The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript

Prospects for For-Profit Distance-Education Spinoffs

Thursday, December 13, at 3 p.m. U.S. Eastern time

What are the prospects for distance-education ventures that are for-profit subsidiaries of traditional colleges? What does the closure of NYUonline mean for the distance-education industry?

The recent decision by New York University to shut down its for-profit spinoff, NYUonline, is being closely analyzed in the distance-education industry. Some experts believe that the failure at NYU, closely following a similar failure at Temple University, points to underlying problems with for-profit spinoffs of traditional universities. Others, noting growing online enrollments elsewhere, say that NYU's difficulties relate more to poor decisions made by the operation than to industry conditions.

» Debating the Demise of NYUonline (12/14/2001)

Jack M. Wilson is chief executive officer of UMassOnline, a division of the University of Massachusetts. He is also a professor of management at the university's Amherst campus. Mr. Wilson has held numerous positions in industry and academe, including being a professor of physics and dean of undergraduate education at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and working as a consultant to companies such as AT&T and HarperCollins.

A transcript of the chat follows.

Scott Carlson (Moderator):
Hello, and welcome to Colloquy Live. I'm Scott Carlson, a Chronicle reporter, and I will be your host as we discuss the health and future of distance-ed spin-offs and programs.

This discussion is happening at a crucial time: Just two weeks ago, NYUonline called it quits. University of Maryland University College gave up on a for-profit strategy at the end of October. And Virtual Temple, Temple University's online venture, dropped out of the race months ago, as the market fell.

That leaves a diverse group of survivors, with varying levels of success so far: the University of Phoenix, Fathom, UMassOnline, Penn State's World Campus, Capella University, Global Education Network, the Alliance for Lifelong Learning, eCornell... the list goes on. What are the prospects for these and other distance-education ventures -- both the for-profit subsidiaries of traditional colleges and their nonprofit cousins? What does the closure of NYUonline mean for the distance-education industry?

Our guest today is Jack M. Wilson, the CEO of UMassOnline. Mr. Wilson, a veteran of online- and continuing-education programs, has spoken widely about the topic. Thank you for joining us, sir.

Jack M. Wilson:
I look forward to the discussion. I think this is one of the most important issues facing higher education. I think that online education will transform higher education, but the dimensions of that transformation are being determined right now.

Scott Carlson (Moderator):
Let's get started...

Question from Alfred Bork, University of California, Irvine:
So far, online courses from both traditional inctitutions and for-profit institutions are mostly imitations of existing university courses. What are the prospects of new distance learning courses that proceed in other directions, using the full interactive capabilities of the computer?

Jack M. Wilson:
There does seem to be a canonical model of online education that has received wide acceptance in the community. Often called the ALN model, this model has been enshrined by the Learning Anytime Anyplace partnerships program (LAAP) from the Department of Education and the grants program of the Sloan Foundation. The �asynchronous� nature of the model certainly had some advantages of flexibility for the student and manageability for the institution, but it also has some challenges in the area of retention, learning performance, and completion. Further, it often enshrined technology limitations as necessary elements of the new model. Technology did not easily support audio or video over the network in the early days. Thus the ALN model envisioned both threaded discussions and live chat. This was supposed to provide some of the interactivity that is vital to any effective learning experience. Video and audio were neglected as important tools.

Making a virtue of necessity, we began to see articles talking about why a model that had students typing at one another was superior to students talking to one another.

Clearly the ALN model has been an enormous contribution to the community, but it is very likely that far richer models will emerge. The fundamental power of the internet arises from the ability for human beings to interact in very robust ways. These interactions may be with other human beings or with powerful interactive resources. For the last few years, I have taught one course in which I conducted a weekly "Live online" session. During this session I was able to interactively poll students from all over the world. As I saw how they responded to my questions, I would often call on them to defend their opinions, which they would do with audio over the internet or with the use of a live blackboard or other collaborative software. Students were also divided into virtual teams who prepared a case study to "present" over the network each week. With either 14 or 28 teams, I had one or two different case studies each week. My favorite memory is of a team consisting of executives from GE, United Technologies, J. P. Morgan, and Ford who were assigned to do a case study of GE's eBusiness strategy. In one semester, this case was presented during the time that GE and United Technologies were vying for the ability to buy the Honeywell Corporation. It was a compelling and invigorating case. Very well done. I had also taken the liberty of inviting a senior Vice President of GE to sit in with me. I did not reveal this until the case had been presented and the other students had taken the opportunity to grill the case leaders. It was truly a grand finale when I asked him to comment upon the case. Interactivity can also mean student interactivity with very powerful simulations, with smart systems, or with rich multimedia experiences. Many of these more powerful forms of interaction, often found in CD-ROM based programs, fell by the wayside in the rush to the Internet. The narrow bandwidth just did not allow it. As bandwidth availability continues to double on an annual basis, these limitations need to be (and are being) re-evaluated. There is one caution here. These multimedia interactions can be very expensive to produce and many a program has foundered by spending too much on media and thinking too little about learning.

