Jun.
2005, Xene #46
Distance Learners Happy with Online
Education
By Mike O'Connell
Distance learning doesn't appeal to everyone. Some
will miss the student interaction, others the after-class
conversations with professors, and still others the
campus atmosphere. (Did someone say "keg party"?)
But for goal-oriented, self-motivated students, distance
learning can be a great way to get a degree, according
to students who have completed these programs.
"What I got out of it was a whole new set of
opportunities open to me," says Annie Semmelroth,
who finished her Bachelor of Arts (Major in Global
Studies) last year at National University in San Diego
(USA) while living in Sapporo. "When I left home
I was 20 years old. I didn't have a degree. I had
mostly restaurant experience. When I came home I was
totally in a different boat. I had a degree and a
second language."
Semmelroth recommends it particularly for learners
living outside their home countries, saying her degree
and overseas experience helped her to get her current
job with Miyako Hotel in Los Angeles, where she sells
bookings en block to travel agencies.
A typical distance-learning program involves an "online
campus" where professors post readings and assignments,
and students communicate with each other and return
those assignments by e-mail, or sometimes by post.
Books are available from the university bookstore
or other online retailers, and some universities will
even ship reading materials for free from their libraries.
THE GRIND
Getting
the hang of studying online took a year for Semmelroth,
who says it's definitely not for slackers.
"It was difficult to have the time to sleep,"
she says. "I was reading 120 to 200 pages a day,
doing three essays a week, doing discussions and working
on a research project."
She completed the undergraduate degree in three and
a half years, spending sixty hours studying in an
average week.
Christian Perry, who teaches English at Hokusei Gakuen
University and two other universities in the Sapporo
area, is two years into his Masters in Applied Linguistics
at the University of Southern Queensland (Australia).
He's also positive about the experience.
"I really like the distance learning style,"
he says, "because if I study better in the morning
or better at night, then I can choose. Generally there's
a lot of flexibility in the deadlines."
He believes the course has helped him professionally.
"When I think about language teaching and language
learning, I do it with a broader perspective,"
Perry says. "There's an idea called 'schemata,'
where you have basically foreknowledge of how things
work...I've learned that when I'm doing listening
or reading exercises, it's probably a good idea before
I start that exercise to try to trigger some of the
schemata in the student's head."
He expects to finish next year.
Amanda Harlow, who teaches English conversation in
Sapporo, is on track to finish her Masters of Education
in English Language Teaching at the University of
Manchester this winter. She found online education
to be a good way for her to earn a degree with the
minimum disruption to her life.
"I investigated going and doing a resident learning
course," Harlow says, "and you can do it
in a year, but I made the conscious decision that
I didn't want to leave my partner and cat and life
in Sapporo. So I decided to do it by distance. And
also financially it spreads the cost out over a couple
of years."
Finding materials has not been a problem for her.
"I can borrow up to ten books per course for
free from the university library in England,"
she says. "They ship them here...My main supply
of books until now has been the Hokusei library at
Oyachi, at Hokusei University." This library
is open to residents of Sapporo.
For Japanese students, online programs let them take
advantage of the strengths of overseas universities
without leaving Japan.
Kyoko Yuasa, an associate professor of English literature
at Sapporo University, says that her Master of Arts
in the Humanities program at California State University,
Dominguez Hills (USA) helped her to sharpen her writing
skills and develop her critical thinking.
"I knew how to gain knowledge in Japanese education,"
Yuasa says, "but I didn't know how to express
my opinions."
Now, she says she's one of the few faculty members
at her university who is able to write papers in English,
which gives her more opportunity to attend overseas
conferences. On one such trip last year, to Oxford,
England, she met another academic who asked her to
translate his work into Japanese.
FLAKE FACTOR
Being
a foreign student among mostly native English speakers
was a challenge, Yuasa says. She didn't receive credit
for her first semester, because her grades were unsatisfactory.
There are also the problems of flaky professors, uneven
feedback, and time differences.
"Keio study guides were like a samurai master's
enigmatic instructions," says Hiromi Matsui,
a translator who has earned two degrees by distance
learning: a Bachelor of Arts in Literature from Keio
University in Tokyo, and a Master of Arts in the Humanities
from California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Matsui's California State University courses were
completed by post, which made it more difficult to
confirm the details of assignments. She decided against
taking the California State University courses online,
because of the 17-hour time difference. She also says
her program there lacked the student interaction she
had enjoyed in her Keio program. And she found the
feedback from professors to be uneven.
