Online learning is changing education in Montana

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

LeAnne Yenny, a science and math teacher at Sacajawea Middle School in Bozeman, wanted to be a better teacher, so she decided to study for a master's degree at Montana State University.

Yenny was able to do it at home, by taking her MSU classes online.

Instead of driving to campus, hunting for parking and scurrying to a classroom after a full day of teaching high-energy seventh-graders, she'd sit down quietly at her computer at 10 o'clock at night.

"It's fantastic," Yenny, 31, said last week after finishing her master's of science in science education (MSSE), designed for science teachers who want to learn more science and better ways to teach the subject. "I'm so very lucky.

"I would probably have had a difficult time getting through the master's degree if I had to come to classes," she said. Still, she found that online classes required discipline, organization and commitment. And her favorite MSSE courses were the face-to-face summer field classes -- visiting Yellowstone National Park and taking wildflower hikes.

Online learning -- also called distance learning or e-learning -- is growing in popularity, in Montana and around the nation. Nearly 1 million U.S. students enrolled in courses that took place completely online in 2004, twice as many as two years earlier, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported.

Especially in a vast state like Montana, lawmakers and university regents are keen about the Internet's potential to bring higher education to even the most remote communities, to help working people raise their job skills without having to leave home, and to boost the state's economy.

Now 44 Montana public school districts are jumping on the online bandwagon, working to bring similar opportunities to students as young as elementary grades.

This fall the Montana Schools E-Learning Consortium will begin offering classes -- from accounting to Spanish -- to any student, including private, religious and home school students. Most classes will be free.

Despite the online learning revolution's growth and promise, teaching high-quality college classes on the Internet hasn't turned out to be the cheap and easy alternative some first expected.

Distance learning has not proven to be the big money-maker some hoped for a decade ago. Nor has it turned out to be the big threat that would make brick-and-mortar universities obsolete, as some feared.

And far from serving mainly rural residents, it's proven to have lots of appeal for suburban and city dwellers.

Online education has shown itself to be a wonderful tool, say those at MSU who have worked for years to perfect it. But it has to be done right.

"It's a very exciting time for education," said Kim Obbink, executive director of the Burns Technology Center (formerly the Burns Telecommunications Center). The center provides the computer expertise to support MSU's online courses and trains professors in how to do online teaching.

"It's really changing the way people have to think about doing business," Obbink said, "and it's changing for the good."

Inventing the wheel

A lot of what people at MSU have learned about online education has grown out of a longterm effort to teach public school science teachers to be better science teachers.

In the early 1990s, MSU already had an intensive summer institute for science teachers on-campus. Professors wondered if it could be taught over the Internet. The National Science Foundation awarded MSU a grant to see if that could work teaching physics.

The answer was yes. That led to a second NSF grant to expand the online courses to teaching all sciences.

"We were sort of inventing the wheel," recalled George Tuthill, physics professor, associate dean of the College of Letters and Science, and co-chairman of the faculty steering committee for the master's of science in science education.

At first the software was primitive and "clunky."

"There was none of this 'point and click,'" Tuthill said.

As the technology improved, so did MSU's understanding of the online learning and how to make it work.

Tuthill found that online classes changed how he thinks about teaching.

Instead of focusing on preparing his own classroom lectures and then asking students at the end, "Any questions?," he discovered he had to think a lot more about his online students and the activities they needed to learn.

Tuthill also discovered it may take twice as much work to prepare an online course. Most of the organization and work for the entire semester must be done before the first day of class.

But the results can be worthwhile, especially when students discuss topics online.

"We get very rich interactions when we let them discuss something over several days," Tuthill said. "That's the power of this medium. ... It's almost better than face to face, because they have time to reflect."

MSU won a third NSF grant to teach science -- and better, experiment-based ways to teach it -- to elementary school teachers.

The Fascinating Bug course is one current example. Teachers taking the online course don't just stare at computer screens, but must do lots of hands-on activities, like drawing bugs and creating bug habitats at home.

That means Lisa Brown, an online learning specialist in the Burns Technology Center, mails out real live bugs to the teachers taking the class. She laughed and said she now knows customs regulations all over the world.

Over eight years, the three NSF grants to MSU have totaled about $6 million, Obbink said.

Since the federally funded project's start at MSU, some 10,000 teachers have gone through it, called the National Teacher Enhancement Network.

The federal money made a big difference in MSU's ability to try out the new technology, at a time when the university didn't have extra funds to invest in the experiment.

Intimate online

Carol Thoresen, MSSE coordinator, recalled that when she was first asked to teach a class online, "I was a real skeptic."

In the early years, online classes throughout the country tended to be correspondence-type classes just slapped on the Internet, Obbink said, and as a result they got a reputation for poor quality. There's still a lot of "garbage" on the Internet, Obbink said. Consumers have to be cautious when choosing an online course.

So distance education still has "a bad rap," Thoresen said. But what she saw happening at MSU won her over and inspired her "missionary zeal."

In 1997, MSU started offering the master's of science in science education. It has grown from 30 teachers enrolled in six classes to more than 200 teachers taking 38 courses today. This summer it had 55 graduating candidates.

The students have come from 47 states and 11 foreign countries, including China.

It is MSU's largest single distance-learning project and represents about 30 percent of MSU's online enrollment, Obbink said.

Classroom science teachers like Yenny take classes online during the fall and winter semesters. Then in summer, most travel to MSU and take field classes on topics like paleontology and biology in places like Yellowstone Park and the Beartooths.

