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October 06, 2008, 03:42 PM ET
Interview: Why a Small Liberal-Arts College Decided to Offer Online Courses
Ed L. Schrader, president of Brenau University, promotes online education in liberal-arts colleges. Brenau is a small college in Georgia with a strong focus on distance education. The institution offers 11 online degree programs, most of them career driven, an uncommon focus for a liberal-arts college. Mr. Schrader says that about 40 percent of faculty members teach the online courses.
Q. Why did a liberal-arts college like yours decide to start an online program?
A. We did it to meet the communication needs of the current generation of students. If the majority of the world is going to learn online, the liberal-arts schools will have to make a decision. They can’t give up on their responsibility saying they don’t like online courses; either they participate in them and do it well, or they throw in the towel.
Q. How do you explain that a liberal-arts college offers such career-driven distance-education programs?
A. We should make the liberal arts a component in the education that folks will use when looking for a job. I believe that we are taking a view of liberal arts from the 18th century without applying it to the current culture. It’s antiquated and not very attractive to students in 2008.
Q. Did you start offering the online classes in hopes of obtaining an additional source of revenue?
A. We started nontraditional courses — basically evening and night courses — back in the 1970s to help with revenue. But with online courses, it was not as much desire for revenue but to help students who needed more scheduling options. That said, the online college is financially successful, more than the women’s college.
Q. Before your professors can teach Internet courses, they have to take them themselves. What do they learn during their training?
A. Basically, the idea is that if they haven’t been in the receiving end, they would not know how students are receiving it. So they learn what workload is appropriate to online students and how students respond to different pedagogical techniques online. They also learn to understand the technological tools.
Q. How are traditional professors welcoming having to teach online classes, too?
A. We have a mixed reception. Some teachers are very aggressive in starting new online courses, while others you have to drag a bit into the 21st century. But our contracts with faculty members give us the ability to assign them an online course. —Maria José Viñas
Categories: Distance-Education
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