New Project Enlists Women to Help Women Learn Online

St. Louis — Gail Weatherly has gotten phone calls from women near tears over their situations.

They’re taking care of kids. They can’t afford child care. They can’t make it to regular classes. And they don’t know about online learning, said Ms. Weatherly, distance-education coordinator at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, Tex.

Ms. Weatherly hopes such women could one day benefit from a project being developed by a scattered group of women involved in distance education.

Their work centers on a social-networking Web site that would allow women to share information about online education and serve as mentors to one another. It’s called the Collaborative Online Resource Environment for Women (Core4women), a still-in-the-works effort that Ms. Weatherly and her colleagues described during a workshop here Monday at the national conference of the United States Distance Learning Association.

The project, billed in the presentation as “A Better Way: Women Telling Women About Online Learning,” evolved from Ms. Weatherly’s dissertation research at Texas A&M University. Studies like the American Association of University Women’s “The Third Shift” had examined barriers to women pursuing education. Ms. Weatherly sought to push beyond that. She looked at how earning online degrees changed women’s lives, sometimes in major ways, like one woman who left an abusive relationship. In the process, Ms. Weatherly encountered research subjects who wanted to share the expertise they had gained with other women.

Long story short: Ms. Weatherly and some colleagues set up a pilot project on the free social-networking site Ning. A scattered group of female mentors from the the world of distance education worked with a small group of Texas college students, victims of abuse or poverty, who signed up to help test the private site. The project’s organizers hope to expand the effort and gain the sponsorship of the USDLA, which has an offshoot called the International Forum for Women in E-Learning.

A Chronicle reporter was the only male in the audience Monday, but two women present raised the subject of how the other sex fits into this: Is there going to be a mentor network for men? And why do they have to be separate? Why not Core4people?

In an interview after the presentation, Ms. Weatherly responded by returning to her research. Women shared experiences with her that they might not have shared with a man: taking an online class when they were expecting a child and very sick, for example. Men might be participating more in care giving these days. Largely, though, Ms. Weatherly said, “women still feel like they would sacrifice going to school for their family.”

“Sometimes I think they need another woman to say, It’s OK for you to work and take care of your children and earn a degree – and you can do that easier by online learning,” Ms. Weatherly said. —Marc Parry