UMassOnline Announcements



UMassOnline Announcements

Is an online program right for you?

April 22, 2002

Living in this fast-paced, high-tech world, you know that there are huge benefits to a university education... whether that means finishing your bachelor’s degree, getting a professional certificate or continuing your education at the graduate level.

But, you also know that life’s demands leave little time for returning to campus! Online education programs offer alternatives to traditional classroom learning, and can be a better investment of your valuable time -- letting you spend it studying instead of commuting.

If you are considering online education, here are some of the questions you’ll want to ask:

1. Can online learning be a credible alternative to classroom learning?

2. Will a degree or certificate earned online hold the same value as credentials from a campus-based program?

3. Will my instructor give me the personalized interaction that I would get in a classroom?

4. How will I communicate with other students?

5. Once I’m an online student, do I have the option of learning in the classroom?

6. Do I need to be a computer whiz to use the technology?

Can online learning be a credible alternative to classroom learning?

Yes, it can, if it is done with a well-respected institution with a quality program. A quality online program creates a rich learning environment, enables quality interaction between faculty and students, and provides solid credentials from a reputable institution.

Will a degree or certificate earned online hold the same value as credentials from a campus-based program?

You will want a degree or certificate that will be recognized throughout your career! If a university has been well known for 150 years it will likely be there for you over the next 20 years! Don’t be misled by programs that claim to use faculty and curricula from prestigious institutions. If the organization touts “brand name” course content, be sure you will be getting a “brand name” degree.

Will my instructor give me the personalized interaction that I would get in a classroom?

Interaction with the instructor is a very important aspect of a quality online education. The methods of that interaction differ in on line programs, but quality programs give you the same level of commitment, attention and expertise from faculty as an on-campus program. Ask whether online programs are held to the same academic requirements as on-campus programs. Ask whether the faculty is part of a credentialed academic department.

How will I communicate with other students?

A quality online program will enable you to have virtual conversations and collaborate on projects with other students without having to be online at the same time. Threaded discussions and live chat are often used to debate concepts and opinions with faculty and other students. An online course is far more than just reading material and taking tests.

Once I’m an online student, do I have the option of learning in the classroom?

If flexibility is important, look for programs that offer both online and “face-to-face.” Universities with multiple campuses and/or outreach centers can give you this option. Some programs offer a “blended” approach combining on-line and face-to-face components. Conversely, when you are looking at classroom-based programs, consider selecting a program that gives you an online option. The key here is to find the combination of flexibility and quality that meets your needs as a student.

Do I need to be a computer whiz to use the technology?

Not at all! Online programs are accessible to anyone who can do email and web surfing. In my experience, students pick this up quite quickly in the first week and thereafter find themselves focusing most of their attention on the course material and very little on the technology. On-line education is not about technology. It is about learning, students, faculty, interactions, and success.

Not much different than traditional education, is it?

_____

by Jack M. Wilson, CEO of UMassOnline

Why UMassOnline

The University of Massachusetts has been a leader in distance education for over 25 years. In 1975 we were among the first to send out videotaped engineering courses and we were one of the seven founding members of National Technological University. We have been delivering education via the Web since 1995.

Now, we are putting the power of the five-campus University behind online higher education. UMassOnline is the one-stop marketplace for the University's online courses, certificates, degree programs, and corporate and professional education opportunities.

UMassOnline is UMass

UMassOnline students are UMass students and receive the same benefits as their on-campus peers:

An internationally recognized faculty, including winners of the world's most prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize, National Book Award for Poetry, and the Draper Award in Engineering.

A fully accredited university with highly ranked schools and colleges.

A 300,000 alumni network, including successful, highly respected industry leaders, scientists, authors, astronauts, hi-tech entrepreneurs, and entertainers.

A staff and faculty committed to meeting the needs of students, whether on campus or off.

Rigorous academic requirements that guarantee a degree or certificate of great value.

The University's reputation as a world-class research institution, consistently producing important research advances.

Part-time programs enabling students to fulfill professional and family obligations.

