Wednesday, June 12, 2002

Educause Seeks Minority Colleges for a Cooperative Distance-Learning Project By FLORENCE OLSEN Educause is seeking a few good American Indian, black, and Latino colleges. Leaders of an Educause project designed to build up the high-tech capacities of minority-serving institutions say they are looking for colleges to operate distance-learning facilities that other minority-serving institutions could use. Educause, a consortium of colleges interested in education technology, has received financing from the National Science Foundation for the project, known as Advanced Networking With Minority-Serving Institutions, or AN-MSI. "We are in the early stages of finding out who might be interested in pursuing this," says David A. Staudt, director of the networking project. Project leaders say they are interested in copying an online-learning program developed at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. It was started in February 1999 to save taxpayer money and avoid duplication by serving many Wisconsin public colleges at once. The model program, known as dot.edu, now hosts nearly 11,000 courses, in various stages of development, for 83 in-state and out-of-state campuses. It does not, however, put a special emphasis on minority-serving institutions or programs. The dot.edu facility has 45 servers for hosting online courses, a 24-hour help desk, and a staff of four experts in software training, instructional design, and Web-accessibility rules. Leaders of the AN-MSI project at Educause say their next step will be to develop detailed plans for how such a facility could be duplicated by minority-serving institutions, which are defined as colleges whose students come from American Indian, African American, or Hispanic cultures. Academic-equipment grant programs are a potential source of financing that project leaders say they will explore. One such program offered by Sun Microsystems provides free hardware for Web-based learning projects. The nonprofit model that dot.edu developed works because it is "education taking care of education," says Charlene Douglas, director of dot.edu. Companies that have tried offering similar services have not been successful "because they expect education to operate like any other business," she says. The dot.edu facility operates on an annual budget of less than $1-million, Ms. Douglas says. It generally charges Wisconsin colleges an annual fee of $23,500 for its full range of services, in addition to a $200 fee for each course section that its servers host. Institutions outside the state are charged a bit more. Mr. Staudt, of Educause, says that "some really good technical horsepower" already exists within minority-serving institutions and communities. "What we need to do is to get ourselves organized." He says time is the biggest obstacle facing minority-serving institutions interested in offering more distance-education and Web-based courses. "Some of these folks are teaching four or five classes," he says. "Sometimes it's really difficult for them to find the time." But some distance-education experts say the hosting-facility model may itself be flawed. "I think it's an idea whose time has not yet come," says Janet K. Poley, president of the American Distance Education Consortium. "I don't see large customers and dollars in education rushing to those kinds of facilities." Ms. Poley says that network and help-desk operations are so crucial for distance learning that many colleges are unwilling to give up their control over those functions. Even if they are not very good at operating a help desk or a network, she says, most institutions think: "We need to keep this in our own control, or we'll lose our customers." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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