The University of Oregon’s online education system has unfolded gradually over the years. The roots of UO’s online education can be traced back to the days of distance education when faculty would drive out in station wagons to rural Oregon to deliver science labs, says Kassia Dellabough, director of UO’s office of professional outreach and development for students.
Through the years, UO’s outreach has taken a turn towards a virtual route to accommodate the increased number of students taking an online course, a local phenomenon that reflects a national trend. Despite increased interest, UO has yet to follow the lead of other universities, such as Oregon State University, in developing a centralized hub to help streamline it’s online services.
Still, this hasn’t stopped different pockets within the university from exploring the online frontier and creating unique programs of their own.
“I think when people talk about e-learning or online education, that’s a huge umbrella term for all different kinds of models of delivering a learning experience,” Director of eLearning for UO’s American English Institute, Leslie Opp-Beckman said.
Opp-Beckman oversees E-Teacher Scholarship Program that offers foreign English teaching professionals help to develop and strengthen their language skill through fully online-courses. More than 100 countries and 1,200 people participate in the program.
Opp-Beckman is working with Keli Yerian, the director for Linguistics’ Language Teaching Specialization Masters program, to put this program online for international students based in different countries. It would be the first online masters degree in the College of Arts and Sciences. The university currently offers only one other online masters program in Applied Information Management.
“We’re seeing this really powerful synergy between our international global partners,” Opp-Beckman said. “(eLTS) is a new opportunity to build off this foundation network.”
According to Opp-Beckman, teachers and students can still bond in an online classroom, in spite of having little, if any, face-to-face interaction.
“Those teachers really feel like they know each other and at the end of the course in the course evaluations again and again, the participants say ‘we’ve loved working with our lead faculty and each other,’” Opp-Beckman said. “Aside from the academic content of the course, getting to working with 20-something other colleagues around the world is incredibly enriching.”
Ayunda Siagian, one of the program’s E-Learning’s partners from Indonesia, sees a strong demand from professionals in the country. She believes it’s a great opportunity for professionals to develop and advance their English language skills while connecting with other people around the world.
“There is all these pockets of people doing cool things but we are not a unified,” said Dellabough in terms of online educational programs.
At UO, the Office of Academic Extension and the Libraries are working on a partnership that would create an Instructional Technology Referral office as a way to help faculty navigate resources on online campus.
The new office would help to streamline the disbursed resources currently available, according to Dellabough. She also believes it would help to create an inventory of what technological resource services are being utilized on campus as she sees a disparity among different departments. This office would also help figure out what faculty are missing in their classes, and guide faculty through the process of adding innovative technology to their courses.
The project is currently undergoing a feasibility study to see how cost-effective it will be.
“We are trying to be thoughtful in how we’re moving forward so we can statically invest in the right direction,” said Dellabough.
According to Dellabough, the debate over distance education — like decentralized online learning platforms — has been an on-going conversation since she joined in in the 1990’s. While the UO has focused on improving and strengthening residential, undergraduate and graduate education over the recent years, dialogue around distance education has ramped up once again.
“UO has always been big on decentralized because there is a perception of more freedom to innovate and take action in a more efficient way,” Dellabough said. “It also gives ownership down to the departmental level, where many believe it belongs.”
OSU on the other hand has made distance education a priority and created a robust online education platform called E-Campus in 2002. It has help to streamline resources and infrastructure needed in order for it to provide its 34 online bachelor’s and graduate degree programs.
“We feel very strongly as a land grant institution we should provide access to all learners in this state, not just those who can get to a traditional class room,” said director for ECampus, Lisa Templeton. “By putting (degrees) online we have been able to provide … access to an OSU education to learners all across the state, country and the world.”
ECampus has infrastructure that pairs designers and experts in online education and pedagogy with faculty members in academic units. The ECampus staff helps develop online courses while faculty members focus on the discipline and content. Multimedia experts help create a rich learning environment for students to interact with the content, faculty and other students.
Templeton feels that having a central unit to support all academic colleges made the most sense to use resources effectively. ECampus provides a group of experts that departments can pull from to create quality online courses.
“We learned a lot, a lot of it depends on the culture of the campus and getting others to be on board with online education and understand its benefits and that takes a long time,” Templeton said.