[CEO Jack Wilson's photo]

A Message from the CEO

Jack Wilson

The University of Massachusetts President and Board of Trustees created UMassOnline to serve the community educational needs of the Commonwealth and beyond by providing high-quality educational programs over the Internet. UMassOnline draws on the faculty and curricula of the five UMass campuses, as well as a state of the art technology platform, to deliver the highest quality online educational experiences.

Today with 31 of the University's outstanding degrees and certificates available online, UMassOnline is proud to be helping busy professionals, lifelong learners and many others to continue their education even when they cannot return to campus. During the 2001-2002 academic year, UMassOnline, in collaboration with each campus' Continuing Education unit, supported 9,164 online program enrollments. UMass now offers 7 graduate degrees, 6 undergraduate degrees, and 18 certificate programs in disciplines including liberal arts, education, management, professional programs and information technology.

If you are a busy professional who would like to further your education, enhance your career, or enrich your life, I hope that you will consider UMassOnline as your educational partner.

About Us

About UMassOnline

The UMassOnline Executive Team

UMassOnline Contact Information

About UMassOnline

The University of Massachusetts President and Board of Trustees created UMassOnline in 2001 to serve the community educational needs of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and beyond by offering accredited educational programs via interactive, Internet-based learning systems.

UMassOnline draws on the faculty and curricula of UMass Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth and Lowell, as well as a state of the art technology platform, to deliver the highest quality online education. Online programs are taught by the same committed world-class faculty, and are held to the same rigorous academic requirements as on-campus programs. Academic programs are fully accredited by the relevant accrediting bodies such as the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). Degrees are granted by the sponsoring campus.

Today with more than 30 of the University's outstanding degrees and certificates available online, UMassOnline is proud to be helping busy professionals, lifelong learners and students worldwide to continue their educations, enhance their careers and enrich their lives - even when they cannot return to campus.

During the 2001-2002 academic year, UMassOnline, in collaboration with each campus' Continuing Education unit, supported 7,824 online program enrollments.

A Message from President William M. Bulger

Welcome to UMassOnline. Welcome to the University of Massachusetts.

At the dawning of the 21st century, UMassOnline is the place where the University of Massachusetts seeks to dramatically expand access to the excellent educational opportunities present on our campuses in Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, Lowell and Worcester.

Just as our great land grant University was created in 1863 to broaden access to learning, UMassOnline is built to eliminate all remaining geographical and temporal barriers between potential students and our world-class faculty.

With UMassOnline, everybody with access to the internet -- in their home, work place, school, or public library -- can have a virtual front row seat in a University classroom. At your fingertips you will find programs ranging from the liberal arts to information technology to business education.

UMass is Featured in US News & World Report

[U.S._News_logo] Programs offered by the UMass campuses through UMassOnline are featured in US News & World Report's October 15, 2001, ''Best of the Online Grad Programs'' issue.

UMassOnline In the News

The Boston Globe -- Online ed taking off

June 16, 2002

By Agnes Blum, Globe Correspondent, 6/16/2002

When Mari Sayama's husband got a good job in Japan last year, she wanted to move there with him, but she also wanted to continue her studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

So she did both.

Sayama, 33, joined the ranks of students pursuing degrees online. Despite the economic downturn, and the closure of many virtual universities because of management problems, online education is alive and well.

The convenience of being able to take a class at 2 a.m. wearing pajamas - or from as far away as Japan - ensures these programs will attract students, supporters say.

"I am very happy I can continue my graduate education," said Sayama, who is pursuing a master's degree in counseling with UMassOnline. "Studying counseling in two different cultures is quite a stimulating experience that widens my views."

UMassOnline Announcements

Surprises Working Online ... by Dr. David Patterson, Virtual Professor, UMass Boston

March 14, 2002

Pasta . . . curry . . .zinfandel . . . other flavorful treats were brought by online students to the newly decorated home of an accounting major, who was also enrolled in the same distance learning course. We gathered with the anticipation of meeting, face-to-face, those with whom we had “chatted” over the Internet for nearly a semester. These online students came from all parts of Massachusetts, and though out-of-staters such as our Floridian were unable to attend, they were kept up to speed through our usual mode of communication — e-mail.

