Kevin Patten is a working professional and a father of three children, two boys and a girl, age 15, 12 and 8, all of whom are active athletes. Between attending soccer, softball, golf and basketball games, as well as keeping up with the demands of his job as a reliability engineer for The Raymond Corporation, it would seem that Patten would have very little time, if any time at all, to earn a college degree.

Patten, however, is the kind of person who works hard at achieving his goals, even if they require a long-term commitment. It took him 9 years of dogged one-course-at-a time persistence to earn an associate’s degree in mechanical engineering technology via the traditional classroom mode from Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York. It took another five years to earn his bachelor’s degree in electrical/mechanical engineering technology via the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Online Learning Program.

"You set your priorities and you realize that if you are going to get ahead in this world, you have to make some sacrifices," says the RIT alumni.

Sacrificing for Patten meant scheduling a lot of his schoolwork during weekends and evenings, and RIT’s online program offered him the flexibility of tackling his educational responsibilities at times that fit in with his busy schedule.

"I’m not afraid to work from seven in the morning until nine at night if I have to, or even later sometimes," he says. "But I tried to minimize that as much as I could by doing a lot of schoolwork on the weekends, getting up early on a Saturday or working late on a Friday night. But I always took time out to go to my kids sporting events and open houses and plays at school, because that’s more important to me. Although school is important, my kids and family are lot more important.

"The best thing I liked about online learning was that it gave me the ability to pretty much make my own schedule," he continues. "Although we worked to a syllabus and course schedule, I was able to take that schedule and tailor it to my own needs."

Online learning at RIT takes advantage of the Internet and computer conferencing along with other multimedia technologies, such as videotaped and/or CD-ROM lectures, to deliver the classroom to the student’s home and computer connection. With more than 7,900 enrollments per academic year and 20 years of experience in distance learning, RIT offers students the benefit of top quality and tested anytime/anywhere, asynchronous online degree programs.

In addition to taking advantage of the flexibility of online learning, Patten says he was surprised to see that the interaction between students and faculty members, although electronically and not face-to-face, was actually better than when he attended traditional classes.

"I’ve met just as many people in the online program as I did actually sitting in a class; in fact, I got to know some people better and some of them I still keep in touch with," he says. "What I found was that typically the online students in many ways were in the same situation – working full-time, trying to raise a family and trying to get an education. We had a lot in common. When you go to school on a campus, you pretty much show up for an eight o’clock class at two minutes to eight, sit down, open your book, listen to the professor, close your book and then go home. Online I spent more time interacting with other students; we’d email each other quite regularly."

Patten also claims that his phone bills have decreased since graduating. "During the five years I spent a lot of time on the phone with different people, because even though we were all in distance learning, we worked in teams sometimes and we had to interact with each other (outside of the web-based envrionment).

Patten also believes that the online environment helped to facilitate an open dialogue that he did not see in his face-to-face classes. "I think the interaction with faculty face-to-face is somewhat different because students are sometimes reluctant to ask questions, because they don’t want to embarrass themselves in front of a group. But online you’re really just typing away," he says, referring to the threaded discussions typically conducted in the online environment. "You’re kind of talking to your computer screen, in a sense. Online it’s easier because you really cannot put a face to a name. For the most part, I think it was better. People were not afraid to ask questions. We got to develop a different level of communications at times."

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