Question from Elmore Alexander, Philadelphia University:
It seems to me that the critical issue is not for-profit vs. not-for-profit but the marriage of the not-for-profit university with a for-profit venture. Some for-profit purveyors of distance education are being successful and some univeristies are being successful through their normal continuing-education arms. The struggle seems to be with the for-profit spin-offs of universities. Do you see this as the growing pains of the early adopters or an inherent conflict?

Jack M. Wilson:
I think it's both an inherent conflict and part of the growing pains, because the difficulty stems from the cultural differences between the two groups. They really haven't had time yet to establish a cross-cultural understanding that would allow joint ventures to be more successful.

Question from Merlin Wittenberg, Southern Adventist University:
Within the next 4 years what markets do you see as the most promising for online learning: high school, college, university graduate level?

Jack M. Wilson:
This is my favorite kind of question. When asked to choose between alternatives, I select "all of the above." These will all be very important markets, but they will be very different. When a program is selecting markets they need to match their core competencies against the market. Those who try to address markets outside of their core competencies will fail no matter how attractive the market!

How are these markets different? High school will be a very important market. Demographics are daunting. Large numbers of teachers will leave and are leaving teaching. Many of the current cohort came into teaching in the '60s and '70s. Now they are beginning to leave. Both the quantity and overall quality of teachers in the pipeline needs improvement. This is particularly true in the math and science areas. There is a need for online courses to provide access for students that would otherwise be denied. There is also a tremendous market for the aspiring student (parent?). More and more students would like to get a head start on college. While some can go to the local university to take courses, most cannot. I cannot go into the details on funding models in this short answer, but I have examined this carefully and think it is an important need and an important market.

I look at undergraduate and graduate programs very differently. I do not see online courses displacing traditional four-year undergraduate programs for 17- to 21-year-olds. That said, there is lots that can be done for others outside that definition and there will be substantial use of online methods in traditional courses. There is also a huge community need (and market) for degree completion programs for those who have some college, but entered the workplace before completing the undergraduate program. This kind of a program is also very attractive when delivered as a capstone for community-college students.

The graduate level is a different matter. I think that online programs (broadly defined) will indeed displace most of the professional graduate programs in business, computer science, engineering, nursing, education, and many other professional programs. I expect that most research based doctoral programs will remain in the existing formats. Doctorates in education may be one exception there.

Question from Michael Lansing, University of Minnesota:
How do such ventures--failed or not--involve the broader corporatization of long-standing universities (such as NYU) more generally?

Jack M. Wilson:
This is a difficult question, because it could be coming from several different perspectives. If you are asking whether the joint ventures in education are really the same kind of activity as the many joint ventures in research, then I think that one can find those kinds of connections. As universities have had to seek alternate sources of funding, they've often turned to corporate partnerships to supply that alternate funding.

The need for alternate funding stems from two primary reasons. The first is the increasing shift of the burden of the support of the university from the states (in the case of public universities) back onto the university itself. The second reason is that funding for research is demanding greater and greater matching by the higher education institutions doing that research. Each of these trends cause universities to look elsewhere for support, and corporations are one of a few such sources.

Question from Sonia, Government:
In the article "Debating the Demise of NYUonline," the authors refer to online programs of reputable institutions such as UMass and University of Maryland University College. What can you say of for-profit institutions like Capella University? How can one explain the growth in enrollments in such institutions while witnessing the demise of NYUonline? Is it simply poor judgment from an economic standpoint, or is it not because the distance-education curriculum is too traditional?