Students were alive with the excitement of relating to one another what it had been like taking — for the first time ever — an academic course for credit over the Internet through UMass Boston. It seems that these students had signed up for Universe of Music (MU 248) not only to complete an Arts requirement or to learn more about music or even to pack yet another course into their busy schedules, but because they possessed a genuine curiosity and sense of adventure about learning. The entire evening resounded with commentaries on their discoveries of an array of music and information across the World Wide Web, their animated conversation moving from stories about this or that link to navigating the Internet to just plugging in a new set of speakers. In essence, we adventurers found our own links to one another. Who would ever have suspected this?

Students asked, “How many times have you taught this course online?” To their surprise, they learned that it was my very first time, the maiden voyage. For you see, I was one of those holdouts as far as becoming involved in the new wave of information technology was concerned. However, like the students, my curiosity finally got the best of me, and so this past fall I embarked upon the oftentimes forbidding prospect of designing and leading a course so completely bound up in computers.

To my surprise and delight, just about everything needed for our study about the universe of music could be found on the World Wide Web. Out with the expensive textbooks and their CDs and in with an electronic text fused with hyperlinks for adventuring out into the amazing world of music. We have compared human heartbeats and pulsars with musical rhythms, seen and heard aboriginal instruments of Australia (bull-roarer and didjeridu), taken virtual lessons on Indonesian gamelan instruments, studied with the aid of computer graphics and MIDI samples how complex Latin and African polyrhythms are created, watched video clips of whirling dervishes, and analyzed the sound production of a Tuvan throat singer famous for singing two different pitches at the same time.

And there was yet another surprise! The scope of the papers submitted electronically — as attachments — was not limited to text alone. Students visited sites with video clips, audio clips, photographs, maps, charts, and much more. It seemed natural to these cyber students to integrate them with the traditional research paper. Students could actually illustrate in extraordinary ways the points made in their traditional texts. Topics ranged from a study of the ragas of North Indian Classical music as performed by guru (teacher) Ravi Shankar and his shishyas (disciples), daughter Anoushka among them, to a tracing of three distinct stages of pop star Madonna’s ever evolving musical style.

Wondering why a distance-learning course should have a “live meeting” as one of its requirements, we saw firsthand perhaps its greatest purpose. Simply, and to nobody’s surprise, we found that the value of the experience was in venturing forth from the virtual world and into the real one, finally meeting those with whom we had surfed along the World Wide Web.

Least expected of all, though, is the impact two semesters of online teaching would have on my classroom teaching. I did not figure on these Internet encounters with the students and the possibilities of the World Wide Web becoming so quickly and naturally intertwined with a lifetime of teaching. But learning is always fraught with surprises. As one of the popular song standards of some years ago asks, what’s new?

About the author Dr. David Patterson , Professor of Music, has taught at UMB for nearly 30 years. He is a recipient of the Fulbright Senior Lecturer Award and the Chancellors Distinguished Teaching Award. On May 11, his composition, Isle of Hope , will be performed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the Ellis Island Medals of Honor opening ceremony.

Music 248 is offered online this summer through University of Massachusetts Boston.

UMassOnline In the News

eLearning, Is it over?

January 2002

by Jack M. Wilson, CEO, UMassOnline

Is it over? The eLearning boom that is.

Last year, almost every college and university announced that they were going on-line. Venture capitalists dumped billions into eLearning start-ups of all kinds. There were billions to be made and the first movers would be the ones to profit! Or so we thought. The new “for-profit” start-ups dangled visions of millions of dollars in front of Presidents and Deans, and some jumped at the chance.

