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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