Jack M. Wilson:
I think that the rise of for-profit education is a demonstration that the universities are not doing a good enough job serving some of the community's needs for learning. The for-profit education providers that are not in partnership with traditional institutions do not run afoul of that cultural conflict that the joint ventures have seen. Many of these institutions focus on providing consistent, reasonable-quality educational programs to learners seeking the convenience and services that the traditional institutions may not provide.

Question from Scott Carlson:
Mr. Wilson, I've heard that some university presidents have seen the shakeout in online education and have thought, "Whew, I guess online-education is a boondoggle -- I don't have to worry about that anymore." Is that a mistaken perception? Even if it's not easy, is now the easiest time to get into the business? Will the field be far too crowded, far too competitive, later on?

Jack M. Wilson:
They're wrong. But as one already involved in this business, I'm glad there are many who come to this conclusion, because the field had become much too overheated. Many institutions are jumping at online education without the careful thought and established expertise required to do a good job. I'm glad that many institutional leaders, especially those who do not have the experience to be successful in these fields, have decided not to enter online education and further confuse the community.

Question from Yvonne, regional, Midwest state university:
Is the reason for the spin-off to avoid higher education "red-tape" processes and hire "more responsive" faculty talent? If so, then the answer is to change the internal processes and support the currently creative faculty. Is this POSSIBLE?

Jack M. Wilson:
Is this possible? Absolutely! Is it easy? Not always. Faculty, like other human beings, come with many different attitudes about getting involved in online education. Some are very enthusiastic. Some are very talented. (Unfortunately, these do not always go together.) Many are very cautious. Some have been burned by ill planned efforts. Some are actively hostile. Not everyone need be involved in online learning. The trick is to find the talented and enthusiastic and then to extend the reach into the cautious and open minded. Don't waste time and energy on the hostile. The cautious and open minded are the key to success. These are usually the top mainstream faculty in terms of research, teaching, and service. They make the difference.

The first part of your question has many answers. The number of reasons that spin-offs have been considered probably exceeds the number of spin-offs. In some cases, it may be because the leadership has despaired of doing the work implied in the former paragraph. I have seen very few programs that have been successful by bypassing faculty. I prefer to work with faculty even though it can be difficult at times. An outstanding faculty creates the core of any academic program. A program without faculty may be easy to run, but it would also be rather uninspiring. In many recent cases, a spin-off was done to try to tap external funding for programs. Some thought that venture capitalists would rush to fund their programs. They had visions of multi-million dollar IPO's. Although there has been billions invested in this area, very little of this has gone to closely held spin-offs. When Columbia formed Fathom, they anticipated tapping the capital markets for $10-million to $20-million. When that did not happen, the funding had to come internally. While failure to attract funding is often blamed on the collapse of the stock market, the problem goes way beyond that. Most of these programs could not attract funding in even the boom times.

Scott Carlson (Moderator):
We'll throw this next question out to all of you in Distance-Ed Land.

Comment from Tracy Mitrano, Cornell University:
Back about a year ago I enjoyed a Colloquy Live with Sally Silberman as commentator on this subject. How is she, and what has she gone on to do since the closing of NYU's online project?

Question from Mark, for-profit eLearning company:
With the "shake out" of larger academic institutions, do you see opportunities for smaller, niche-market providers? If so, in what ways?

Jack M. Wilson:
I do think that diversity in learning experiences will be a hallmark of future of higher education. While universities have traditionally all tried to emulate the leading research universities, many of the smaller and newer providers try to carve out a new path. Many will find niche markets that are not provided for by the large mass-market higher education organizations. This diversity is a healthy thing, but it does pose some challenges to those of us in higher education. Just as department stores have been supplanted by different kinds of retailers, ranging from discount stores like Wal-Mart, to online stores like amazon.com, to very high end specialized stores, higher education institutions may need to work harder to discover their particular place in the future.

Comment from Jesse Heines, UMass Lowell:
Alfred Bork's point about proceeding in other directions and Jack's about the high cost of production made me think about different ways to fund distance ed. Dick Larson at MIT has talked about having students see their undergraduate institution as their "education provider" for life. In such a model, perhaps a portion of a student's tuition could be set aside to fund DE initiatives that s/he would be able to use without further cost or at a steep discount after graduation, perhaps for, say, the first 5 to 10 years. Such a model might mimic the one used by car manufacturers and even computer retailers who guarantee the various components they sell for a certain period of time. These are just thoughts, of course, but I wonder if anyone knows of an institution that is perhaps thinking along these lines.

