A little more than 4,000 miles from East Lansing, a student is earning an advanced degree from MSU.

Although he has been stationed in various locations since he began taking classes, Harris Brumer, a U.S. Army captain at Honolulu’s Fort Shafter, is now in his third year of a criminal justice master’s program with an emphasis in security management.

Brumer said he “came” to MSU’s Virtual University because he wanted to go to law school after his term of service in the military, and the criminal justice master’s program would help him meet this goal.

And he fell upon MSU rather easily.

He recalls simply typing “long distance education” into an Internet search engine.

“I realized after I graduated West Point I wanted to further my education,” Brumer said. “I had a good friend of mine who told me that he was looking into taking a master’s via the Internet. The idea just blew me. I thought, ‘Wow, I could have a master’s before I leave the army!”

Convenience

More and more are thinking along similar lines.

Robert Church, the vice provost of University Outreach, said what he hears the most from off-campus students is that taking Virtual University courses is more convenient than coming to East Lansing or various other MSU extension campuses scattered throughout the state.

“If you live in the Detroit area, for instance, it can take you 45 minutes to get from one suburb to the suburb where the class is being held, so that’s an hour and a half shot,” Church said.

But If you can do it online, or at least most of it online, there’s a “whale of a lot of convenience and time saved,” he said.

Students get to choose when they’re going to take the classes - to get up early or to stay up late. And they can work at their own pace.

Brumer said a flexible schedule was crucial for him because of his hectic army career.

Yet, he was still surprised at how flexible his online professors were with their professional students.

“I plan my own schedule,” he says. “I realize when the deadlines are and I just work backward from that point. The unit I’m in now, I’ll have time to complete my degree and study. (But) when I first started, I was in more of a tactical environment and I went to the field a lot. We did a lot of training so I’d be gone for weeks at a time. My professors understood.

“They were very sympathetic.”

When he returned from the field, instructors allowed him to finish what he’d missed.

Paul Hunt, vice provost for libraries, computing and technology, said online classes were just a natural progression from previous technological advances that brought television, satellite broadcasts and two-way television to teach long-distance students.

He called the Virtual University an initiative championed by MSU President M. Peter McPherson and Provost Lou Anna Simon “as a natural outgrowth of the university’s technology guarantee.”

The Virtual University began in Fall 1996, and provides educational opportunities to many more people than traditional courses at MSU can accommodate, Hunt says.

Since its initial year, the Virtual University has thrived, serving nearly 2,400 students in 1999 - up 148 percent from the previous year.

McPherson, during last year’s State of the University address, said a much-expanded virtual program is critical to serving students and for the future of MSU.

And some courses are simply more convenient to take via the Internet than in person, including remedial math classes, Hunt said.

The virtual classes also permit MSU to offer courses not only across Michigan, but to students all over the world taking graduate courses in disciplines such as nursing, social work, human environment and design, criminal justice, and physics.

Six students received their master’s degrees in criminal justice, via the Internet, in Fall 1999.

Former Virtual University student Bret Graddy said with his schedule, he couldn’t have completed his degree in a traditional class environment.

“I traveled frequently and so did my schoolwork,” said Graddy, a former district loss prevention manager at Target Corp., where he heard about the online program. Graddy now is employed as a regional security manager at Gateway Computers in Virginia.

“I could tackle my class assignments at a hotel through a laptop,” he said. “I knew that in advance I could focus in on school on alternative nights.”

Increased Learning

Graddy said taking Internet classes means students have to be prepared to be an active participant, because he believes if students aren’t willing to engage in the learning process, then “you’re not going to be successful in this program.”

He said the program helps students gain more understanding from the class because reading the material is paramount to doing well in the class - while reading material for traditional classes can be easy for students to put off and not read.

Students also increase their writing skills via Internet courses, because class participation involves more writing than is usually found in traditional classes.

“I had to read for understanding,” Graddy said. “That might require me to read a particular assignment not once, not twice, but maybe three times. There is a volley of ideas that is taking place.”

Online courses also offer students the ability to go beyond the scope of the class and learn more material related to the subject, Church said.

And pupils can move at their own pace.

“Not only in moving from screen to screen, but you can do 15 minute chunks if you want,” he said. “You can review if you didn’t understand it.”

But while there are vast tempo differences between online courses and classroom settings, Church said most virtual classes still follow the same format as traditional courses.

A big difference? Many believe classroom settings haven’t begun using the Internet as an advantage.

That will hopefully change, said Church, who believes adding such teaching devices could be a big advantage for classroom students.

“The key to making this work in the long term is that students have to take more responsibility for learning on their own,” he said.

“You don’t have to go just the way the lecture goes - you can go on detours, explore in-depth something that’s of interest to you.”

And that’s where virtual university shines.

A different way of learning

Byron Brown, an MSU economics professor who teaches online courses in Advanced Placement microeconomics for high school students and Economics 201, said online classes are completely different from their traditional counterparts.

And for people who don’t have the option of taking classroom courses, Internet courses can prove to be a valuable alternative.

But it requires more independent motivating.

“For some people it’s better because they have the discipline to really keep up with the assignments and to learn the material without face-to-face contact,” Brown said. “It’s not the same thing as a class.”

The most commonly used means of communication is e-mail. In Brown’s case, there’s a teaching assistant and the students can send him or Brown e-mail.

In an online course, Brown thought it was really important to give students assignments with deadlines so there would be incentive to keep up.

There’s also a specific format for testing online students which accommodates those far from campus without compromising course security, Brown said.

