One alternative to the day in, day out drudgery of classes for students is online classes offered by the Distance Education program. Most campus-based classes post readings, syllabi and study guides online, but Distance Education classes rely totally on the Web to communicate between student and instructor.

Rebecca Swanson, DELTA’S associate vice provost for Distance Education, said the program is an alternative means for providing learning opportunities to students so they can balance work and other activities and pursue other goals.

“Eventually our hope is that Distance Education will be a means to an end – just another way for students to do their classes,” Swanson said.

The program currently offers courses from all 10 colleges at the University, from general education classes to major-specific classes to physical education classes.

“We had more than 13,000 enrollments in Distance Education classes the last full fiscal year (2008-09); 148 courses and sections,” Swanson said. “We currently have 48 degree and teacher licensure programs.”

Jessi TenBrink, a sophomore in English secondary education, said she has taken two online classes but prefers face-to-face classes.

“One of the advantages is definitely the ability to do work at your leisure. I’m a full time student; I work 36 hours a week; I have a husband – it’s nice to do something at midnight, six a.m., whenever I can,” TenBrink said. “It’s overall probably a little less work because you have time to prepare something; you’re not going to class three days a week having something prepared.”

Swanson said Distance Education courses should be fully equivalent to campus-based courses.

“The only difference is homework is online, exams are proctored in a secure environment – or in some cases students actually come to campus and take the exams with the instructor,” Swanson said.

John Pugh, assistant director for Distance Education testing, said all the appointments are made online and they do close to 20,000 appointments a year.

“When [students] come in to be tested, about 65 percent are done online now,” Pugh said. “They come in, show a photo ID, we assign them to a computer, they log in to Vista, Moodle, WebAssign, they’ll click on their test… and we take control of their computers from our proctor computers.”

Pugh said the proctors monitor everything the students do during testing, but computer monitoring has become more of an issue because of the sheer number of appointments being made.

“We have two testing rooms and some additional rooms. Between the two regular testing rooms we have about 36 seats, and we have overflow capacity of about 24 seats,” Pugh said.

“We have four cameras in each of the room with panning and recording abilities. They can basically read the writing on a dime from fifteen feet away.”

As more students choose to take online classes, Distance Education proctors see more activity during exam time.

“We proctor for about 120-160 different Distant Education courses a semester. Per week, anywhere between 300-500 tests per week,” Pugh said. “Most of those courses have at least one midterm and a final. I’d say the average course has them come in about three times a semester.”

For class material, TenBrink said she has never had a live or recorded lecture.

“Generally [professors] just post a PowerPoint or a word document with notes on it. If they used videos it was a posted link,” TenBrink said. “We’re really trying to make our courses as mixed media as possible,” Swanson said.

Swanson said the major differences between online and conventional classes are the cost and the method of learning.

“A primary difference is just students getting used to an online environment. Some people just prefer the face-to-face interaction,” Swanson said. “There’s a difference between a campus-based tuition and Distance Education. Distance Education is a per-credit-hour charge.”

TenBrink said she finds the work less interesting online and professors could help change the experience.

“I think that if professors are going to teach online classes they should be up to date on technology,” TenBrink said.