Historically Black Colleges Grapple With Online Education

One of Lionel S. Duncan's responsibilities at Morgan State University is creating more online-education courses. He's got his work cut out for him.

"Distance education is a very hard sell at black institutions, at some more than others,"

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says Mr. Duncan, director of distance education at Morgan, a historically black university here. "There was a time when we just couldn't think about technology in the classroom," he says. "We had to think about reading and writing."

But times are changing. Providing distance education, especially online, is imperative if black institutions are to remain competitive as more institutions of all types put degrees and courses online, says Earl S. Richardson, president of Morgan State. From 1998 to last March, he chaired the President's Board of Advisers on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, a federal panel.

The 105 historically black institutions and roughly 30 more predominantly black institutions confront the same challenges as other institutions as they work to train professors, improve infrastructure, and find scarce money and time to develop online content, says Bruce N. Chaloux, director of the Electronic Campus of the Southern Regional Education Board. But the job is even harder than at mostly white institutions, because black colleges have smaller endowments and charge their students less, he asserts. They also must consider their historical mission of cultivating a supportive atmosphere for black students.

On the whole, black-college officials say, the institutions aren't as driven or financially able to offer online learning -- in fact, some don't offer any at all. A survey in January by the Digital Learning Lab at Howard University revealed that, of the Web sites at 123 black institutions, only 40 displayed any links to online courses. An October 2000 study by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, an advocacy group for black institutions, and the U.S. Department of Commerce found that 58 percent of black institutions participated in some form of distance education, but that 85 percent of them were not offering degrees online.

Comparatively, a 1998 survey by the U.S. Department of Education found that 79 percent of public four-year institutions and 47 percent of private four-year institutions offered virtual programs, and that 91 percent were expected to have such courses by 2001 (the study has not yet been updated). Michael P. Lambert, executive director of the Distance Education and Training Council, estimates that two-thirds of all colleges now offer distance courses.

Black institutions have been engaged in distance education for years in other formats, particularly telecourses, says Janet K. Poley, president of the American Distance Education Consortium. Many black colleges now offer online courses, but only a few grant degrees online, she says.

Those that do are reasonably competitive with predominantly white institutions nearby. For example, North Carolina A&T State University offers a bachelor's degree in occupational safety and health and a master's degree in instructional technology. The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, also in the state system, offers three bachelor's-degree-completion programs -- in electrical-engineering technology, fire-safety technology, and nursing -- and two master's-degree programs, in nursing and elementary education. Hampton University, in Hampton, Va., offers one online bachelor's degree, in religious studies, while Liberty University, a predominantly white institution of similar size in Lynchburg, Va., offers two associate-, four bachelor's-, and five master's-degree programs through videotape, but nothing online.

Online programs don't try to replicate the supportive, individualized environment that many black institutions foster, although they do attempt to compensate for the absence of face-to-face contact, says Vida A. Durant, chief information officer at the United Negro College Fund.

The majority of colleges and universities, black and white alike, use the same course-management software -- WebCT, Blackboard, and others -- to put their courses online, says Kimberly Phifer-McGhee, director of distance education at North Carolina Central University.

As black colleges acquire more expertise in developing online courses, they will eventually incorporate more of the personal attention that makes being at many black institutions special, says Bennie Lowery, director of distance education at Louisiana's Grambling State University. He says he wants "to provide more support services" but that "most of us are just trying to keep up, much less develop unique aspects. However, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't."

The Three 'M's'

For many black colleges, whether to offer online education comes down to three "M's": money, mission, and market. Money, or lack of it, plays a dominant role. Black institutions split into three categories, says Diane Bowles, who runs technology conferences for black institutions. State institutions can use public money and often have official encouragement to provide distance courses, and the larger private universities can draw on their own resources to move programs online, says Ms. Bowles, who is director of the Visual Technological Research and Education Center at Georgia Institute of Technology. Both are more likely to offer distance education than are smaller private institutions, which are often in rural areas and have fewer financial and manpower resources.

Many black institutions receive federal and state grants to supplement spending on the technical infrastructure they need to support distance education, such as networks, servers, and connections to the Internet. To stretch their money further, black institutions interested in distance learning are seeking money from the federal and state governments, corporations, and alumni and other donors. Some are also forming consortia that create Web-based courses and degree programs that all members can use while spreading the high cost of developing online courses.

Most black colleges need better technical infrastructure if they are to offer distance education, says Frederick S. Humphries, president of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. "It needs to be tried, and in order to try it, you need the resources for it," he says. The United Negro College Fund, a consortium of 39 private black institutions, has raised more than $90-million in the past two years to rebuild the technology platforms of all its members, says William H. Gray, its president.

About 90 percent of black institutions pay for technology upgrades with grants made under Title III of the Higher Education Act of 1965, says James H. Haynes, who coordinates such grants at Morgan State. Under Title III, developing institutions that need to improve their physical infrastructure, including technology, can apply for federal aid. Although the money -- $206-million is earmarked for black colleges this year -- can also be used for other purposes, many campus-technology administrators say they rely on Title III money.

Writing grant proposals, however, is a big problem for black institutions, says Mr. Duncan, of Morgan State. Unlike many predominantly white colleges, most black colleges don't have staffs devoted expressly to applying for grants, he says. That leaves the task to professors, who don't have the same time or skills as professionals.

