DO YOU SEE DISTANCE EDUCATION AS A MEANS TO BRING IN "NEW" REVENUES?

DO YOU SEE DISTANCE EDUCATION AS A MEANS TO BRING IN "NEW" REVENUES?

Magid said "absolutely yes." Lynch said "there is no right answer." Heeger said "yes and no." The rest gave a qualified "no." So, obviously, a certain ambiguity penetrated this question. Most claim that the primary reason for providing distance education is to offer more options to their on-campus students. They also see completely online programs as a means to open up new markets as well as a stepping stone to eventually growing their numbers of technologically enriched face-to-face classes and thus stay competitive in a changing, web-savvy student marketplace.

Finney: We got into this for reasons other than revenue. Our virtual college has several missions. One is just accessibility - we wanted to have a larger area be able to access our courses. Another reason is a very local reason having to do with the lack of available space here in Manhattan. We created courses that are fully online and also [hybrid face-to-face and online] so that we are able to increase our offerings within the same space envelope. With respect to revenues, what we discovered is that online classes that still revolve around a physical classroom are popular and more easily sold. We can recruit students more easily for those classes than for online education that is wholly asynchronous and wholly online. I think over time that might change and maybe the dot-com dreams of thousands and thousands of students and millions and millions of dollars will come to pass, but I think the growth curve of online is like the growth curve of anything else - it takes a long time.

Kasta: It has been a revenue generator but not a significant one up to this point. When you have on-campus students taking your [online] courses, it is a rearrangement [of revenues]. At the moment, they [on-campus students enrolled in online courses] represent 30 percent of our business, and we expect that to go higher. At many Ontario universities, it is 70 percent. These institutions are really creating online courses primarily for use on campus.

Lynch: Distance education has more than one objective at an institution of higher learning. One is to bring in new revenues; a second objective would be to maintain revenue share by offering services that other competing institutions might be offering; thirdly some services can only be offered most effectively using distance education technology. So the answer is yes, sometimes and not necessarily.

Heeger: No and yes. No in the sense that distance education [at UMUC] is not a separate initiative. It is part and parcel of the way this university does business. Distance education for us is more about the way we operate as a university. Using distance education technologies are just modalities for extending the university. Now having said that, online education gives us access to larger and larger pools of students. And it gives us access to new relationships with other institutions [and corporations].