Pensare teamed up with Duke. Click2Learn teamed with NYU Online. Fathom teamed with XanEdu. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School teamed with Caliber, a spin-off from Sylvan Learning. Cornell spun of eCornell to the consternation of faculty. Kaplan Ventures, Knowledge Universe, Pearson, and Sylvan Ventures made investments and acquisitions totaling $3.6 billion in 2000 and were expected to invest at least $2 billion additional in 2001 and 2002. UNext created Cardean University and partnered with Columbia, the London School of Economics, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Chicago. Reportedly Cardean had pledged to pay Columbia, and perhaps the others, $20 million dollars if they failed within five years. The exact structure of the contracts is not public. North Carolina, Harvard, and the University of Southern California went to University Access for help in getting online. Harcourt Higher Education was launched as a college in 2000 and confidently predicted “50,000 to 100,000 enrollments within five years.”

That was then and this is now. Pensare is gone. Unable to attract the external financing that it had hoped for, Fathom had to obtain $20 million in financing internally. Cardean has laid off over half its work force this year and has asked the universities to restructure the business arrangement. Rumors suggest that “restructure” means that the universities are not getting their $ 20 million after all! Temple University, who had followed the crowd in creating a for-profit spin-off, quietly closed that spin-off without really ever activating it. They got more press for closing a virtually non-existent operation than most others get for running viable programs! Harcourt is gone after enrolling a total of 32 students in 2001. eCornell is open now, but with very small programs and drastically reduced expectations. Caliber has filed for bankruptcy. University Access has changed its name and withdrawn from higher education.

The Chronicle of Higher Education asks wryly Is anyone making money on on-line learning? The conclusion seems to be that there are indeed a few organizations that have demonstrated viability. The University of Maryland University College’s effort UMUC-Online, Penn State’s World Campus and the University of Massachusetts UMass Online represent campus based programs that have had some success. The University of Phoenix is everyone’s poster child for the for-profit online university, either as a cautionary tale of a market mentality applied to higher education or as an investment success that demonstrates the viability of such an approach.

The very mixed picture is probably a manifestation of the confusion that reigns about the purpose and the place for on-line higher education.

It’s about serving learners and not about using technology. First of all, designing educational experiences around technology is a foolish chase. You cannot possibly keep up with the technology. The paradox of technology enhanced education is that technology changes very rapidly and human beings change very slowly. It would seem to make sense for proponents of e-learning to begin with the students. At least that is a relatively slow moving target. Deployment of technology then becomes an exercise in applying a rapidly improving technology to a very consistent set of goals. Although this can be a challenge, it is a much more doable task. Over the last 15 years, the state of the art in distance learning has gone from satellite delivery of video, through interactive compressed video or video conferencing to web based on-line learning. The Sloan Foundation did much to popularize the standard model of on-line learning as Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN). This model was further enshrined when the U.S. Department of Education created the Learning Anytime Anyplace Partnerships program (LAAP) around the Sloan Model. The anytime-anyplace mantra became accepted dogma in the on-line world. Proponents of the ALN models often looked down their noses at their colleagues still operating in the older video based worlds.

Unfortunately the doctrine of the “anytime-anyplace” ALN model also had it’s own flaws. The “asynchronous” nature of the model certainly had some advantages of flexibility for the student and manageability for the institution, but it also has some challenges in the area of retention and completion. Further, it often enshrined technology limitations as necessary elements of the new model. Technology did not easily support audio or video over the network in the early days. Thus the ALN model envisioned both threaded discussions and live chat. This was supposed to provide some of the interactivity that is vital to any effective learning experience. Video and audio were neglected as important tools. Making a virtue of necessity, we began to see articles talking about why a model that had students typing at one another was superior to students talking to one another.

Both experience and research tends to indicate that audio and video interactions have some advantages over typing interactions. Even more interesting: audio tends to be more important than video. Audio, video, threaded discussion, and live chat all have their advantages and disadvantages. Which modalities to use in a given educational environment should be a pedagogical question first and a technical question second. Enshrining technical limitations as pedagogical advantages is not a productive trade.

