Distance Education Program Sends Videos All Over The World

Just because you don’t live in Northwest Arkansas does not mean you can’t get a degree from the University of Arkansas College of Engineering. Now an engineer may obtain a master’s degree from the UA while still working at his or her current job, wherever it may be located.

“We offer a master’s of science and engineering and a master of science in operations research via distance learning via videotape,” says Rodney Staggs, manager of the Engineering Distance Education Center. “The off-campus students have the same homework, take the same exams and are expected to perform as well as the on-campus students.”

Classes are held at approved sites at corporations, military bases, colleges and other locations around the world. Ordinarily, the program has sites in Europe and Asia, but this year, as a result of military transfers, there are no participating sites on those continents. The EDEC also has a special agreement with the Universidad de Antonio Narino and the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia.

“Our program is designed for the videotape audience,” says Staggs. “Electronic interaction between the EDEC faculty, staff and students has been very successful as an alternative to personal interaction.”

The center has a full studio equipped with four broadcast-quality cameras and numerous state-of-the-art computers, production machines, lenses and microphones.

Classes are offered to employees of the U.S. Department of Defense and to 33 other government agencies, and 115 corporations have offered the EDEC to their employees. The average grade-point average for a distance education student is 3.77 (based on a 4.0 scale), and the courses have a 97 percent completion rate.

In 1986, the UA became one of the first universities in the world to establish a distance learning program. Since then, 68 people have earned master’s degrees and one person, Robert P. Lewis, has earned a doctorate. More than 1,700 students have taken over 16,600 course hours from the center, and the number of courses offered each semester has jumped from 12 to 45. Although other universities have opened distance education centers since 1986, Staggs says the UA’s remains one of the most prestigious and flexible.