But developing home-grown skills and programs, not just buying hardware, is key if black institutions are to offer more distance education, says Roy L. Beasley, director of Howard's Digital Learning Lab. To save money and keep their instructors focused on teaching, some black colleges contract out course design and Web-site maintenance to companies that will do the work for them, says Valorie F. McAlpin, a dean of information technology at the College of Agriculture at the University of Maryland at College Park, who worked for 20 years at North Carolina A&T. But if black colleges are going to succeed at distance education, she says, they must cultivate expertise in-house.

A Focus on Mission

As important as money -- if not more so -- in online education is whether distance learning meshes with the historical mission of black colleges to provide education to their communities and, particularly, to black students, says Ms. Phifer-McGhee. When she came to her previous job at Florida A&M University in 1998, she says, the faculty was at first split roughly 60-40 in favor of distance education.

"The faculty wanted compensation and the best way we found was through grants," Ms. Phifer-McGhee says. The university got more than $3-million from the National Science Foundation to provide salary, hardware, software, and graduate assistants for professors who would spend the time to create online courses. It also got $242,000 under Title III for infrastructure and training.

With those incentives, more faculty members started developing content with enthusiasm, she says. "Their whole attitude changed," she says. "In fact, the response was so big, we always had a waiting list for our training sessions."

But other colleges are just as set against diving into online programs. Michael L. Lomax, president of Dillard University, a private institution in New Orleans, says that while integrating technology into classrooms and libraries is important, distance education isn't. Small historically black institutions such as Dillard specialize in providing a nurturing, individualized environment that can't be reproduced online, he says. His university doesn't offer any online courses and doesn't intend to, he says: "Dillard won't be giving a degree to anyone who won't set foot on campus."

Other institutions are on the fence, weighing the issues before committing themselves. "Distance education is still emerging as part of our mission," says S. Raj Chaudhury, director of the Bringing Education and Science Together Laboratory at Norfolk State University. As a mode of teaching, online education is having a hard time matching the rich learning environment that face-to-face interaction provides, he says. Another challenge is that faculty members at black institutions traditionally carry heavy teaching loads, Mr. Chaudhury says. Many colleges can't afford to give professors time off or pay them extra to create courses.

Playing to the Market

The market for distance education also differs from the traditional black-college market, says Ms. Durant, of the United Negro College Fund. Most distance-education students are older professionals, instead of the 18- to 22-year-old, full-time students that historically black colleges typically draw.

That hasn't stopped black colleges from creating online courses and programs, of course, says Mr. Chaloux, of the Southern Regional Education Board. Black institutions market themselves primarily to black students but will accept students of any ethnicity, he says. Those institutions that choose to offer distance education decide on content in the same way that other institutions do -- they look at their markets and offer what sells.

Most of the courses and degrees that black colleges offer online are the business and professional courses that many black students demand, says Mr. Duncan of Morgan State.

That's what Hampton University did, says Debra Saunders White, its assistant provost for technology. Its online bachelor's degree in religious studies relies on the market drawn to the convention of ministers that Hampton has held for the past 87 years, she says.

One niche distance-education market that black institutions have not yet entered is, perhaps surprisingly, black studies. The University of Tennessee at Knox-ville lists an online course called "Black Writers in America," and several other predominantly white colleges list black-oriented courses among their online-education options.

Ms. Durant and many other authorities say that the growing interest in black studies through online education by predominantly white institutions doesn't threaten the mission or the market that black institutions have.

But Grambling State's Mr. Lowery thinks that those institutions probably are cutting into the black-institutional market, but there's not much black colleges can do. "It's a priority thing," he says. "We can't do everything at once. The current market is for regular courses and degrees, and that's what we're concentrating on."

Enlisting the Army's Assistance

A fourth "M" among the online-education concerns of black institutions could be the military. Officials at many black institutions think that one of their biggest recent opportunities to get into online learning is eArmyU, the distance-education program the United States Army offers to its enlisted soldiers, many of whom are members of minority groups. The gargantuan operation -- it expects to serve 80,000 soldiers over the next five years at a cost of $453-million -- allows soldiers to earn degrees and take courses online from 23 member institutions.

The program has drawn the attention of many institutions that are interested in having the Army pay them to provide distance education. Last month PricewaterhouseCoopers, the consulting company that runs eArmyU, called for new colleges to join.

Only one historically black institution, North Carolina A&T, participated in the program's first year. But "infrastructure issues" nearly forced it to bail out, says Thurman N. Guy, special assistant to North Carolina A&T State's vice chancellor of information technology and telecommunications. "We had some success with eArmyU, but participation was awfully demanding on our resources."

North Carolina A&T State's hesitation hasn't stopped Alabama A&M University, Bethune-Cookman College, Florida A&M, Grambling State, Morgan State, and North Carolina Central from forming the Virtual HBCU consortium to participate in eArmyU.

The colleges hope to divide the work and cost of creating programs to offer an associate degree, three bachelor's degrees, and a master's degree among them, allowing all of them to participate without overextending their resources. PricewaterhouseCoopers "seems to understand that's how we have to do it," Mr. Lowery says.

But Mr. Beasley, of Howard, worries that most black institutions aren't ready to participate. Because the Army is looking for courses that are available immediately, he says, "it may all be over in two or three years, and there will be no more room at the table."