Content is not king. When MIT announced that it was providing free access to the materials from all of its courses, I was immediately called by several reporters all asking variations of the question: “If MIT is giving away their courses for free, why would anyone pay for courses from UMass.” I would ask the reporter if MIT was giving away access to their classes, their academic credit, their faculty, their students, their campus, their library, or any other aspect of their educational environment. The answer was always no. MIT is planning to give away free access to (some of) their content. That is all. Of the entire value chain of higher education, content is the least valuable part. Another way to look at this was to point out that over one hundred and seventy students paid over $3000 each to be in my “live-on-line” class last year, and yet all of the content of that class was available for free on the web or for roughly $50 in a text! If so, why were the students so anxious to pay the $3000 that I had to raise the course enrollment limit four times?

UNext, through its Cardean University offspring planned to acquire content from the leading universities in the United States and Europe. They then spent amounts up to $700,000 per course to massage that content into very well produced on-line courses. Unfortunately the expected market has yet to materialize. Students want access to Columbia and Stanford degrees, faculty, fellow students, and classes, and not to their content. Harcourt stumbled on the content issue in a different way. As a leading content provider, they assumed that they had a leg up on the competition with their extensive library of content. To their credit they quickly realized the need for the rest of the value chain and set about building it from scratch. Still it is hard to build a reputation in a few months that took the universities over a century to acquire.

Reputation is “a very big thing.” It is more than “brand name.” Reputation includes the organization’s brand image but it sets a much higher bar. Conventional wisdom in the e-business world suggested that brand could be built by clever advertising campaigns or that it could be inherited from the brand equity of the parent. Harcourt Higher Education thought that students would flock to an organization sporting the brand name of a well-known publisher. Cardean thought that it could sell it’s very expensively produced courses to a public anxious to get access to the brands of its partners, Columbia, the London School of Economics, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Chicago.

When a person buys athletic shoes, that person may not really care how long the maker has been in business. They just like the style, the price, and the image created by an expensive advertising campaign. When individuals look for an educational experience, they want their credentials from an organization with an outstanding reputation and a very high probability for being in business throughout their careers. Universities measure their lives in centuries, while most businesses think in years. No one wants a degree or certificate from any organization that has any appreciable probability or disappearing in the next ten years. No amount of advertising can overcome this.

It’s about culture, stupid. They say it is easier to move a graveyard than it is to change a university. That is usually meant as an insult, and those of us who advocate change in universities certainly chafe at the slow pace of that change. While there is lots of room for universities to move faster and be more responsive to community needs, there is little likelihood that those changes will bring the universities to the quarter-to-quarter mentality of the business world. There is a major cultural difference here, and that is probably a good thing. Universities should be institutions that take the longer view.

Joint ventures that bring together business organizations with a high “need for speed” in partnership with universities with slower, more collegial, processes seems to me to be an impossible combination, and I have led both kinds of organization. It is probably not an accident that the University of Phoenix is the most successful of the for-profit companies. They did it (mostly) on their own without the entangling alliances of Pensare, Caliber, UNext, and others that would partner with higher education. On the other side, the University of Maryland, Penn State, Illinois, Massachusetts, and other state ventures may have a better chance for success because they are not in major partnerships with corporate ventures. There are many ways for corporations and universities to partner, but virtual universities do not appear to be one of them.

The organizations also have value systems that conflict in fundamental ways. While the universities often strive for access, quality, research excellence, service, and teaching for teaching’s sake, a corporation is driven by financial considerations first and then other values to the extent that they are compatible with financial success. There is nothing wrong with this difference. No corporation would survive long enough to do pro-bono work if it was not financially successful first. Although the same thing could be said about the universities, the usual method of funding of universities from tuition and government sources tends to obscure this fact. The difference is just a fundamental difference in culture.

Money does matter. To a businessperson, it must be a surprise that I would even need to assert this. To most university faculty, this claim may be an insult, but the university’s behavior demonstrates this to be a fact. As the major funders of university research, the NIH, the NSF, and the Defense Department drive the direction of faculty research. We may say that we independently select our research targets, but the evidence suggests that the funders can significantly alter universities research efforts. The enormous amount of time and concern that state universities give to securing maximal government support and that private universities give to increasing their endowments is additional evidence.