One strength of the MSSE program is that teachers taking the online classes can think about and apply what they learn in their own classrooms, and then discuss it online with their professors and fellow teachers.

That's much better, Thoresen said, than when she was a high school science teacher in Connecticut for 25 years, and earned a master's degree. In the 1970s, that meant attending college classes four summers in a row.

With MSSE, she said, "you can't just go to summer school and forget it" once you return to teaching in the fall.

Teachers in the MSSE program often find they have more access to their professors and more interaction with colleagues through online discussions than they would on campus, she added.

"We're a distance program," Thoresen said, "but we're really very intimate."

Another advantage of online courses is that every student has to participate actively in online discussions. If they don't "speak up" on the Internet, there's no way to tell if they're participating and it hurts their grades. So students can't just sit passively, as they might at the back of a real classroom.

Downsides

Of course, online courses have disadvantages.

"You can't dissect a frog online," quipped Ritchie Boyd, assistant director for instructional technology at the Burns center.

"Online learning isn't for everyone, Boyd said. Some students don't learn well without being in face-to-face class.

What Boyd tells professors about making online classes successful is that they need to set the right tone (welcoming and encouraging), to be clear, and to create a sense of community among the students. Online courses often offer a "coffee shop" space where online students can chat and get to know each other informally.

"The more a student feels connected to a class, other students and the instructor, the more likely they're going to succeed," Boyd said.

In the early days, people talked about universities placing all their courses online. What works better, MSU discovered, is finding a particular niche, things it does well -- like teaching science courses to school teachers -- and offering those online.

A growing number of MSU professors are placing their regular, Bozeman-campus courses online for their face-to-face students. Lecture and PowerPoint notes, reading selections and solutions to problems are made available on the Internet. College students are demanding it more and more, Boyd said.

Still, not all professors are enthused about online education.

"One of the great attractions for the Board of Regents and the Legislature is, in a large state like Montana, it does not require people to pick up and move" to get an education, said Warren Jones, MSU Faculty Council president.

Faculty members feel they already work hard, Jones said, and putting together a distance course is significantly more work. And concerns about the quality of distance courses also linger.

"Definitely some faculty just love distance classes," Jones said. "The trepidation on the part of some faculty ... I think was the fear there would be a big push to go that direction, and people who'd never done distance courses in their lives would be asked to do a couple of them."

Not cheap

Online learning hasn't turned out to be cheap.

That was one of the early myths, when universities envisioned online education saving big bucks or making big profits by having one professor teach, say, 500 students.

But as it turns out, Obbink said, "You shift costs from the classroom -- heat, light -- to servers and technical support people."

From the Montana student's point of view, online courses tend to cost a little more per credit than regular courses, Obbink said. That's because, unlike regular, on-campus students, online students get no state subsidy. They are considered part of MSU's continuing education program, outside the regular enrollment.

And the regents have required that online courses be self-supporting.

Tuition for MSU's distance classes has to be competitive nationally and internationally. If distant students had to pay regular out-of-state rates, their tuition would triple.

That would be a severe blow to MSU's distance program, because about 60 percent of its online students live outside Montana.

Obbink is optimistic about the future of distance education.

"The tools are getting better," she said. "We see more integration of video, audio and text. ... People will have much more chance to choose how they'll get their learning."

Still, there seems little danger that most 18-year-olds will give up the chance to attend a bricks-and-mortar college and leave home.

And there will always be parents, Boyd pointed out, who will be happy to send them off.

E-learning for K-12

Online education works well with mature students like classroom teachers, Tuthill said, but he's less sure it would work with his 19-year-old.

Montana school districts are about to find out as they embark on their e-learning experiment.

Some 50 Montana school teachers came to MSU's Burns center two weeks ago to get training in how to teach online.

Students can see the classes being offered this fall by visiting the Montana Schools E-Learning Consortium Web site (www.mselc.org/).

"It's a wonderful opportunity for students to have access to distance learning," said Marilyn King, Bozeman's assistant superintendent for instruction, "and a great opportunity for teachers to delve into that."

Students may wish to enroll to make up a class missed because of illness or expulsion, King said.

Some may want to take an advanced or specialty class not available at their own schools, said Dave Puyear, executive director of the Montana Rural Education Association. MREA is working with the Montana School Boards Association to create the E-Learning Consortium.

To sign up, students must enroll through their local school districts.

Most classes will be free for students. The reason is that public schools will get to count a portion of students' enrollment in the head count used to determine how much money school districts get from the state. For every homeschool or private student who signs up for at least two classes, the school district receives funds from the state, Puyear said.

School districts will then be reimbursed or credited $500 by the consortium for each full-year e-learning course a student takes from one of their teachers.

At least one Bozeman teacher, Spanish teacher Jan Krieger, is listed as offering an online class. Manhattan and Belgrade teachers are also on the list.

Local control was one of the major concerns listed in the consortium's original proposal. Organizers wanted to avoid what happened in Alaska, where one school district started offering online classes and enrolled 3,000 students from across the state within a year.

Other districts lost enrollment and funds, creating a lot of division and controversy, said Lance Melton, MTSBA executive director. That can't happen in Montana, he said, because of a new law passed to preserve local control.

Students can sign up for classes now, Puyear said.

"It's open to all Montana children," he said. "We're doing it for the kids."

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