Thursday, November 15, 2001

Columbia U. Makes a Third Foray Into Distance Education By SCOTT CARLSON Columbia University, which already is involved in two high-profile distance-education ventures, has opened a portal site that collects and showcases various online courses, course Web sites, publications, and e-learning resources available through the university. The site, called Columbia Interactive, provides links to Web sites of Columbia-based newspapers, a site that offers details about an archaeological excavation in Egypt, and the Web sites for the Columbia libraries and the Center for Jazz Studies, among other things. In addition, users can see all of the Web sites of courses offered through Columbia. The site also prominently features links to online courses and cheaper online seminars available through Fathom, Columbia's for-profit distance-learning venture. Fathom processes and profits from the sale of those courses. In addition to Fathom, Columbia is a player in UNext, a venture that sells online business courses to corporations. Columbia Interactive was put together by Columbia Digital Knowledge Ventures, an arm of the university that packages Columbia's intellectual material in digital form and prepares it for distribution through venues like Fathom. Columbia officials hope to use the new portal site to serve both students and faculty members, along with those outside the university. "We have built an awful lot as a university over time, and we're gearing up to build much, much more on the online-educational side," says G. Todd Hardy, the executive director of Columbia DKV. "So rather than ask people to look through the dot-edu site without some organization to it, we decided to create this separate tool to find things that might be of some interest to them." "This material was always there," he adds. "You just wouldn't know where to find it." Mr. Hardy says that the site cost somewhere in the "tens of thousands" of dollars to put together. He says it will not draw an audience away from Fathom, which is also trying to build a base of users among students and faculty members at Columbia. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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