a classroom looking at a screen. Why pay $20,000 to look at a screen?”

Some teachers and other campus employees fear that courses by video and computer will mushroom without thought to how they will change traditional college life--not to mention how they will increase faculty workload and alter the way colleges determine how productive teachers are.

“Most of the instructors I’ve talked to about this are very much concerned with the lack of personal relationships that students will see,” said Bob Simpson, a math instructor at Fullerton College. “That’s one of the most important parts about going to college.”

Ray Christensen, 26, an Irvine Valley College student, said he would rather learn from a teacher in person than on a screen. But he sees possibilities. “If you could have access to great professors (on video), and could interact with them, that would be good,” he said.

Randy Lewis, UC Irvine’s director of student activities, added: “I hope people realize this electronic thing has some real pluses, but it could have minuses too if it doesn’t pay attention to the human side of college.”

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Educators cite a number of reasons to try distance education: reaching disabled students, reducing commuting to campuses, letting students direct their own learning, giving students a way to escape crowded lecture classes, allowing students to take courses that are scheduled for the same time by attending one and seeing the other later on tape.

Projects now underway in the CSU, University of California and community college systems open a window to what college students may see in the 21st Century.

Take John Witherspoon’s class, for instance. Witherspoon, professor emeritus of telecommunication at San Diego State University, saw students in his “Technological Trends in Telecommunication” course in person twice the whole semester.

Witherspoon videotaped the course so students could watch at their convenience. Students used computers to communicate with each other, Witherspoon and a telecommunications expert in Britain, he said.

Witherspoon typed assigned questions during “computer conferences”--open meeting halls in cyberspace in which students see the questions appear on computers at home or in a lab. Students type answers and debate other students electronically. “It became like a seminar,” he said.

The class fit the changing schedules of many CSU college students, who often work long hours and have families, Witherspoon said.

In a post-class survey, 60% of his students said they got more personalized attention from the instructor than in a traditional class. But the survey also showed a trade-off: 60% of students also said they preferred to talk to a professor in person, not over a computer.

CSU officials are pushing ahead with other efforts throughout 22 campuses.

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An advertisement in an academic newspaper proclaims that Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is “Building (a) ‘Virtual University’ to Reach More Students.” Students can avoid getting swamped by a crowded survey architecture course by using detailed multimedia materials instead, the advertisement reads. Lecture clips, graphics and full-motion video come up on a screen with the click of a mouse.

Systemwide, CSU’s most well-known initiative, $4-million Project DELTA, will examine how technology will change teaching and administration.

Through the project:

* Campuses put art and biology teaching materials on-line for access by others in the CSU system.

* Students can get a degree in business administration by taking courses from several CSU campuses electronically.

* Beginning college-level courses are offered by video to high school students in remote California towns, enabling students to take advanced courses as soon as they get to college.

Bob Threlkeld, director of Cal Poly Pomona’s Distance Learning Center, said his campus is developing packaged course work in hotel management for distribution in Mexico, Taiwan and the United States.

“We’ll get a piece of the tuition out of it all,” Threlkeld said. “We’re seeing ourselves as sort of being (filmmaker) George Lucas. We’ll produce the packages available anywhere, anytime, and at a high-quality level.”

Threlkeld said he subscribes to the “export your best, import the rest” theory of higher education, in which campuses develop areas of strength and use distance education to offer students classes in other subjects.

“I think we are nostalgically leaving the craft and art period of higher education,” he said.

Research-oriented University of California has also joined in.

UCI graduate business students living in San Diego talk to teachers’ assistants in Irvine through video-conference rooms. Such rooms also enable 30 students in Irvine and three students at UC Riverside to take a graduate philosophy course from one professor this fall.

“At this point it’s certainly not cost-effective,” said Bill Nail, UCI director of media services, but cost savings may result when larger numbers of students become involved.

The UC system may soon share professors of small departments among campuses by video-conferences, he said, which could eliminate the need to have the same classes on every campus.

“They’re looking at offering 17th-Century metaphysics (by video-conference) for example,” Nail said. “How many experts in that area does the UC really need?”

UCI Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening added: “Sharing among campuses is a trend. It’s emerging, but a trend.”

A recent UC task force also suggested that offering courses by video-conference between campuses will fill gaps in instruction wreaked by three rounds of early faculty retirements. Nearly 2,000 instructors have retired early from nine UC campuses since 1990, depleting various departments.

Alan Hoffer, director of UCI’s education department, said the campus is working with the Institute of Multimedia in Chiba, Japan, to offer UCI students Japanese language and culture resources electronically. The first classes are likely next fall.

Hoffer is excited about the technology’s potential, but “we don’t want to make this into a system of robots,” he cautioned. “There is still personal contact that’s needed.”

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Information and Computer Science Department Chairman Tim Standish heads a UCI committee to look at how that campus will develop and invest in education technology. Standish said computers, fiber-optics and telecommunications breakthroughs are happening so quickly, it is tough to predict which electronic tools will be worth buying in the long run and which ones will enrich students’ education.

“You only want to (spend money on computers) if it gives you a good advantage and keeps repaying the investment,” Standish said. “We’re trying to find out when the use of computers advance pedagogy.”

Wilkening said distance education works well with adult students, but probably won’t make it easier to squeeze many extra students into UC schools. However, it can enhance teaching for traditional college-age students on a limited basis, she said.

Traditional college-age students “don’t want anybody else but human beings to deal with,” Wilkening said. “They know computers don’t write letters of recommendation.”

Some students fear they will pay escalating fees and spend fewer hours with faculty members in the computer age.

“We need to focus on the state’s priorities and restore adequate funding (to education) instead of using a technology that hasn’t been proven to perform the task as well as traditional methods,” said Scott Lay of Placentia, a UC Davis student interviewed by electronic mail.

Wilkening predicts a gradual change in store for the tools of teaching.

“I don’t know that we will end up being a ‘virtual university,’ ” Wilkening said. “But imagine recording the lectures of our eminent professors. We should be taping our great minds.”

Private universities also are experimenting with distance education. Concordia University plans to link its Irvine campus with the other nine Concordia campuses nationwide by video-conference. Pepperdine, like several other universities, put library journals and texts on-line so that students can read them by computer.

And among California community colleges, which have been experimenting with distance education techniques for two decades, Coastline is in the vanguard of cooperating with state universities to offer more courses.

Frank Arrieta, a student in Forrest’s “Natural Processes” class, said the Cal State Dominguez Hills night course offered through Coastline is convenient because he works in Costa Mesa and lives in Long Beach.

“This is my first class this way, and it took a while to get used to it,” Arrieta said, as he prepared to take an exam delivered by courier. “But the teacher gets really enthusiastic.

“He makes us relate to him--even though he’s far away.”

Growing Demand Educators are exploring ways, including distance education, to better teach the students that will want to enter colleges in the near future. Higher education researchers say the number of high school graduates in California will rise by nearly 187,200 students between 1992 and 2009-an 81% increase. *

California Community Colleges Total Undergraduates: ‘02: 1,717,244 *

California State University Total Undergraduates and Graduates: ‘02: 424,300 *

University of California* Total Undergraduates and Graduates: ‘02: 179,000. * UC system has not disclosed estimates for future enrollment demand. Figures given are from California Department of Finance, whose estimates are regularly lower than those provided by the three higher education systems. Sources: California Community Colleges; California State University; California Department of Finance; Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Researched by ALICI DE RADO / Los Angeles Times