On-line and distance learning can be a significant additional revenue stream for traditional universities. In addition to the direct revenue from student tuition, there are also increased benefits in other areas due to the visibility and connections that get created to corporations. When a university is serving the educational needs of a corporation, the corporation will often think of that university when it comes to research contracts and philanthropy. It may not be the primary driver, as alumni ties often are, but it does make a difference.

Any course creation model that leads toward very high cost/high quality production values is often on shaky ground to begin with. History is replete with examples of high production value efforts, which do not do well in the market. The 1980’s effort to create an introductory physics course, the Mechanical Universe, that takes advantage of Lucas film like Hollywood special effects was an excellent example. It cost over $10 million to produce. The results were most impressive as television and a disappointment as education. There was no business model, which could recoup the cost. The Cardean model of high cost course production may be the latest example of the mismatch between the consumer and the producer.

It also matters where the money goes. Many of the for-profit spin-offs of universities expected to be able to access the venture capital markets to finance their expansion plans. These plans failed for two major reasons. The first is that few venture capitalists are foolish enough to finance a venture where the control rests with a university. Private universities are difficult enough, but the concept of a venture capitalist in partnership with state governments is a real stretch. The second is that venture capitalists expect a substantial return on their money in a short period of a few years. In the heady days of the dot-com boom, few would look at any deal that did not promise at least a “ten bagger,” or a ten-fold return on investment. That’s ten fold and not 10 %. Imagine the dialog with faculty members who are being asked to extend themselves to help build the new virtual university. Now imagine when you tell them that the goal is to get a ten-fold return for investors! Hardly an easy sell at the faculty senate. Virtual universities seem to do better when faculty can see that the benefits of the effort accrue directly to the institution and provide extra resource to support research, teaching, and service.

Barriers to entry may be low, but barriers to success are certainly quite high. A cursory examination of the patterns of development of virtual universities demonstrates that it is a lot harder to be successful than many thought. It is very easy to start a virtual university. All one had to do was to set up a server, create a portal, acquire a learning management system, develop some courses, and begin the marketing. For those institutions finding this too much to contemplate, learning service providers would come in and do it all for you. Entry was easy.

As we have seen, finding success has been considerably more difficult. Even defining success becomes elusive. For those institutions that took the for-profit route, either on their own or in a joint venture, success often meant large financial returns.

Now that visions of e-learning billions have evaporated for most institutions, we will get down to the serious business of creating the leading virtual universities. These institutions will be both public and private. We have seen that both models can work if the institutions are clear about their goals and organize themselves appropriately. Mixing unlike goals or a lack of clarity in goals will continue to be a sign of expected failure.

Nearly every university will have some involvement in on-line learning, but not every university will be a net exporter of educational programs. Reputation, or brand, will be very important, but it will not be the whole story. Strong brands with weak programs will not be successful. There will be room for different kinds of brands to serve different characteristics of learners. Some will be price sensitive and some will not. Some will want nothing but the designer brand programs and some will seek commodity style education at wholesale prices. Just as some people buy Mercedes while others buy Chevrolets, learners will seek out brands that appeal to their sense of themselves and their needs. Even within a market segment, there will be room for market differentiation. Some will prefer Ford to Chevy. Others will want BMW instead of Mercedes.

The e-learning revolution is not over. It is just entering a more intelligent and less self-indulgent phase. History demonstrates that the first movers in technology are rarely the eventual leaders. Dumont may have invented the television, but the company disappeared in the early days of television. Edison invented electrical generation, but his DC systems lost out to the AC systems of later competitors.

There is lots of opportunity for excitement in the next few years. Moore’s law is continuing the relentless increase in computing power and continuing to push down prices. The bandwidth law shows that we will continue to see faster and faster networks bringing higher and higher quality materials into our homes. There is much that is predictable over the coming decade. Technology is relentless and dependable in its advance. Human beings will continue to exhibit the characteristics that they have exhibited for centuries. Maslov’s hierarchy of human needs will change little. The paradox of a rapidly changing technology serving a slowly changing humankind will provide opportunities for those who start from culture, values, and human need and have the insight and courage to know how technology can serve these.

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