Comment from Alfred Bork, Univ of California, Irvine:
Jack, my belief is that the model you mention is inadequate. We need to use fully interactive learning units, very seldom done so far, that adapt to the needs of individual students. Such material is practical now, but does not fit the model you mentioned.

With regard to markets, I am inclined to say that the biggest distance learning markets will be preschool and adult education, followed by elementary school. Graduate school, having the fewest number of students, is the least promising.

Question from Judy Burke:
Why are distance-learning Ph.D. programs so rare? I am looking for an interdisciplinary Ph.D. degree like the one offered by the University of Missouri at Kansas City, which is unfortunately not offered in a distance-learning format.

Jack M. Wilson:
I think that doctoral programs are probably the most difficult kind of a program to put online. These kinds of programs usually have quite a bit of interaction between a faculty mentor and a student. The research and faculty mentoring are a bit more difficult to do in the online environment. There are some exceptions to this. Online doctoral programs in education have become more prevalent in the last few years. In those fields that do not require expensive research facilities, it is possible that more programs will be developed.

Question from Linda Wheeler, Harvard Business School Interactive, Inc.:
One of the reasons for the closure of NYUonline's closure that was mentioned in The Chronicle's Dec. 14 article on "Debating the Demise of NYUonline" was that "many of the courses were taught by adjuncts with less expertise and teaching experience." How would you suggest other executive-education endeavors set about tapping into resources of the top faculty of an institution in order to avoid this error and possibly enhance the client's perception of "solid faculty involvement"?

Jack M. Wilson:
I think this is a perceptive question. NYUonline appears to have been trying to have it both ways at the same time. They were trying to build on their excellent reputation as an elite research university, but they were delivering a product in a manner more consistent with a mass market provider of education. There's room in the market for the higher education equivalent of a Nordstrom's as well as a higher education equivalent of a Wal-Mart, but there's probably not room for an institution that is trying to operate like a Nordstrom's, but providing services like a Wal-Mart. These are both valid parts of the higher education market, but it is difficult to mix the two. Interaction with quality faculty is a key part of the value proposition of high-end educational experiences. Programs that neglect this part of the value proposition do so at their peril.

Question from Ajit , DigitalThink:
How should the marketing department communicate with the production team so as not to follow the same steps as those of NYU?

Jack M. Wilson:
I'm not sure that lack of communication between the marketing department and the production team was a significant factor in the demise of NYUonline. The marketing and production of programs has been reasonably successful at NYUonline. It is more a case that there was no actual need for the program to be for-profit. Once they realized that, I think that they simply decided to fold the successful parts of the programs back inside the university. For NYUonline, being for-profit provided no significant competitive advantage. That's why they went back to being nonprofit.

Scott Carlson (Moderator):
Here' s a question for Yvonne, at the Midwestern state university.

Comment from Alfred Bork, Univ of California, Irvine:
Yvonne, are the current faculty the best people to produce distance learning courses, even with some "support"? They tend to try to do just what they have been doing, often not the best possibility for distance learning. And it will never lead to anything new!

Question from Ben Echeverria of Palomar College:
What major factors should drive the decision to take e-learning in the direction of non-pofit or profit at the outset of the decision making process?

Jack M. Wilson:
A crucial part of that is to understand how much external funding you feel would be required to develop your program. I also think you have to ask yourself how closely coupled the new programs are expected to be to any existing traditional programs. If there's close coupling between the traditional and online programs, and if the traditional institution is able to provide the seed funding, then I would recommend that they use a nonprofit model. If the programs are not closely coupled and will require extensive external investment, then the programs could be spun off as for-profit programs. If one decides to spin their virtual university off as a for-profit organization, then one must be prepared to do it in a very businesslike way, and to give up tight control of the program to the new for-profit organization. If one expects existing faculty to be a central part of the programs, then a for-profit model is a far more difficult sell.

