Rubbing your eyes, you focus in on the clock: 11:03 a.m. Carrying the bowl, milk, and cereal, you make your way to the couch to eat some breakfast and watch some daytime Jerry Springer. After the Lucky Charms are gone, you grab your laptop and you power it on, because it’s time for class.
Reading your professors’ emails, you download the readings and finish them by the time Jenny Jones is over and Ricky Lake is starting. No more buses to North, no more buses to South, now you can just grab the remote and flip to Oprah instead of walking the twenty minutes from one end of campus to the other. This online degree is going to be wicked.
Soon, students all over the globe can do whatever they want while obtaining their bachelor of science in electrical engineering (EE) at the University at Buffalo. With a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for $300,000 to help develop the degree and after 18 months of hashing out details with administrators, the program is expected to be operational in the fall of 2006, reports Ellen Goldbaum for the UB Reporter.
The online degree is collaborative between UB, Stony Brook, and Binghamton. The three universities will have requisite courses for the degree and the online student can take the needed courses at any of the three universities. There will be a tuition sharing agreement between the organizations that covers the cost per student for the course.
Professors and students will communicate electronically; students receive their assignments and ask questions all online. “We don’t require students to come to campus for any part of their degree,” says David Porush, executive director of SUNY Learning Environments, which coordinates and partially funds the effort.
Online degrees are not all they are cracked up to be. The premise sounds nice, but it takes a lot of dedication to sit at a computer doing homework, studying, reading, and writing emails, says Porush.
The course will carry the same in-state and out-of-state rates as it does for on-campus courses, according to the program’s website. Additional fees for technology and administration will also be applied to the degree. The materials need to be bought by the online student as if they were going to take the course on-campus.
Is an online degree the same as earning one by traditional means? Does sitting at your computer really compare to trudging through the snow to campus, getting up at eight in the morning, fighting for parking, buying hundreds of dollars of books, and late night cramming in the library while on caffeine pills? These questions need to be addressed. Employers will accept an online degree as valid, but even then sometimes the experience and value just isn’t the same.
Emily Passucci feels that it may not be exactly like the college experience, but she sees the benefits. The 21-year-old senior EE major says the online degree is “a bit irritating.” To her, it would be weird not to go to class each day, she explains. She understands that this program could help people who are not able to come to UB to study. Busy people with no time to return to school can now bring the school to them.
One thing she points out was that through online courses, students will not be able to make a personal connection with a professor, which can help you in the future. As Passucci says, in the business world, sometimes it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know.
Another question that should be asked is how can one be certain the person getting the degree is who they claim to be? Porush responds to this inquiry with a question: does UB need to do a background check prior to enrollment?
As far as cheating goes, Porush says, “No one is worried about that anymore.” If there had been a problem, it would have shown up in one of the 100,000 students already enrolled in a SUNY online program in one of the 4,300 courses with one of the 2,000 professors teaching them.
Since the student and the professor are in constant communication, cheating would be almost a full-time job, explains Porush. In a survey taken by Syracuse University, it was discovered that 74 percent of undergraduate students and 42 percent of graduate students cheated in some form or another in the past year. Pointing to data like this, Porush says that he would be willing to bet that it is a much lower percentage for online students.
Heather Nicastro doesn’t buy this online spiel. The 19-year-old EE major says, “I don’t think you’re going to be able to grasp everything over a computer.” She believes that a more one-on-one approach with professor communication is the only way to properly obtain an EE degree.
The program also leaves open questions for Nicastro. For instance, if she has already taken on-campus courses, would she be able to continue her degree online and how would she do labs with circuit boards and equipment if she never stepped foot in a lab? “To each his own,” she says, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Echoing Heather’s concern over the labs, William Aperance, a 21 year-old senior EE major says, “I think in some ways it would be much more difficult for a degree like engineering.” Although he feels it is a good idea overall, he isn’t so sure how a person at home would get the same type of experience, especially with the later courses and the labs that require a lot of hands-on work.
However, Aperance does say that if he had the option, he would consider doing it himself and that in general, he doesn’t “really have a problem with it.”
When it comes to the hands-on portion of the degree, Porush says, “We have a menu of options for fulfilling the labs.”
Some of those options would be virtual simulation, mailer kits, and wiring kits and hands-on kits that come with a CD for completion through the web. Porush explains that every student in the world would be about 40 minutes from a lab where they could do EE projects.
One idea is to make contracts with labs to allow students to come in and use the equipment. MIT with Microsoft is working on something called iLabs which could also be a possibility for lab work in the future. As Porush says, these are all options for the future; no single method is necessary to answer the issue just yet.
There has been a growing demand for online degrees with an increased growth in online universities to match it. SUNY began this program after judging the demand and EE was decided on according to numerous sources. SUNY already has an online program called EngiNet, which is for graduate engineering courses, according to Ellen Goldbaum in the UB Reporter.
Porush says that the EE degree was chosen because it is a high profile and highly sought degree. Porush says that because this SUNY degree will be the first cross-institutional one like it, there will most likely be many more to come. Speaking of the EE degree he says, “The planning part has been smooth sailing.” He has spoken to people around the world about it and they all seem to be amazed and enthused about the degree.
Online degrees are convenient and in demand because they can be taken anywhere. Police can learn Spanish through online courses and are doing just that in Nashville, Tennessee according to the Associated Press. Soldiers over in Iraq can earn their degree while fighting for their country. People all over the world can now be a part of the SUNY system and obtain their diplomas. Porush says that there are about eighteen million students currently enrolled in online programs in the United States.
But with this degree, where does that leave teachers? No teacher is really needed for an online degree. Someone with mediocre knowledge of the subject could no doubt direct the student in an email. Even if they did need a teacher, one teacher could still be instructing 1,000 students online all at once. This wave of the future could potentially wipe out some jobs. Aren’t you glad you’re going to college for teaching now?
Since SUNY already offers 90 degrees entirely online, Porush says that they have discovered that there is about a one to 25 teacher/student ratio. Generally, the number of students is 20 to 25, and only sometimes can it be as many as 30 to 40. The limit tends to be 25 students per professor, so professors have nothing to worry about, especially since they already teach the courses on-campus that are offered through SUNY. Because of this, not only will SUNY receive prestige for this degree, so will individual professors.
One question that remains unclear is whether students can take online courses as well as on-campus courses or go from on-campus courses to online courses. According to Porush, “The sense is that we’re going to want totally different students.” In other words, there would be no mixing and matching online courses with on-campus courses.
He explains that they would like to see different student populations in each program, although he does say the degree is not different. Although the idea may be to keep the two programs separate, Porush says that this may not be the case in the long run, but for now, it is the direction they seem to be going in.
When asked about the new online EE degree, Sean Stamp, a 20-year-old physics engineering major, has varying opinions. His major is tied closely to the EE degree in that he has to take many courses that EE majors have to take. His primary concern over the new online degree would be that due to previous scandals and highly publicized advertising for other online degrees, that the degree from SUNY would lose some of its credibility.
“It just doesn’t seem like the real college experience,” says Stamp. Although he may feel that it is an incredible step for SUNY to take, for him it just isn’t the same as trudging to class everyday. “On one hand, it’s cool to not have to go to school,” he said. “On the other, isn’t that the point?”
If you would like more information about this program and other SUNY online programs, check out sln.suny.edu.
