Wednesday, May 24, 2000

A Deal Will Help Columbia U. Put Continuing-Education Courses Online By SARAH CARR Columbia University's division of continuing education announced Tuesday that it would work with a company called Cognitive Arts to put a cluster of courses online this coming fall. Cognitive Arts, which has worked with Northwestern University, also expects to announce within a few weeks a deal to help Harvard University's business school put some of its courses online, according to a company official. Columbia is working with the company to create Columbia Continuing Education Online, which will be a part of Columbia's arts-and-sciences division. The courses will most likely include some in traditional liberal-arts subjects -- such as psychology and economics -- in addition to more typical online offerings in business and other professional fields, said G. Todd Hardy, president of Columbia Media Enterprises, the university's digital-media company. The deal between Columbia and Cognitive Arts will to some degree follow the model of Columbia's deal with UNext.com, a company working with five universities to offer online business courses. Like the UNext courses, the Columbia Continuing Education Online courses will be based on problem solving, rather than on traditional lectures and readings, said Mr. Hardy. In a typical scenario, a student might be told that he is the general manager of a business with an emergency to deal with. Cognitive Arts will help Columbia transfer its courses into the new format, but any credit awarded will still come from the university, according to Mr. Hardy. Students taking UNext courses receive credit from a UNext subsidiary called Cardean University, rather than from the partner institutions. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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