Question from Jeff Brindley, Innovation Management Consulting:
Do you believe that the failure of NYUonline or Temple University is a result of jumping into online education too early before all of the research and the tools for online education had a chance to develop? Has the technology advanced enough and have we learned enough over the past two years to avoid similar missteps in the future?

Jack M. Wilson:
No and yes. I think that NYUonline and Virtual Temple were two dramatically different situations. NYUonline had been vigorously developed and was enjoying a modest measure of success. Virtual Temple had been created at a time when it was a bit faddish for universities to create profit-making spinoffs. Virtual Temple was never vigorously pursued, and created far more activity through its closure than it ever did through its operation.

Scott Carlson (Moderator):
Here's a question for the audience...

Comment from Anne-Marie Brinsmead, University of Toronto:
What are everyone's views on cost-recovery university online prospects where outside funding is a rarity?

Scott Carlson (Moderator):
Mr. Wilson is going to respond to Mr. Bork's earlier comment....

Jack M. Wilson:
I see that my old friend Alfred Bork has made a few good points that I wanted to respond to. First, with regard to markets, I agree that a graduate school with the fewest amount of students is the least promising. I think that the other markets that he's identified are indeed large markets. However, I think that adult education will continue to be the largest market, followed by elementary school and preschool. His point about the model being inadequate is well taken. If he is referring to the canonical model presently in use, I think there is a lot of room to add far more interactivity. Where I diverge from some of the proponents of fully interactive learning units is on their emphasis on doing this in a self-contained fashion without the interaction with a faculty member. I think that the interactive systems can be an important component, but will not be sufficient for most educational needs, with a few exceptions.

Scott Carlson (Moderator):
Mr. Bork is commenting on Jesse Heines's earlier comment....

Comment from Alfred Bork, Univ of California, Irvine:
Jesse, the critical cost factor, I believe, is NOT the cost of development, but the total cost to develop, deliver, and market an hour of high quality student learning time. My new book, with Sigrun Gunnarsdottir, published by Kluwer, has a chapter devoted to this issue of costs. The UK Open University showed over 30 years ago that expensive development of good material can lead to lower costs per student.

Question from Paul Roden, Keystone Mercy Health Plan:
At the recent Corporate University Week Conference in Orlando, Florida, several presenters stated that 85 percent of participants in e-learning or distance education failed to complete the program. Today on an online seminar, an e-learning vendor stated that the company had a 67 percent completion rate of MBA and required management-training workshops delivered for their customers. What is the real success rate for distance learning in academia and the private sector? If the social aspect of learning is missing in cyberspace is "blended learning," is both face-to-face and distance learning the answer?

Jack M. Wilson:
I'm not sure that I agree that the social aspect of learning needs to be absent in online learning. I think there are many examples of online learning that are far more socially interactive than traditional lecture courses at universities. I do agree that a blended model of online learning with either face-to-face or audio/video interatctions can be a very attractive hybrid.

Question from Romeo Marquis, Framingham State College (MA):
Would Jack or anyone else please address more fully the emerging high school market in distance ed?

Jack M. Wilson:
There are several different parts of high school units in distance ed. Some of those parts have substantial ability to pay. Other parts will require and/or charitable funding to be able to address significant community educational needs. Just as universities have learned to combine these markets by charging high sticker prices for students and then reinvesting that funding as financial aid for needier students, online programs can be developed to meet the needs of both of these markets through a tuition-based model with significant financial aid, and contributions from government and charitable organizations.

Comment from Alfred Bork, Univ of California, Irvine:
Linda's comment suggests to me the inadequacy of the current model. If we must have instructors for distance learning, we are condemmed to small classes and high costs per student. The best possibility is to develop learning material that does not depend on the current idea of an instructor. We have been doing that for over 30 years!

Comment from Doug Edwards, Central Texas College:
A comment about niche markets. We at CTC have been in the online business for a few years now. Last year, however, the Army started an initiative to give laptops and Internet access to all troops wanting college. The soldiers get this for free. We made a mad scramble to get our support and technical capabilities up to the challenge. I regularly teach to about 75 students a semester online, now. Most of them are military. With other ventures dropping out of the market, I can only see our course load increasing. Don't you think? At this point, as long as the military keeps funding such projects, we should not run short of students waiting to get in.