"Some of the handwritten comments were illegible,"
she says.
Not all of Semmelroth's professors were serious, either.
"Some of them were completely dedicated to making
sure everyone was on the same page, and then there
were other teachers that would make excuses,"
she says. In one class, only four of the initial twenty
students finished: "No one could stand the teacher."
While this can happen to students on a real campus,
students on cyber campuses are less able to get the
"buzz" on professors and are less able to
complain about poor faculty performance.
This was true for administrative issues in general,
Yuasa says.
"It was difficult to communicate with administrative
staff," she says. "There's the time difference,"
and the tendency for questions to vanish in a haze
of academic bureaucracy.
Lack of supervision or student contact hasn't been
a negative for Perry in his applied linguistics program,
but he believes it could be in other fields of study.
"For some people, the lack of classroom interaction
is going to be a problem," he says. "They
want that atmosphere of it being a class. They need
the social contact. I think it depends on the subject.
If it were business school, for instance, and you
had a classroom full of people who had come from different
businesses, had different experiences in different
countries, had different undergraduate majors - bringing
all that wisdom into the classroom in a discussion
is really useful."
Harlow says, "I had this illusion when I started
that there would be weekly or monthly feedback. In
the initial stages there was, but really once you
get going there isn't much."
This can tempt learners to slack off.
"You have no sense of time passing," Perry
says. "There's not regular weekly meetings where
you're conferring with colleagues and getting a sense
of what they don't understand...It's really just you...For
a lot of distance learners the struggle is to set
aside the time and to have the regimen in your life
to study on a regular basis. It's easy to get sidetracked.
You kind of know there's an assignment due, but there's
no sense of pressure. There are no external cues saying
you better get to work. It's all internal. It all
comes from you."
In preparation for this regimen, Perry took the extreme
step of moving from Sapporo to sleepy Ebetsu, where
he has made a point of not hooking up a TV.
"CLICK [HERE] FOR DEGREE"
A
final issue is legitimacy. One online site advertises
"Instant degree in 5 days...100% Approval!...No
Coursework!...100% Legal!...Impress your family, wife,
girlfriend, or co-workers...Click here for degree."
The $150 degree from one of these diploma mills is
unlikely to impress your girlfriend or boyfriend,
let alone a potential employer.
Earning a real degree takes several years and costs
between 500,000 and 800,000 yen, depending on the
university, the program and your place of residence.
Students from out of state generally pay more than
students who have an in-state address.
"I would look very carefully at programs,"
Perry says, "meaning, is it a legitimate university?
That is, University of Southern Queensland existed
as a university long before it did the online stuff.
There are universities in the U.S. that almost solely
do business as online universities. Well, how serious
are they? Are you paying for a piece of paper? Are
you really learning anything? I would do an Internet
search to see is the university under investigation
by the Department of Education."
Semmelroth steered away from schools that weren't
accredited, whose Web sites were hard to navigate,
or that answered her questions with belated form letters.
Choosing a school also requires that you consider
your long-term plans, as well as the entry requirements.
For non-English speakers, the language requirement
is usually a TOEFL score of 550. Applicants must submit
transcripts of their previous schooling.
"As I'm English I thought maybe I should get
something from a European institution that would be
recognized," says Harlow of her choice of school.
"If I apply for jobs in Europe, they would all
know what Manchester University is, whereas if I did
something with an American college or an Australian
college it might not be so useful."
Wherever you go, in the end, the results depend on
you.
"You really better be interested in it,"
Perry says, "because you're not going to have
friends who are studying the same thing. You're not
going to have a lot of colleagues. You're going to
have to have some intrinsic drive to learn this stuff."
He adds, "It's not a sprint; it's a marathon."
HOMEPAGE LINKS
http://dominguezonline.csudh.edu/
http://www.education.man.ac.uk/langlit/EdTech/DEd.html
http://www.nu.edu/Academics/OnlineEducation.html
http://www.nu.edu/Academics/Schools/COLS/MathematicsSciencesa/Degrees/610-107.html
http://www.teaching-english-in-japan.net/directory/cat/17
http://www.usq.edu.au/opacs/cllt/default.htm