On-campus students test in rooms and off-campus students arrange to have a proctor give the test.

A proctor can be a local librarian or school counselor who administers the examination, he said. Students can also visit an MSU Extension office to take the test if there is such an office available in their area.

In Brown’s courses, he administers periodic quizzes to check that students are keeping up with studies.

“Everybody gets a different version,” he said.

Specialized courses for different organizations

Online courses aren’t just for college-aged students and random career professionals who want to expand their knowledge, though.

For corporation purposes, the criminal justice program was developed to meet a need the Target Corporation had in the industrial security area.

The Target Corporation approached MSU and wanted to partner with the university, said Peg Kowalk, an administrative assistant in the School of Criminal Justice who coordinates the Internet master’s program in that school.

“They wanted to come in and get some education for their asset protection people and so this is kind of what started it all,” Kowalk said.

The first group of students to graduate from the program in 1999 were all Target personnel. While the program was designed specifically for that company’s employees, they aren’t the only ones in the classes.

MSU also has a Virtual University agreement with San Francisco State University in which the two schools share a mathematics course.

MSU has not initiated a military program yet, but Hunt said the possibility is being explored.

Currently, Church said MSU is looking to get involved with the military’s interest in online classes.

But he said the military is looking more for community college and high school completion courses than university-level classes.

“Most of our work is going to most successfully be done with professional organizations,” he said.

Some students involved in the Internet program have been employees of Pinkerton, a security corporation, and other people involved in law enforcement careers, Kowalk said. There are two specializations students can choose from in the degree program - security management and international focus. The international focus is the newer of the two. It began a year ago, and is more of the law-enforcement end of the spectrum.

There are about 30 students in the program, and it contains the same content as on-campus courses.

The drawbacks

For former student Graddy, there were some disadvantages to the Virtual University.

The lack of contact with fellow classmates is one key aspect the online courses severely lack.

“You lose the feel of relationships,” he said. “I couldn’t attend ball games, the late nights at the library - that’s all part of the campus culture.”

There are obvious other downfalls that are to be expected with a course that isn’t offered in person.

Students lack instructor interaction in social and extracurricular settings. And that’s a key part of life in a traditional university setting, Hunt says.

“VU is not intended to replace traditional degree programs,” he said.

Staying motivated is also tougher when students are allowed to work when and how they please.

Church says there’s actually a loss of time for the students, even though they have more freedom.

“We require more participation on the Internet than we do in a regular class in the sense that some people make you write some kind of response once a week,” he said. “All of which suggests that people are taking more time.”

As the programs progress, students may learn how to make this more efficient and what to skip, but that doesn’t seem real clear at the moment, Church said.

And ironically, Church said, the university actually has potential for losses via the virtual programs.

MSU has not recovered the initial developmental costs yet, he said. Each course costs between $40,000 and $50,000 to develop - that includes developing the technology and marketing.

“We haven’t discovered the trick of how to reduce the cost for each individual faculty member teaching the course,” Church said.

What others offer

MSU aside, other educational institutions are taking advantage of the Internet via online classes.

Within the region, the University of Wisconsin Learning Innovations partners 15 institutions, including the UW-Madison, to offer about six or seven degree sequences online.

The program began in 1995 and the center was officially set up in 1997, said Doug Bradley, the director of marketing for Learning Innovations.

He said the officials wanted to collaborate with several universities and two-year colleges to be able to offer students expertise from the whole system.

“Any professor can work with their local department and campus to put a course online, but if you put a sequence of courses together to form a degree system you have to work with us,” he said. “It helps us then sort of take the best that we’ve got.”

Bradley said Learning Innovations offers programs like bachelor of science degrees in business administration and nursing, and master’s programs in criminal justice, engineering, and project management for about 3,000 students.

On the Internet, there is also eCollege, a service provider that partners with more than 200 educational institutions around the world and offers about 11 degree programs online, said Will Houston, an inside sales consultant at eCollege in the Ontario, Michigan and Ohio region.

Houston said eCollege, started in 1996 by Rob Helmick and John Dobrin - accessible at www.ecollege.com - guarantees that the site will be accessible 99.5 percent of the time. The site partners with universities that offer degree programs and online teaching supplements.

Preparing them early

Along with offering college-level courses for graduates, undergraduates and lifelong learners, the Virtual University has also begun offering courses for high school students to gain some college credits before they even arrive on campus.

The online program could come in handy for many students. Currently, only 60 percent of Michigan high schools even offer advanced placement courses to seniors. In 1998-99, 46 percent of high schools offered the advanced courses to their students.

The courses are designed to prepare a student for the placement tests given yearly in a variety of different subjects. If students earn a high enough score on the test, they may receive a certain amount of college credits in that subject area or be able to skip a certain required course when enrolled in college.

Placement courses are offered in subjects such as chemistry, psychology, human geography and microeconomics, said Jenny McCampbell, director for the Office of Gifted and Talented Programs. The first such courses were offered through the Virtual University in Fall 1999.

“I just think it’s wonderful that we’re offering this opportunity to students,” McCampbell said.

But thus far, there hasn’t been quite the response she would have expected from high-schoolers.

“There’s a lot of reasons involved,” she said. “If the schools are not involved already in advanced placement, then they don’t necessarily know that this would be good for their students.”

There’s not always fast Internet connections available to students, and the program is something new - people don’t know enough about it, students and high school administrators alike.

“They don’t realize that it can be quite interesting and interactive,” McCampbell said.

“We have to educate the educators.”

Kristyne E. Demske can be reached at demskekr@msu.edu.