Comment from S. Parish, Kentucky physician:
The debate about distance education is exciting. For lifelong scholars in and out of academia this is a great time to be alive. As a parent of a high schooler and a middle schooler, I try to expose my kids to the wealth of resources available for all their interests whether academic or athletic. My son's seventh grade curriculum for homeschool includes courses from the University of Missouri and BYU along with a host of unit studies online. I have interests in history and literature that have been well served by distance education. Let no one think an education ends with a degree. As Ralph W. Emerson stated in his address "The American Scholar": "Colleges...can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame... Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year."

Question from Donna Weinreich, Western Michigan University:
I am beginning to develop online courses for my Gerontology Certificate Program. I have noticed that commercial e-learning products are significantly further advanced than academic products. What can we do about this?

Jack M. Wilson:
One thing that one can do is to begin to adopt any commercially available e-learning product that is more sufficiently advanced. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I think it's a good thing. One of the obstacles to the success of online education has been the prevalence of the "not invented here" (NIH) factor. When everyone feels as if they need to develop all of their own materials, the average quality of materials goes down. We need to move more toward the textbook model of materials development. Some individuals will have the talent, the time, and the inclination to develop very high quality materials. These materials will be further refined as others use them. Other faculty who use these materials will also add their own personality to the course by developing some additional materials, but the skeleton of the course may come from the commercial provider. Carol Twigg of the Pew Center for Academic Transformation has done a terrific study on this, and that study is available at center.rpi.edu

Comment from Alfred Bork, Univ of California, Irvine:
Ann-Marie, I think the prospects for profit are great, but not with current directions. This will become eventually the largest of all software markets, I believe. But before commercial endeavors we need more experimental work exporing new forms of learning.

Comment from E. De Laurentiis, Knowledge Environments, Inc.:
I agree with Alfred Bork. I've been developing an adaptive technology that personalizes the learning experience for the student, making learning interesting and effective. Often, the reason that live instructors are needed is to compensate for ineffective learning tools.

Comment from Charles Hannon, Washington & Jefferson College:
Alfred Bork asks, "are the current faculty the best people to produce distance learning courses, even with some 'support'"? The issue is not so much where the faculty are pulled from, but whether they are treated as fully enfranchised faculty/employees. Adjuncts usually (and rightly) have divided loyalties, because they are not treated well by their institutions.

Comment from Alfred Bork, Univ of California, Irvine:
Jack brings up one of my favorite topics, the level of interaction. With regard to the learning material we consider two factors very important. One is the quality of each interaction. In our units the typical interaction is a question from the computer, and a free-form response from the student, in the student's native language. I believe that speech input will be the common future form for student input to the computer. The second factor is the frequency of interactions. Our experiments in public libraries show that we can keep people at difficult learning material for long periods if the time between interactions does not exceed 20 seconds. Again, I repeat that this is all possible today, with well-designed material. Such an approach can lead to individualized learning.

Question from Christopher Horton, rural Nova Scotia:
Research has shown that the most effective way to teach physics is in a laboratory setting, with the students working in small research groups monitored by a teacher, with the small groups bringing their findings and thoughts back to the larger class for presentation and discussion. I have been giving some thought to the question of how this could be structured in distance education, perhaps with the use of chat rooms. Are you aware of anyone else who has tried or considered such an approach?

Jack M. Wilson:
Yes. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, many of the courses are taught in a studio format, based upon that research base. They have a distance learning program with thousands of students, and many of those courses have been taught to try to emulate the "studio at a distance." I think this is one of the most promising formats for online education. It also addresses one of the issues that Alfred Bork brought up in his second comment. He suggests that if we must have instructors for distance learning, we are condemned to small classes and high costs per student. The studio model directly contradicts that. We are only condemned to small classes with models in which all of the interactions are directed from student to instructor. In better-designed models, like the studio model, much of the action takes place between students working on virtual teams, and the instructor becomes a facilitator, moving through the virtual team sessions. I've often felt sorry for instructors caught at the center of a system in which all input is directed at them. That is a truly overwhelming experience, and it is bad pedagogy besides.

Comment from Peter Shapiro, William Paterson University:
Jack, your comment about Not Invented Here (NIH) really hits home. If we can get to the point where professors can see a course as a mosaic or a jigsaw puzzle with various parts that they can mix, match, and alter, I think these types of professionally produced materials will find a home in more traditional spaces.

