E-Commerce and Higher Education - Types Of Virtual Higher-ed Institutions

TYPES OF VIRTUAL HIGHER-ED INSTITUTIONS

A wide variety of higher-education institutions have implemented e-learning programs. Large public university systems often turned to e-learning as a cost-effective means of expansion. They also looked at it as a way to accommodate a projected 20-percent increase in applications by 2008, when Generation Y graduates from high school. In general, online courses became more attractive in an era of shrinking state education budgets. Community colleges embraced e-learning to serve rising numbers of returning and first-time adult students; by 2000, nearly half of all college students were more than 21 years of age.

Elite, private institutions also began testing cyber-education as a revenue-generating endeavor. Their early experiments frequently involved online engineering or business programs targeted at professionals seeking additional training. Fearful of jeopardizing their academic reputations, many schools spun off independent, for-profit online units offering only non-credit courses. Collaborations among private Internet companies, museums, publishers, and universities also appeared, such as UNext.com, which counted Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the London School of Economics among its contributors. Faculty from those institutions developed the online courses and delivered lectures via streaming media. However, part-time instructors handled the actual grading and student communication via e-mail. By 2001, the profitability of such ventures was still unproven. Some of these collaborations provided scholarly articles and lectures for free, hoping to convince online visitors to enroll in affiliated cyber-courses. They also featured online bookshops. At least one prestigious university, MIT, decided to place all of its courses online; anyone can access the classes, though only those paying to enroll will be granted any credit for them.

The most controversial entrants into the e-education arena were for-profit, degree-and certificate-granting institutions, which exist entirely online. One such school, the University of Phoenix, had become the largest private higher-education provider in the United States by 2000. Another, Jones University, was the first exclusively online university to gain accreditation in 1999. Most such ventures offer standardized online courses taught by adjunct instructors.

Two educational areas particularly well served by e-learning were corporate and U.S. Military training. American businesses spend approximately $60 billion annually on employee education, and online courses well suit the scheduling needs of working adult students. Such students often possess a more focused, disciplined approach to education than traditional college-age students, and thus can handle the less-structured learning environment of cyber-education. The U.S. military adopted online instruction to help retain enlistees. In 2000 the Army proposed creating an educational portal that would permit active-duty personnel to continue their education online from any location in which they were serving, with the military footing the bill.

Beyond cyber-classes, the Internet also has affected traditional, face-to-face classroom education. A majority of campus personnel utilize e-mail for transmitting feedback on assignments and conducting teacher-student meetings. Educational software, or "courseware," initially consisted of student-generated, course-affiliated Web sites and professors' lecture notes posted online. However, these delivery platforms have become increasingly elaborate. Many were developed as collaborations between e-learning companies and high-profile professors from famous institutions; the online course content is licensed from the faculty or institutional developers. Some course-ware provides templates that permit instructors to set up online chat rooms and course bulletin boards, post syllabi, and provide links to course-relevant sites. Software also features online grading and diagnostic components to monitor and assess student learning. With "smart classrooms," teachers can incorporate online audio and visual resources into their lectures, or students can attend real-time "guest lectures" given by professors located anywhere in the world.

Some observers predict that "benchmark" versions of the most popular general-education courses required by nearly all higher-education institutions will soon replace lectures written by individual instructors at each institution. These courses, usually introductory surveys in psychology, American history, English composition, calculus, and biology, generate roughly half of all credit enrollment in the United States. Preparatory courses for standardized admission tests also have gone digital.

College portals also have emerged. These allow students to apply to multiple schools online, fill out financial aid applications, as well as register for classes, pay tuition, and order textbooks. Other portals were intended for college faculty and administrators who can use the Web to track enrollments, submit grades, and so on. Many of these services initially came free of charge to interested colleges and universities, provided that the institutions allowed advertising and e-commercial applications to be supplied alongside campus-oriented information. Most also used cookies to trace users' Web habits.