MINNEAPOLIS-ST.

PAUL STAR TRIBUNE 952 words 18 November 2001 By SHERRI CRUZ Hayim Herring wanted to go back to school but his daily schedule was squeezed. Herring, 43, a rabbi, is the father of two college-bound children, a husband and the assistant executive director of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation, where he works 50 to 60 hours a week. He solved his back-to-school problem by taking classes online, on his own time over four years, earning a doctorate in organization and management in May 2000 from Capella University in Minneapolis. Though Herring raves about the Internet learning environment, he emphasizes it's not as easy as it might seem. "I've never worked so hard in my life," he said. "You really have to be in charge of your own learning." Depending on who you are, that's a plus or a minus. While online learning isn't for everyone, it's becoming more popular as the curricula improve and the technologies that deliver the courses get better. Capella joined the online learning field in 1992. Since then, enrollment at the university has soared; Capella now has about 4,000 students taking its online graduate and undergraduate

degree programs. This year enrollment is up 90 percent, said Stephen Shank, chancellor and founder of Capella. Although Capella is strictly an online university, hybrid schools exist. Private and public colleges and universities, high schools, trade schools and even businesses provide online learning. Barnes and Noble University, for example, offers free online courses in a variety of subjects. Age also is a factor in online education. At Capella, most students are 25 or older. "They don't have a primary need for socialization," Shank said. But the media-savvy generation, 18- to 20-year-olds, will eventually demand more online opportunities. "They're going to be forcing colleges and universities to put more technology into the learning program," Shank said. Online learning is still growing up. "A wine before its time" is how Craig Anderson of St. Paul Technical College describes online courseware in general. The curricula are developed several ways: in-house by faculty or purchased through businesses that develop their courses through consultants, authors or field experts. And there are even more ways of presenting and delivering an online learning environment, with tools called "learning management systems." One of the biggest deterrents to online learning is that much of the courseware on the market is bland: Read a page, click, next, take a quiz. "Page turners" is what Amy Sitze, editor of Online

Learning magazine, calls the curricula. Online learning's biggest limiting factor is bandwidth. As soon as the majority of people have access to high-speed Internet access, which will spur the development of audio, graphic and video-rich course- ware, online learning will become much more attractive, most people in the industry say. "I think it's really going to take off," Sitze said. Another important issue that needs to be worked out, according to St. Paul Technical College's Anderson, is who owns the curricula - the professor or the school? St. Paul Technical College also offers online courses, usually as part of corporate training programs but individuals can sign up for the classes, too. The college buys most of its course materials from Education To Go, a California company. Many online courses exist as part of a school's distance-learning program, which consists mostly of studying via printed materials and submission by mail. At the University of Minnesota, Continuing Education's Independent and Distance Learning has put about 20 of its 150 classes online. Last year, 6,800 students were in the distancelearning program. About half of those students take an online course because it fits their schedule better, said Deborah Hillengass, director of IDL, which began in 1909. Some of the print-based courses are Web-enhanced, offering Internet resources as another way to study.

Most of the students taking the online learning courses are admitted university students but there are others: mothers with young children, incarcerated or homebound people, traveling business people, and high school students. Hillengass has been with the program since 1972 and has noticed the evolution. "When I started there weren't any online courses," she said. She worked with radio and TV to deliver weekly courses over the radio and public-access TV . . . The advent of the VCR put an end to radio and TV delivery. Now the biggest trend is online learning. "It really has changed the world dramatically." Contrary to what some might think, online learning requires discipline and is highly interactive, with regular feedback and interaction with professors and peers. For example, at Capella, class participation is required and is accomplished through a variety of means, including online bulletin boards, where students post their comments to a "thread" of discussion. "In a regular classroom you can shrivel up and hide in the corner," Herring said. "You can't do that online." Capella's teacher-to-student ratio is 1-to-12. While online learning is poised to break out, most in the profession agree, it will never replace face- to-face learning or experiential learning. For instance, Northwest Technical College has an online nursing program. But you can't stick a needle and draw blood from your computer, so a portion of the learning must be experiential. To achieve that, schools such as Capella let the students connect

their course work to their daily work. Herring said that philosophy has improved his job performance. "The work that I do has gone up in quality," Herring said. "It's a complementary way to learn."