Like the Morrill Act and the GI Bill, will the UI Global Campus Partnership be a new model for educational opportunity?

by Mary Timmins

Liberty and justice for all.
Education for all, too.
Joe White has some ideas about that.
It’s an ideal true down to the magma core of who Americans are.

Education across social boundaries has made this country what it is, creating knowledge, opportunity, conversation, critique, progress. Yet economic rifts are rumbling across society. Only 30 percent of high school graduates make it through college, while the other 70 percent funnel into a working world occluded with hardship. A single mother in East St. Louis wants to be a nurse, but her salary as a fast-food worker barely covers her children’s day care. A National Guardsman deployed to Iraq dreams of becoming a teacher. A college dropout would like to finish her degree in philosophy but is too busy tending bar and looking after a mother with Alzheimer’s to get from Cerro Gordo to the Urbana campus on a regular basis.

President B. Joseph White

'It’s no overstatement to say that the Global Campus is very much in the tradition of the Morrill Act and the GI Bill of Rights ... [which] dramatically increased access to education for hundreds of thousands – millions – of people.'

The vision of a Global Campus is a response by White, as president of the University of Illinois, to the needs of such citizens – and there are many, many, many of them – not to be left behind. It is his response to the vast intellectual resources stewarded by the University and to the amazing opportunities created through computers and technology. And it is his response to the drive to find more money as state funding shrinks like an oasis drying up in the great, intimidating desert of fiscal self-determination.

The Global Campus is, moreover, White’s response to responses – of concern from faculty that online education poses questions of control and quality, of worries by students that their degrees from the U of I will be degraded by a widened sphere of instruction and of questions from alumni who may not even understand what online education is, much less why Alma Mater should be engaging herself in it.

It is especially for the latter that this piece is written.

From eBay to e-learning

The world of 2007 is a world plugged in past the point of no return. From the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, e-connectedness is everywhere. Multitudes of people live by computer – working, chatting, gaming, shopping and, indeed, learning. In 2005, an estimated 3 million students took courses online, according to the Sloan Consortium, an educational association that predicts one student in five will soon be an online student.

“Online education is to university education what Toyota was to the Big Three 30 years ago,” said Robert Vickrey, pointing out how the small Japanese carmaker has outrun the Detroit establishment in automobile sales. An attorney who has served on the UI Board of Trustees since 2001, Vickrey observed, “When you say ‘e-learning,’ the entire picture changes.”

The demand is driven by “nontraditional” older students constrained by responsibilities and/or geography from full-time, on-site education. But on-campus and online are by no means mutually exclusive. For undergraduates, the bafflements of arranging classes can be allayed by asynchronous courses that students can attend on their own schedule – at midnight, if need be. And indeed, online education is desirable not just for its convenience but in its own right as a new learning paradigm.

“Our research has show that today’s online communications technology is robust enough to enable a broad and strong distribution systems of our faculty’s expertise and significantly increase access to higher education for more students,” White said. “What we’re talking about here is increasing the productivity of our colleges and universities. … It is ironic that universities have not seized information technology to reap the huge productivity gains that the business world has enjoyed. That must change.”

The University of Illinois Global Campus Partnership is expected to lift off in 2008 with graduate and certificate programs in such high-demand disciplines as business, nursing and education. On the Urbana, Chicago and Springfield campuses, veteran faculty will be tapped to develop courses, many of which will be taught by adjunct instructors.

The strategy is to create an operation that is nimble and can be scaled up quickly, responding to demand in niche markets for top-flight professional programs and degree completion programs. Expanding undergraduate course offerings may eventually lead to a range of UI baccalaureate and graduate degree programs online. Plans call for all qualified applicants to be admitted, preferably within 48 hours of when they apply. Response should also be swift on financial aid, and tuition will be the same for all students, whether in- or out-of-state (it is expected to compare to that for in-state students attending the Urbana campus, now at roughly $250 per credit hour). Class sizes will vary, but budget projections are based on an average of around 20 students per section.

With plans calling for the Global Campus to ramp up regionally before going national or international, many students will enter through institutions such as Parkland College in Champaign, which already has its own large online presence and a robust record of associate’s degree graduates who go on to the Urbana campus.

Chet Gardner, who left his post as UI vice president for academic affairs to lead the initiative’s development team, expects conservatively that 9,000 students will be enrolled in Global Campus courses five years from now, generating tuition surpluses approaching $10 million to $20 million. Such surpluses are potentially a tremendous boon to the University as state funding unpredictably and inexorably recedes. Meanwhile, startup costs are estimated at $20 million, for which sources of outside funding are being sought. At press time, more than $1 million had been spent. “Of all the expenditures I’ve approved over the years,” White told the Chicago Tribune in January, as controversy swirled around the plans for Global Campus, “there are none I feel better about than these.”

The faculty weigh in

“This is one of the most noble ideas I’ve seen in my 33 years here,” said veteran history professor Vernon Burton. “The complications are in how it will be implemented and how it will maintain the standards of a University of Illinois degree.” As chairman of the UI Faculty Senate Executive Committee, Burton has faced such complications since the fall, as faculty concern has incited controversy across the University system.

The concern is not about whether online education works. At UI Springfield, one in five students is enrolled in an online course. “Students will say, ‘I got to know the students in my online class better than I ever got to know the students in my regular classes,” said Burks Oakley II, former director of UI Online and a member of the Global Campus development team. “People think it’s you and the computer, and nothing could be further than the truth.” A specialist in what’s popularly known as distance education Oakley is fond of an ironic observation about the large lecture sections so well-known to freshmen and sophomores on the Urbana campus. “Go to Lincoln Hall, and you’ll see 700 people and people in the back row reading the DI,” he said. “That’s distance education.”

