On-campus undergraduate and graduate programs in mass communication experienced "unprecedented levels" of increased enrollments in 2003, according to an annual study reported in Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, titled "2003-2004 Enrollment Report: Growth in Field Keeps up with Trend." Can this same growth be transferred over to distance-education programs within the communications field of study?

The University of Maryland University College (UMUC) offers a fully online undergraduate degree with a major in communications that has gone from 84 students in 1994 to 567 students in the fall of 2004. Athabasca University (AU) offers a fully online Bachelor of Professional Arts in Communication Studies that started with 77 students in 1999 and now has more than 400. Syracuse University (SU) offers an Independent Study Degree Program in Communications Management at a distance with residency requirements. It limits its enrollments to 25 students per year, and has met that number every year, except once, since 1995. Pennsylvania State University (PSU) offers a relatively new fully online undergraduate certificate in communications studies (launched in 2001) that lacks a track record but is showing great promise.

These four programs have similarities in technology use and interdisciplinarity, but, as can be expected, differences in faculty status, reasons for existing and program length. And despite the online nature of these programs, two piggy-back on associate’s degrees.

UMUC’s Metro Washington Population

UMUC’s program generally attracts people who already have some college credits and might be working full time. UMUC does recruit from community colleges and does have alliance programs in which a student might be enrolled at a specific community college and UMUC simultaneously. According to Andrea C. Martino, director of public relations, UMUC’s expectations when it created online programs in 1994 was that it would reach students in the rural parts of Maryland.

"We were surprised then and continue to be surprised today that many of our students come from the metro Washington area," Martino says. She believes they enroll at UMUC because of the convenience of taking online courses.

But at AU, an open university headquartered in Alberta, Canada, the enrollments typically come from sparsely populated areas, not dense ones, and represent, to some degree, an under-served market living in remote areas of the 3.8-million-square-mile country. Athabasca’s undergraduate communications program, which has seven "tutors" (members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees), is the most flexible of the four programs. Students work individually with a tutor, a teaching method based on the United Kingdom model, rather than attending an online class with other students.

"We tried cohort courses at the undergraduate level," says Evelyn Ellerman, the program’s coordinator, "and found students didn’t want it."

Like UMUC and SU, AU’s communications students tend to be older and have jobs in journalism or public relations. They all have associate’s degrees and need a bachelor’s degree to advance on the job or eventually to enter a graduate program or get a second bachelor’s in another program, such as education.

AU has developed articulation agreements with community colleges and has also instituted a program called PLAR-prior learning assessment and recognition, which enables credit for prior experience outside the classroom. AU is midway through a three-year federally funded $900,000 national study of PLAR.

Unlike UMUC and AU, SU has a residency requirement for its master’s in communications management. When the course was developed in 1995 from scratch, it was, according to its academic director, Maria P. Russell, designed for distance education. However, she used a model that had been in place for three decades for independent study degrees, which required some residency. (One of the graduates of the inaugural class, by the way, was UMUC’s Martino.)

Students in the SU program meet face to face three times in the first year (twice in Syracuse and once in Manhattan) for six days of lectures, discussions, introductions to the two courses for that semester, breakfast, lunch and dinner and, this year, a golf outing. "Residency," Russell says, "helps cement relations between the faculty and students, and among students." Because students meet face to face, they get to know each and throughout the 14-week online courses can help each other via e-mail. She attributes the program’s high retention to the face-to-face sessions and related bonding among students.

SU’s program is lock-step, meaning that all 25 students enter at the same time (August) and usually go through the two-year program together. Sometimes a student will choose to go slower

and take one course a semester rather than the scheduled two, but Russell says that’s rare. "We’ve had people change jobs and move across the country and stay in the program," she says.

In designing the program, Russell says she surveyed members of the Public Relations Society of America, the Association for Women in Communications and the International Association of Business Communicators, a group that AU also relied on for input. One of Russell’s best questions: "What skills do you think you need to get your boss’s job some day?"

The survey resulted in an interdisciplinary degree that drew on communications, management, and citizenship and public affairs. Most of the 11 faculty are tenured in one of those three schools at SU, which Russell cites as one of the program’s cachets. Despite the residency requirement, Russell says the program has attracted students from Australia, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany, Taiwan and Vietnam, among others. (UMUC and PSU also have international students in their distance education programs; Athabasca is, for now, oriented toward Canadian residents.)

