In this issue of EP we talk with three growing providers of online distance education programs - a state institution, a private institution and a for profit - the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS), Saint Leo University (SLU), and Capella University, respectively.

In the summer of 1997, the UIS Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning (OTEL) was formed under the leadership of Ray Schroeder, a UIS professor Emeritus of communications with 30 years teaching experience, to develop online distance education courses and programs.

By fall semester 1998, Schroeder and his staff (a web developer and part-time graduate assistant) along with approximately $70,000 in state seed money, as well as support from the state’s system-wide initiative called the University of Illinois Online, launched two undergraduate online courses (MIS and computer science) with a total of 30 enrollments in what is now called UIS Online.

By fall semester 2001, UIS Online, which currently offers 65 courses and three complete degree programs, had 918 enrollments and 684 students, or ten percent of the school’s total enrollments. (UIS enrolls about 4,000 traditional students.) "What we have done is a fairly steady scaling up to this spring (2002) when we expect to have more than 1,000 enrollments online," says Schroeder.

OTEL has increased its staff to include a full-time administrative assistant, two web developers and four graduate assistants. Admissions and registration services, along with student general and tech support services, have been mainstreamed into their correlated on-campus departments. "This has been an evolutionary process, rather than a reinventing process," says Schroeder. "But we are still working on expanding our counseling and placement services to better serve our online students."

Eighty-eight percent of UIS Online students reside in the state of Illinois. Thirty-three percent reside in Sangamon county where the campus is located.

OTEL has licensed both Blackboard and WebCT course management systems, as well as WebBoard for live chat and threaded discussion software and RealServer and Impatica for streaming media. The vast majority of classes are completely asynchronous. For instance, Schroeder, who also teachers online, does Power Point lectures with recorded streaming audio that is also transcribed to text for the hearing impaired.

OTEL’s faculty support services for developing online classes are built around a tiered system where the web developers assist faculty with complex pedagogical and technical concerns while the graduate assistants provide the nuts-and-bolts services of posting classes online and attending to basic questions from faculty.

Schroeder says that once faculty have experienced online teaching for "a semester or two," they need "far less technical support from our unit. My biggest surprise is that faculty want to put their content up most of the time. They want to have full control of their classroom, and they want to be able to put something new up on a Sunday night at 11 o’clock."

Schroeder estimates that UIS Online can grow to support about 25 percent of the university’s total number of credit hours "without changing the character of the campus. We are trying to identify the appropriate level that would allow us significant outreach and service - one that would allow us to have a robust campus environment and still do outreach."

Part of that outreach relates to being located in the state capital and having relationships with state agencies. For instance, the UIS Center for Legal Studies in conjunction with OTEL is providing online training to state employees through a Workforce Development Career Specialist Studies program. The four-course, credit-bearing program is designed for state employees who provide labor market, career search information, workforce preparation, training, and placement assistance to their clients and/or students.

Additionally, future growth for UIS Online could include adding a new online teacher certification program. Similar to most of the country, Illinois is experiencing a K-12 teacher shortage due to a large teacher population that is close to or at retirement eligibility. To help fill the shortage, UIS is working with the Illinois Board of Education to develop a fast-track certification online program for people with baccalaureate degrees who may be interested in changing careers to the teaching profession, says Schroeder. "There’s a great need out there, and I’m pretty excited about it."

Unlike UIS, where 88 percent of the online student body are state residents and the bulk of instructors are full-time faculty who also teach on campus, Florida-based SLU’s online distance education program enrolls students from all over the country, and 60 percent of its faculty are adjunct.

Like UIS, SLU officially launched its first online classes during the fall of 1998, beginning with three complete degree programs that garnered 12 enrollments. According to Michael Rogich, director of SLU’s Center for Online Learning, by the fall of 1999 SLU’s online program had 650 enrollments in one term. (SLU has six eight-week terms per year.) By fall 2000 that enrollment figure grew to 2,000. Today SLU’s online distance education program has approximately 4,300 enrollments per term.

"We were growing at a phenomenal rate," says Rogich. "But now we are growing at about six to eight percent every eight weeks."

A staff of 18 people, with outside help, maintain the SLU online program. There are three teams (faculty management, admissions and registration/advising), along with services provided by Bisk Education’s University Alliance and staff from the traditional campus, who keep SLU’s online program in fast-forward motion.

The faculty management team is comprised of three people who recruit, one-on-one train and monitor online faculty, The traditional campus assists with recruiting faculty by processing employment applications and working with various on-campus departments to "clear" new hires, says Rogich. Clearing faculty is a process whereby faculty credentials, competencies and qualifications are examined to determine what classes new faculty will teach.