Question from Paul Gross, Park University:
How much were you paying to develop courses, what were you paying for faculty to teach a course, and what was your tuition charge? What were you doing that was most and least effective to market your courses?

Jack M. Wilson:
The questions about what we pay and what gets paid have to be answered by "it depends." Many institutions have spent far too much on course development when the market was not large enough to pay back the investments made in materials. On the other hand, there are a number of very high volume courses and programs where it might make sense to invest more money in development. The development of materials is an expensive business and that is why I suggested, in a previous question, it would make sense to collectively develop materials much as we collectively create textbooks. On the issue of the payment for teaching: This depends upon the business model of the organization. For-profit mass market providers like Phoenix or Capella pay a set amount to instructors and have a rather standardized approach to each class. The amounts are generally a few thousand dollars per course. Many of these courses are taught by part-time instructors who treat this pay as supplemental. For the large research universities, this rigid model does not make sense. Some faculty can be incented with additional compensation. The best faculty are often so busy with their teaching and research, that they would be reluctant to jeopardize their external funding by trying to earn an additional few thousand dollars per year. Their incentive needs to be quite different. They may find it attractive to see the funding from online programs plowed back into support for full-time faculty positions in their departments. These faculty then can share in the overall departmental educational program in the areas of research and service as well as teaching. Similarly, tuition must be set to be appropriate to the market, and may range from as little as a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. There is no "most or least effective" method of marketing. Marketing methods must be selected to match the target market for the program.

Question from J. McGrath:
What are the key things that the online-education environment can provide the student beyond the traditional classroom? You mentioned the Asynchronous Learning model--what specifically do online distance-educators need to do differently for the student?

Jack M. Wilson:
They need to provide far more interactivity in the courses and they need to provide that interactivity in every imaginable and technically feasible way.

Comment from Alfred Bork, Univ of California, Irvine:
The comment from S. Parish should remind us that in the world of today learning should be a continuous process from birth to death. Schools and universities arose when this was not the case. Are they adequate to the future?

Comment from E. De Laurentiis, Knowledge Environments, Inc.:
If the distribution of learning objects from many different sources is to work, a micro-payment royalty system will need to be implemented, such as Ted Nelson who coined "hypertext" suggested over 20 years ago.

Comment from Alfred Bork, Univ of California, Irvine:
Jack, I agree that peer learning is a very valuable activity. There are a number of possible approaches to this. We discovered about a dozen years ago that it is best to have three or four people working together at the display in the kind of interactive environment I described in an earlier post to this discussion. This work was done with middle school students using the Scientific Reasoning Series.

Comment from Marilyn Wangler, Athabasca University:
This discussion is fascinating from a Canadian perspective as our experience has been quite different. Athabasca University's online Executive MBA program launched in 1994, has grown to be the largest Executive MBA in the country, as well as in the top three of all Canadian EMBAs, according to a recent Canadian Business Magazine survey. Our studies have shown that online learning fosters strong student interaction, and adds to a high level of thought and introspection. A collaborative online environment allows students time for reflection so that their asynchronous contributions are meaningful and much more numerous (over a week, there may be 200 contributions from a group of 8 to 10 students) than those in a traditional classroom.

Scott Carlson (Moderator):
I'm afraid that's going to have to be it for today. The volume of questions we got was incredible, and I'm sorry that we couldn't get to all of them.

I want to thank Jack Wilson for joining us. And thanks to all of you who submitted questions or comments.

Jack M. Wilson:
Thank you everyone for your excellent questions and comments. I think the range of discussion illustrates both how exciting this field is, and how young this field is. Together we are all inventing the future of continuous education. Online learning will look like a primitive component of future educational environments, but that is where the action is today. Today we talked a lot about interaction and interactivity. My old friend Alfred Bork and I came at this from slightly different perspectives. That is what makes this field interesting. We are united in our desire to see courses become more and more interactive, and we each have different approaches. We talked today a lot about markets. The term "markets" is one that we borrowed from the corporate community. Let me put a little different slant on it. These markets are really "community needs." We must develop the programs to address the significant community needs for continuous education, for better elementary school programs, for continuous teacher education, for online programs that will allow adults to seek enrichment of their personal lives and their professional lives. Thanks so much for being with us today.