These Grads Use Keys to Learning

Rachael Pabis will rely on her cheeks, lips and teeth to form a smile tonight instead of using her fingers to type one. And any pauses in conversations will not involve her usual e-mail ellipses.

Pabis, who lives in Lansing, N.Y., is a member of the first class to graduate from Cal State Northridge’s online master’s degree program in speech pathology. The online effort was designed to attract more students to speech pathology courses, university officials said.

The program, which allows students to take all their master’s courses via the Internet, will graduate 24 students, many of whom will meet one another for the first time at the ceremony on campus tonight.

“We get to know everybody’s name and their family through their [Internet] postings,” said Pabis, 27, who has taken the Internet classes since they began three years ago. Each class has a chat room on the Web, she said, “that kind of made it like a classroom forum online.”

While courses that do not require attendance on campus have been popping up all over the Web, online degree programs are uncommon, state education officials said.

Officials said there are 16 master’s or bachelor’s degree programs offered online at five Cal State campuses. An online master’s degree program in criminology is scheduled to start at UC Irvine in winter 2003, said Lavonne Luquis, director of educational outreach and admissions communication for the University of California system.

Opponents of distance learning have argued that the experience is impersonal, lacking in quality and too easy to taint by cheating. However, students say they learn all the same information and still manage to make friends in the process. Several said they hope the master’s degree will help them open a private speech therapy practice or earn more money at their current jobs.

Jill Litchfield, 51, said the Northridge program was convenient. “This program lets you work and go back to school,” said Litchfield, who has been working as a speech therapist since 1973.

With the online program, Litchfield, who lives in San Dimas and works for San Bernardino County schools, was able to attend her son’s out-of-state baseball and football games and get her schoolwork done. “You wouldn’t believe all the papers I wrote in hotel rooms,” she said.

Genie Stearns, 27, of Temecula said once she got into the practice of doing the work on her own, it was a cinch.

“If I had a rough day at work I’d get into my PJs or sweats or whatever and do my work,” said Stearns, who works as a speech therapist in Fullerton schools. Stearns said all the lectures are online, so there’s no note-taking. The students are mailed videos and CD-ROMs that may contain lectures or demonstrate different speech therapy techniques. And there’s technical support available if the students have any problems with their computer equipment.

“My computer crashed once, but the professors were very understanding,” Stearns said. And when she was pregnant with her daughter, she was able to continue with her classes despite feeling ill at times. “It was just nice to curl up with the books in bed instead of going into a classroom,” she said.

According to the most recent data available from the National Center for Education Statistics, the percentage of four-year public institutions offering distance education courses rose from 62% in 1995 to 79% two years later. In addition, 12% more of the institutions had planned to offer distance education by 2000.

Jana Everhart, 33, of Mentone, said she had originally applied to CSUN’s traditional speech pathology program. But the online program, which was starting soon, allowed her to keep her job.

“I was kind of apprehensive at first about what all it would entail about using the computer,” said Everhart, who, at the time, was only familiar with word processing. But she soon got the hang of it and was able to do group projects through e-mails, over the phone and with occasional meetings with classmates.

Pabis said she would not have been able to finish her studies if she had had to attend classes on campus.

She said she moved from Los Angeles to New York earlier this year to take care of her ailing mother, who has since died. She has been working as a speech therapist with the Ithaca City School District, taking care of her three younger siblings and studying by home computer. To get through her schoolwork, she said: “I would kind of just shut the world out.”