The faculty management team also handles any student complaints from a faculty perspective. "The most typical complaining you get in any online program deals with the need for feedback and interaction," says Rogich. "We have faculty performance standards, and each term I get class evaluations. Plus, with the administrative software we have we are now able to count the number of interactions per class section."

The admissions team is comprised of five people, including a financial aid specialist. The team collects student application data and transcripts and works with the main campus admissions department. Additionally, the team handles the online orientation process, which is a class that students take during their first term.

The registration and advising team is comprised of seven people who basically help students with the registration processes and provide support services to students by telephone and email.

Web portal, course digitization (including filming, editing, streaming audio and video and CD-ROM production services) and marketing services are all provided by University Alliance from a studio next door to SLU’s online learning office, both of which are in buildings located outside of the traditional SLU campus.

The University Alliance is Bisk Education’s label for a small consortium of dissimilar online degree programs offered by SLU, Villanova University, University of Southern Florida, Jacksonville University and Regis University. University Alliance currently claims to have a combined total of 41,000 enrollments.

Next steps for SLU’s online program includes enhancing both the SLU campus and University Alliance versions of its web pages, and promoting its new bachelor of arts in criminal justice program through a 50,000-piece direct mailing to police organizations throughout the country. SLU is also looking at converting its on-campus health care management program to the online environment and possibly building a marketing relationship opportunity with Jacksonville University’s RN-to-BSN nursing program to uncover potential students.

For the long term, Rogich says if the undergraduate criminal justice programs succeeds, he can see building a criminal justice graduate degree program as a natural extension.

Overall, Rogich adds that such accomplishments would complete a cycle to create what he calls a "mature organization. Then I can see it basically just adding programs and expanding."

Like its for-profit counterparts, Capella University is experiencing unprecedented growth. In only six months, Capella’s enrollments have doubled from more than 2,000 enrollments to more than 4,000 enrollments, says Capella President Michael Offermann, who began his presidency in mid June 2001. Back in the summer of 1999, Capella had enrollment figures in the 600 range.

"When I looked at Capella, one of the things that really struck me was the extent to which infrastructure had really developed here - both human infrastructure and technological infrastructure - to allow us to scale and see this kind of growth," says Offermann, who claims that class sizes have remained in the 12-to-25 students range throughout this expansion process.

There are two overriding factors that contribute to Capella’s success, says Offermann. One is their "ability to move fairly quickly to put into place responsive programs," and number two is their "real dedication to using the web to its fullest capacity to help people."

For example, Capella’s user friendly and highly informative website recently added a unique customer-service oriented feature called the "2-Minute Advisor," where site visitors fill out a series of online forms that helps to determine their academic interests and commitments, ultimate goals, ability to study online, cost factors and more.

Part of Capella’s responsiveness to program development is related to its primary focus on adult learners, adds Offerman. Through focus groups and extensive online and telephone surveys "we are finding more and more adult learners who don’t necessarily want to chew off an entire degree program in one bite." So, Capella has developed a host of new degree-bearing undergraduate and graduate certificate programs that are more like "digestible chunks" that are often viewed as a way to get some specific career-related knowledge or as a first step to eventually transferring into a degree program.

On the faculty side, hiring quality instructors as Capella scales up so quickly and "getting them oriented to the way that we believe education should be done" is a "big challenge," says Offermann. "What we found is that a lot of faculty that are teaching for us happen to come to us from community colleges where they can teach a course for us and still work for their college. This is very interesting for them because (at Capella) they can teach at the upper division level."

Additionally, and more common than hiring community college teachers, many of Capella’s newer faculty are from the business world, he adds. "There are a lot of people who are able to bring their real-world experiences to bear in the online classroom, and they are teaching one course, maybe two courses for us."

Finally, to provide "balance," Offermann says that Capella is expanding its number of full-time faculty who work either on location at their Minneapolis headquarters or throughout the country from their own offices. "Their main role is to work as mentors and help other faculty, as well as teach."

What’s in store for the future? Beginning in April 2002, Capella will be offering a new MBA program that will be "more modular based," says Offermann. The modules will consist of two to four project-focused courses taken over an extended period of time. "We are going to look at things like planning, communications and leadership and then a synthesis of those things into a business plan that will be a culminating project."

In the education and training arena, Capella is seeing a growing interest coming from corporate and government sectors where prospective adult students are seeking programs and courses related to learning how to effectively use technology to provide training - "basically teaching teachers," says Offermann. "We are trying to support people who are really pioneering the change to training being done online," he adds. "It’s an expanding area, but it has been slow to expand. It’s an area where you have to keep up with the content, because it is changing constantly and it’s changing in terms of who is really engaged and what’s really effective or not effective in the corporate world."