Vernon Burton, Professor of History, Faculty Senate Leader

'This is one of the most noble ideas I’ve seen in my 33 years here. The complications are in how it will be implemented and how it will maintain the standards of a University of Illinois degree.'

In Urbana, a number of successful graduate courses and programs are taught online. One example is LEEP, a virtual extension of the University’s top-ranked graduate programs in library and information science. Leigh Estabrook, who spearheaded the program in the ’90s during her tenure as dean of the School of Library and Information Science, said that support for faculty developing course content is “enormous” (during the initial phase, a full-time faculty teaching load equaled one LEEP course) and that content must be updated constantly. LEEP students – even those on other continents – are required to spend 10 days of each semester on the UI campus, not a typical paradigm for many online courses, which operate on a compressed seven- or eight-week schedule.

As for undergraduate offerings, online courses through Urbana are (unlike those at UIS) extremely limited. Given the expertise of the faculty, the potential for growth is enormous. “I think it’s clear that leadership online is a laudable and worthy goal,” said philosophy professor Dick Schacht, who serves on the Faculty Senates Conference, a UI governance group that addresses systemwide issues. Pointing out, however, that the Global Campus model is market-driven, he inquired: “Is this compatible with our norms, goals and standards?” For Schacht, as for many professors, concern is over control of academic quality and whether such an ambitious, high-stakes new initiative might unbalance the University’s three-legged tradition of research, teaching and service.

Faculty on the Urbana campus, for instance, called for the initial Global Campus model to be changed, from a limited liability corporation to a unit that partners with departments and program throughout the university system – a concession granted by White. More vexed is the question of whether the Global Campus will spin off and become an independently accredited fourth campus. A key issue is the large number of adjunct faculty required to create a scaleable, profitable online model of education. “What we do not want is a shadow university taught by adjunct faculty,” Burton said.

“The challenge before us,” observed Chancellor Richard Herman, “is to figure out what role online education will play in the future of Illinois as a public research university – consistent with our past tradition of excellence.

“What we undertake,” he concluded, “we should undertake at the highest level.”

Quality, accessibility, democracy

Student support and reasonable tuition are among the best practices by today’s leading online educators. So is savvy marketing. In a late ’90s run-up paralleling the Internet bubble, New York and Columbia universities – to name two examples – threw millions of dollars into online programs, millions that evaporated for want of students. A second generation of far better connected online institutions has since arisen, such as the University of Maryland University Park (more than 51,000 students), UMass Online (approximately 9,200 students) and the legendarily enormous University of Phoenix. Offering courses around the country and in cyberspace to approximately 300,000 students – who paid more than $2 billion in tuition in 2005 – Phoenix embodies extremes of online education. Its stupendous cash flow is counterbalanced by student complaints about the quality of courses, which are largely delivered by adjunct faculty.Lurching share prices for the Apollo Group, Phoenix’s parent company, reflect Wall Street’s concerns over whether the university will continue to receive the massive amounts of federal financial student aid that has sustained it. Recent leadership changes include the resignation in January of chairman and chief executive officer Todd Nelson.

In both the success and problems of Phoenix, White sees potential for the University of Illinois to become an online powerhouse, generating education of superior quality. For White, the U of I’s character as a mission-driven institution creates an essential distinction that sets it above the for-profit realm. “It’s no overstatement to say that the Global Campus is very much in the tradition of the Morrill Act and the GI Bill of Rights,” White said, referring to federal legislation that, in 1862 and 1944 respectively, “dramatically increased access to education for hundreds of thousands – millions – of people. And the University of Illinois was at the very center of both.

“Global Campus is the next stage of increasing access to quality education, to quality U of I education,” said White, forecasting that Global Campus enrollment figures could one day exceed the 70,000 students now in the three campuses of the UI system.

The prospect of University of Illinois degrees being doubled by so powerful an engine of education delivery may worry those concerned about the institution’s prestige, though. For many who are proud of their UI degree and the singular experience of campus life that it represents, the question is whether the Global Campus will stretch and warp the value of that sheepskin. Against such concerns White responded, “I never heard anybody say with any conviction that the existence of the Chicago and Springfield campuses has diluted the value of the U of I - Urbana degree. Certainly, the 23,000 people who applied to the U of I at Urbana this year didn’t seem to think that.”

Rather, the top instruction and world-shaking research that set Illinois apart as one of the world’s greatest public educational institutions could outfit the University as a potentially dynamic force in the evolution and transformation of American education and society itself.

“I believe in having to democratize education and in offering access to knowledge,” said UI Faculty Senate Executive Committee chair Burton. “Knowledge is power, and to have democracy work, we have to have an informed citizenry.” The tremendous resources of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the College of Engineering, the Library and other campus units, Burton said, could be the basis for the U of I to create “the model for quality online higher education and learning” – a model that takes all qualified comers, including UI alumni for whom Global Campus will present the same opportunities posed to all potential students.

Moreover, “if the University of Illinois, through the Global Campus, emerges as the national leader in increasing access to quality, affordable higher education,” White concluded, “the rub-off benefits, the positive rub-off benefits will be extraordinary … because the world admires smart innovation.”

The essence of the message is this: Online education is the future. And the future is now.