PSU’s World Campus certificate program is comprised of a five-course sequence taught by tenured faculty or Ph.D. candidates. The program was designed at the behest of administrators at some of Penn State’s 19 satellite campuses, the idea being that the main campus would provide five online mass communications theory courses that the campuses would use to supplement their own professional courses, creating a degree program and thus allowing the campuses to keep students (and their tuition) close to home.

Unfortunately, some of the enthusiastic administrators involved in creating the program moved on and the commitment waned until this year when the university created a cooperative built around online courses and which administrators hope the campuses will use rather than hiring adjunct faculty. PSU’s communications certificate appeals to an interdisciplinary group, claiming the background will be useful to majors in psychology, pre-law, political science, and information sciences and technology. It’s the same interdisciplinary appeal that the other communications programs have. For instance, as Amy Matten, the director of UMUC’s communications studies program, parses the opportunities for her graduates, she notes that they range from standard journalism and public relations to grant writing and human resources work.

The nature of some of the courses also generates practical applications. AU’s curriculum includes a project course, which allows students to apply their work experience. Ellerman says students have used the course to test projects they have in mind for graduate school or to follow up on work situations. For example, one student did a study of an initiative introduced by his boss and then reported his findings to his boss. He got a promotion, demonstrated an interest in knowledge management and went on to get an MBA.

At SU, students must complete a thesis or project. Even those who do a project must return to campus to present their findings before a Syracuse University student audience-undergraduate or master’s class. Depending on their topic, students might be presenting in the Newhouse School or in the School of Management. They have the option of presenting to students in New York City, London or Hong Kong because SU runs programs in each of those cities.

Because undergraduate students sit in on the findings, the graduate students serve as role models, Russell says. Another benefit SU derived from its master’s program is a ready supply of internships for its undergraduates at companies where the master’s students work.

Promotion and marketing vary. AU markets to working professionals and to students at allied community colleges. PSU has a general marketing plan that mentions all online certificates and degrees and is designed to drive potential students to the World Campus’ website for more information. SU uses direct mail to the groups Russell initially surveyed (PRSA, AWC, IABC), a small amount of advertising in professional trade publications, attendance at some trade shows and word of mouth. UMUC’s marketing ranges from posters in metro trains to ads in print publications such as newspapers and airline magazines to word of mouth. "We’re the largest public university in the U.S. offering online programs," Martino says. "That’s a lot of word of mouth."

All four programs reported approximately the same attitude toward technology. They want interactivity, but they do not want to get ahead of their students. The various spokespersons predicted that as more and more students become more proficient with online work and as the technology advances, their programs would follow suit. Keep in mind that most of these programs, in origin if not content, grew out of correspondence courses and are now online, so continually changing delivery is the coin of the realm.

Ellerman of AU notes that because of the web, courses can be kept current easily and digital reading rooms have replaced the need to fax articles to students. UMUC’s Martino says that the rise of instant messaging resulted in the increased use of course chatrooms.

One thing that all four institutions discussed in this article have in common is that they are offering complete programs at a distance. A recently released study, "Achieving Success in Internet-Supported Learning in Higher Education," written by Rob Abel, president of the nonprofit Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness, notes that universities offering online degrees have greater success in distance education than those universities that offer individual online courses. The online degrees signal institutional support that favors students by giving them better student services, quality instruction and reliable technology.

Lee B. Becker, Tudor Vlad, Heidi Hennink-Kaminski and Amy Jo Coffey. 2003-2004 Enrollment Report: Growth in Field Keeps Up With Trend. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, Autumn 2004. www.psu.edu/dept/commresearch/JMCE/

Rob Abel. Achieving Success in Internet-Supported Learning in Higher Education. Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness, February 2005.

Programs:

AU - www.athabascau.ca/calendar/page03_16_02.html

UMUC -  www.umuc.edu/prog/ugp/majors/comm.shtml

R. Thomas Berner is a professor emeritus of journalism and American studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Before he retired in June 2003, he was the College of Communications’ director of continuing and distance education.