Virtual Students Click with ‘Online’

A new breed of recruit is hitting the streets despite never setting foot on a college campus.
They’ve got official diplomas, and tired eyes from hours online working for it.
NorthWest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville is the top local institution contributing to the craze that is turning out a new type of non-traditional graduate.
NWACC has increased its enrollment in online courses by 224 percent since the fall 2004 semester while the University of Arkansas’ online enrollment has ballooned 177 percent in the past year alone.
It’s important to the local workforce because a recent economic impact study (performed for NWACC) showed 95 percent of NWACC graduates land jobs with Northwest Arkansas companies.
Most students in online programs need flexibility in scheduling in order to juggle current jobs and/or family. It’s also perfect for businesses that want to boost current employees’ education since online course schedules don’t interfere with usual daily duties.
“The demand for online courses has just increased dramatically,” said NWACC president Becky Paneitz. “So, what we do with our programs is just respond to the demand.”
This fall, there are 1,327 students enrolled in NWACC’s online courses while 1,432 people are taking the UA’s academic outreach online credit courses.
Those numbers account for “hybrid” students who take both online and traditional courses.
Representatives from both schools said pinpointing the exact number of strictly online students would be difficult, but estimated that between 5 percent and 10 percent of those enrolled were taking online courses exclusively.
NWACC’s offerings are ahead of the curve due to a 2004 partnership with Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Two-year colleges, because of their size, also can usually get things approved faster than four-year colleges, but the UA is doing its best to cut through the extra red tape as quickly as possible.
“We’re trying to make every effort we can to make our online programs better,” said Donnie Dutton, the UA’s dean of Continuing Education. “We’re just now starting to take it to that next level and that’s why we are seeing the enrollments jump.”

Virtual Student
November Franco-Arango is the typical online student. She completed seven online courses while earning her Associate of Science degree from NWACC last spring.
With four kids and an hour-long drive from Decatur for each course, the cost of gas, meals and extra hours of child care would have been tougher to endure than an online trigonometry course, which the teacher-to-be passed.
“I figured that online courses would not be as hard as classes that are taken traditionally and that proved to be true,” Franco-Arango said.
She’s now enrolled as a hybrid student at the UA, but has plans to transfer to John Brown University in Siloam Springs next semester.
JBU doesn’t offer any degrees completely online, but she’ll take what she can get after having a bad experience with an online course at UA.
“My online experience as a whole has been a very good expereince,” Franco-Arango said. “But some of the program, as I’m finding out, are a joke.”
The UA only has Associates’ degrees and graduate programs, which can be completed 100 percent online.
Plus, the drive to Siloam Springs from Decatur is much shorter than the journey to Fayetteville for the UA’s traditional courses.
“The UA’s online programs are behind the times in my opinion compared to NWACC,” Franco-Arango said. “The standards at NWACC seem to be much higher, so I had a very easy time at NWACC.”
Dutton defended his programs, pointing out that the UA offers more courses and more online degree programs. He seemed taken aback and genuinely concerned by Franco-Arango’s assessment.
“We’ve got 88 courses, 8 degree programs, and they are as flexible as they can get,” Dutton said. “Two-year programs do have more flexibility to adjust because in a community college setting, it can adjust quicker.”
Not all online enrollees are parents. Many are former traditional students who are in the military. They have been shipped off to various spots around the globe, but still want to continue making progress toward a degree.
Paneitz said she never even met a recent graduate who lived in Florida, while Dutton and others spin stories about students as far away as Japan and Argentina.

Double Click
Unless an employer can decode a transcript, there’s no way to tell if a student earned a degree online or in person.
Diplomas are identical.
So how does an employer ensure a future employee received the same level of instruction from an online course that they would have had in person?
And more importantly, with students able to hide behind monitors, how is cheating curbed?
“We have an instructional design team that works closely with our faculty to revise their current offering for online delivery,” said Greg McHenry, the UA director of credit studies for the school of continuing education and academic outreach. “We want it to be at the same level of quality as the [in person] course.”
Both the UA and NWACC use WebCT programs, which require passwords and even have “proctored” examinations where students complete tests while being monitored at nearby libraries or schools.
NWACC also is part of the National Testing Center Association, a network of institutions that share proctoring duties, which means local students taking online courses from other college sometimes are tested at NWACC’s facilities.
Exams are timed and questions are randomized in order to ensure the same exact test has never been offered. In addition, most courses require plenty of writing assignments, which are much harder to fake.
“Because of the Web, it’s very easy to search for a specific phrase, which makes it difficult to plagiarize,” said Clint Brooks, NWACC’s director of distance learning. “Students write to a particular fingerprint and if one all the sudden pulls out a $1.50 word, maybe they are pulling from another source.”

On Down the Line
Not every course offered in person is offered online at the UA or NWACC because it’s tough to convince some professors and instructors to take on the extra time needed to execute an online course.
At NWACC, many courses offered in person are available online. This fall, it has 52 courses online, compared to the 88 online courses offered by the UA.
“We’ve had to increase the number of courses because more students are seeing the benefits of taking courses online,” Brooks said.
Ideally, both institutions want to be able to offer everything online that’s available in person.
Dutton hopes to take the UA’s program into the next century and beyond.
“When we get all the pieces in place for our virtual university, the people who are away from here — even if they are in Oregon — they can graduate online,” Dutton said.
“They can even send out invitations, so other people can tune into their computers at such-and-such a time. We even plan to have their name emblazoned into the sidewalk while they are being introduced.
“That’s all in our heads right now. We’ve got to sit down and get busy and make it work.”
Paneitz said NWACC’s online program would not be where it is without the help of Wal-Mart about three years ago.
The retail king wanted an online program that offered certifications and other business-oriented courses for its associates.
While the program — called My Education Connection — has been used sparingly by Wal-Mart itself, the technology that came with the partnership benefited NWACC’s online program as a whole.
“I recently met with some Wal-Mart reps and we were talking about ways to improve it because it hasn’t really taken off as far as the numbers,” Paneitz said. “I think they’re revisiting it because it can be a huge benefit to their employees.”
In other words, Wal-Mart has sent only a handful of employees through a program it helped create, but hundreds of others have been able to utilize the same online programs.
“That really got us to take a serious look at online course delivery and ways to improve that,” Paneitz said. “And we no longer have to partner with other colleges. We have our own program.”
And as the demand for online courses continues to increase, so will the level of online delivery that’s available through local institutions.