Cyberspace University
Even Graduation Will be an Online Affair for Students Earning Associate's and Bachelor's Degree at the Bay State's Newest College, Harcourt Higher Education.
- Jerry Ackerman, Boston Globe (08/25/2000)
There are no ivy-covered walls, no bell towers, no high-tech science
labs. Indeed, there are no classrooms, and the full-time academic
staff numbers only nine. Instead, there is the computer, which
is king.
This is Massachusetts' newest degree-granting college, named Harcourt
Higher Education. It's a for-profit subsidiary of Harcourt General
Inc. of Newton, a publishing conglomerate that had $2.1 billion
in sales last year. Although Harcourt Higher Education maintains
offices on Boylston Street in Boston, across from the Prudential
Center, for most purposes it exists only in cyberspace.Its students
will lead "virtual" lives - applying for admission,
attending classes, going to the library, taking tests, and engaging
in classroom debate - entirely online. When they graduate, that
will happen online, too.
"The uniqueness of what we offer is that everything is online,"
said Robert V. Antonucci, who quit as state education commissioner
in 1998 to oversee development of Harcourt Higher Education as
the Northeast's first for-profit Internet-based provider of higher
education.
On Monday, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education voted to
license the result of this work, a move that authorizes the online
school to grant associate's and bachelor's degrees. Classes begin
in November, with students enrolling in groups that will take
course "modules" that last six or 12 weeks, keeping
in touch with professors and each other by e-mail and through
chat-room discussions.
The first catalog will carry about 30 courses; by June, there
will be about 120. More than 200 US colleges currently offer online,
for-credit studies. About 50 offer programs leading to degrees,
including a master's degree in business at Suffolk University
in Boston, a master's in electrical engineering at Stanford University,
and advanced education degrees at Lesley College in Cambridge.
Others, including Northeastern University, offer courses leading
to certification in specific skills, including technical writing,
electric commerce, or Web management.
In the for-profit realm, however, Harcourt Higher Education's
program is only the fourth in the nation, said Michael Teitelbaum
of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which awards grants
to accredited schools to build online courses. The others are
the University of Phoenix, which combines online and classroom
work and has branches in several cities; Nova Southeastern University,
in Florida, and Jones International University, in Colorado. All
are private. Teitelbaum expects more.
"There is definitely a movement in that direction,"
he said. Traditional colleges' online programs also are expanding
rapidly, with state university systems in Illinois, Kentucky,
Maryland, and Michigan leading the way. Seeing the potential for
revenue, several blue-ribbon private schools have created for-profit
affiliates to manage and market their online courses, including
Columbia University, New York University, and Temple University
in Philadelphia.
Tuition at Harcourt Higher Education will be $900 for each
three-credit-hour course. Antonucci said he expects about 1,000
students to enroll during the school's first year, and projects
revenue of about $18 million, including fees from licensing the
use of Harcourt teaching materials to other schools. He said licensing
discussions are at various stages with Northeastern University,
the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Endicott College
(where Antonucci is a trustee), and Fitchburg State College (Antonucci's
alma mater).
By 2005, Antonucci said, the school expects to have about 20,000
students taking an average of 2.5 courses each, a class load that
would yield about $45 million in tuition revenue. The school expects
to break even by 2003, other officials said. While these projections
represent barely a blip on the parent company's ledgers, analysts
say this online presence could influence Harcourt General's efforts,
announced in June, to sell some or all of its assets. Other publishing
companies are seen as the most likely bidders.
"But if a buyer isn't interested in online, they might
just choose to shut this operation down," said Marta Nichols
of Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette. Harcourt General shares, which
jumped more than 30 percent following the June announcement, closed
yesterday in New York Stock Exchange trading at $59.63, down 56
cents.
