Wednesday, February 2, 2000

Shopping for an Online Course? Kick the Tires and Check the Mileage By DAN CARNEVALE Sandy Kelley was a little nervous this past fall about taking her first online course. Although she had taken other courses at the same community college, she still had concerns about Web-based learning, what her instructor would be like, and what would be involved in this particular course. "I didn't know exactly what I was going into when I first signed up for the class," Ms. Kelley says. "I had some reservations about it." She was able to meet with the instructor beforehand, so that helped. But it would have also been nice to have heard from other students who had taken the course previously, she says, so she would have known what to expect. As it turned out, all went well with the course, which was provided by Montgomery College in Houston, and in which students learned how to design a PC help desk. But other students are signing up for Internet-based courses with far less information than Ms. Kelley had. With a glut of online-education providers spilling into the academic world, students may have trouble distinguishing the good from the bad. And experts offer little comfort: They say that as students shop the Web for online courses, it's up to them to make sure they get a quality education. Right now, neither accrediting agencies nor the federal officials offer much help, and private-sector efforts to fill the gap are still in their infancy. "You cannot totally control quality from any kind of external source, so you must assist people in becoming good consumers," says Sally Johnstone, director of the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Ms. Johnstone says plenty of fine distance-education programs and virtual universities exist, but she adds that students need to know how to identify them, and how to evaluate which offers the deal best suited to a particular set of needs. When shopping around, students should comb through their choices and make sure the courses are transferable, have good instructors, and are taught through institutions that are accredited and that provide quality services online. Basically, she tells students, make sure you get your money's worth. Cyberspace, however, is still a vacuum when it comes to reliable information with which to evaluate online courses. Students may have to do some digging in order to find out not only which are the quality institutions but also which courses are best for them, she says. Marshall S. Smith, the former acting deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, says the private sector, not the government, will provide the means for judging the quality of online courses. Online education has just recently hit the fast track, he says, so scores of instructors and innovators are trying to invent new methods of teaching with the new technology. "You have a tension between regulation and the expression of free creativity in the marketplace," he says. "The last thing you want is for government to put a heavy hand in there." But he adds that quality is also a concern, and he says the Education Department should continue to keep an eye out for extremely poor and occasionally fraudulent online-education programs, sometimes referred to as diploma mills. For students who are sifting through a variety of distance-education providers, some basic elements -- such as accreditation -- are still important to look for, observers say. But even experts disagree on whether traditional accrediting standards mean much in the online world. "Everybody's still trying to figure this out," says Ms. Johnstone. "Everything's changing so quickly." Jamie Merisotis, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, which follows accreditation issues, says accreditors' standards for judging quality are going to have to change in the age of the Internet. But even the accreditors don't yet know what direction the changes should take. Mr. Merisotis invites students to be skeptical of distance education and to search hard to find quality online programs. There's a lot of experimentation out there, he says, and some teaching methods work better than others. "There's always a danger with new approaches to teaching and learning that we don't have a firm handle on yet." But Steven Crow, executive director of the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education, which accredits accrediting agencies, says that as long as students are attentive and institutions are responsible, accrediting standards don't need to be changed drastically. As for the so-called diploma mills, accrediting bodies will be able to sniff those out and raise a red flag at the first sign of any problem, Mr. Crow says. "I think we're doing a reasonably good job of sorting out the serious from the non-serious." Even some serious universities, however, offer quality online courses but do a poor job in terms of providing services, support, or information. WICHE's Ms. Johnstone worries that some universities are letting their instructors create Web courses independently but are not at the same time developing an institution-wide plan for reinforcing those courses with services. Until accreditors can step in, some observers say private enterprise should fill the void and rate the quality of courses. Mr. Smith, formerly of the Education Department, says such entrepreneurs might produce a distance-education version of Amazon.com, which lets buyers read reviews of the books the company sells online. Another model, he says, might be the online auction company eBay, which permits buyers to rate sellers of auctioned items. Someone could make a mint, he says, if a site was set up that collects student reviews of online courses. "This is a marvelous opportunity," Mr. Smith says. "I think it's going to pop up through entrepreneurs." NewPromise.com, a Web site that lets users sign up for online courses, has provided such information on its site for four months, says its chief executive officer, Scott Kriz. Because the service is so new, very few reviews of classes have actually been posted -- in fact, many of the posts are from Mr. Kriz himself. But the results thus far have been encouraging, he says. Company policy allows students who have registered for a particular course through the site to post pretty much whatever comments, positive or negative, they feel necessary, so long as the message is constructive, Mr. Kriz says. "It's our belief that by providing the most information, you're providing the students the best service," he says. Another site, eCollege.com, will post student reviews starting this fall, say company officials. And Hungry Minds plans to offer something similar within the next couple of months. Ms. Kelley, who signed up for the Montgomery College course, thinks colleges should post students' complete course evaluations online, rather than wait for some of the students in a class to post their own evaluations on independent sites. If institutions posted complete evaluations, she says, professors wouldn't have to worry that the independent sites would attract comments only from students who had it in for them. Ms. Johnstone of WICHE says education is becoming a more consumer-driven market as students demand more options. "Students are basically asking their colleges and universities and their faculties to give them high-quality services at a time that is convenient to them," she says. The Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications has already put out a book called The Distance Learner's Guide that Ms. Johnstone says gives some pointers on picking a good online course that meets a student's individual needs. She adds that it's important for the institutions to reach out to their students and find out what they need. "The students should be the first concern, and the first concern shouldn't be how those colleges and universities have traditionally operated," she says. 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