This week's Board of Higher Education vote gives Harcourt Higher
Education authority to award both two-year associate's degrees
and four-year bachelor's degrees. School officials say they expect
most students to be adults, studying while working or raising
families. Many will have some college credits, which Harcourt
will apply toward its degree programs. Other colleges can elect
to reject Harcourt credits, though, until the school is accredited
by the New England Association of Schools and College - which
can't happen until at least one student is awarded a degree. And
evaluating a one-of-a-kind institution where everything is electronic
will be challenging.
"We may think we have the appropriate criteria, but in
two or three years, or even in six months, things can change,"
Charles Cook, who will oversee this process for the association,
said. Lack of personal contact between students and faculty is
the biggest criticism leveled against Internet-based education.
But Teitelbaum said online teaching got a boost at a Sloan-sponsored
conference last year, where directors of college-based programs
reported almost no difference in test scores between their students
and those who took identical courses in classrooms.
Harcourt, as an online-only institution, won't be able to make
such comparisons in the business, health studies, and information
technology programs about to be launched. But Christopher Weir,
who heads Harcourt's business education program, said the fledgling
school has taken pains to ensure its courses match those at universities.
Faculty from schools such as McGill University, Carnegie Mellon
University, and New York University were hired to write course
outlines and lecture material, with other educators reviewing
their work.
Weir, a former advertising executive and administrator at Emerson
College, is one of four deans hired to oversee a total of four
full-time instructors for the school's start-up. The bulk of their
work will be managing up to 30 part-time adjunct instructors who
will be teaching the majority of courses. Adjunct faculty will
post lecture texts; designate textbook readings from textbooks
or files that can be downloaded from a Harcourt General database
center in Florida; grade tests and other papers; provide individual
advice and criticism via e-mail; and coordinate online class discussions.
Because most homes don't have high-speed, broadband Internet access,
Harcourt and other online programs avoid using audio and video.
But e-mail and chat rooms take on extra importance to stimulate
participation.
"What we want to avoid, at all costs, is a disconnect,
a sense of loneliness," Weir said.
Teitelbaum, at the Sloan Foundation, said online educators
generally have found students to be more communicative via e-mail
than they might be in a classroom. "Students who are shy
and would never think of raising their hands in a classroom have
no fear about sending their professor an e-mail," he said.
Even by Internet-age standards, the development of Harcourt
Higher Education has been fast. Antonucci said he was hired in
January 1998 to run Harcourt General's ICS Learning Systems unit,
which sells correspondence courses. ICS at the time was changing
its name to Harcourt Learning Systems and beginning to distribute
its courses on CD-ROM discs from another Harcourt General unit,
Archipelago Productions, of Monterey, Calif.
But it was clear that college online course offerings threatened
that plan. Antonucci moved the Harcourt Learning Systems headquarters
office to Cambridge from Scranton, Pa., and began overseeing development
of an online program. One mandate was to use existing Harcourt
General resources wherever possible. The results include location
of the school's digital library at Harcourt's server computers
in Florida; assigning ICS staff in Scranton to screen applications;
using Archipelago software; and adoption of Harcourt-published
texts for about half the courses being offered this winter.
Full-time faculty were chosen in part for their experience
in "distance learning." Donald D. Babcock, a former
associate chancellor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston,
was one of the first, hired as provost and vice president for
academic affairs. Babcock had administered UMass-Boston's off-campus
courses for health care workers, delivered via videoconferencing.
Almost alone among the current Harcourt faculty, Babcock, who
previously taught literature courses, keeps an office cluttered
with books, from works of Aeschylus, the ancient Greek writer,
to a text titled, "Navigating the Internet."
Babcock believes online teaching's popularity will explode
once broadband connections are widespread so instructors and students
can communicate via video. But he also advocates in-person meetings.
"I don't believe Web-based education will ever replace
face-to-face communication, nor should it."
In the meantime, hoping to build some sense of identity and
school spirit, Harcourt Higher Education is considering selling
sweat shirts, coffee mugs, and the like - bearing a school seal
that includes an image of a computer monitor. Appropriately for
an exclusively online institution, the seal now exists only as
a digital file on its computers.
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