Elements of Quality Online Education cation

Adding Clicks to Bricks: Increasing Access to Mainstream Higher Educationeducation continue to be studied and analyzed if it is to continue to grow at UIS and other institutions, todemonstrate conclusively that it is in no way inferior to on-campus learning. These critical issues mustnot be allowed to become insurmountable obstacles, or online education will never fulfill its promise.One of the concerns that has been expressed by some faculty is that online courses may cannibalize theon-campus class enrollments. Some students, when given a choice between an online and on-campussection of the same class, may choose to take the online class. This may mean that certain on-campusclasses will not enroll sufficient students and that they will have to be cancelled. This concern has keptthe online program from growing as rapidly as it could. In this case, online education may be thought ofas a disruptive technology—one that creates entirely new markets and in so doing cannibalizes existingmarkets. One example of a disruptive technology was the personal computer.“Most mainframe and minicomputer companies walked away from PCs … with theobvious results. IBM actually managed both business models for a while, beforecompetition came in and crushed their PC business. But the destructive power of thedisruptive technology was undeniable: in less than a decade, PCs went from being cheaptoys for hobbyists to being powerful tools that started to cannibalize mainframe sales”[26].It may well be that the virtual campus will cannibalize some existing enrollments from the traditionalcampus. To date, the experience at UIS has been that the clear majority of students taking online sectionsare doing so from a distance. Furthermore, there is anecdotal evidence that students within the commutingdistance are taking more courses during a given semester than they had in prior years, availing themselvesof the flexibility of the online classes to supplement their on-campus classes. This development isresulting in more efficient progress toward the degree by students who are mixing the online and oncampus classes in their degree program. But if a segment of the student population currently being servedby UIS prefers online courses to on-campus courses (for whatever reason), it certainly is much better thatthey take these online courses from UIS rather than from another institution. And by offering the onlinecourses within the virtual campus, there will be synergies that should improve the educational experiencesfor all students. During the 2004-2005 academic year, the UIS campus will conduct a detailed study todetermine the extent to which online enrollments are taking students away from on-campus programs.H. Becoming a Model Institution for Others to EmulateOverall, by implementing the virtual campus initiative described in this paper, the UIS campus willindeed become the prototypical twenty-first century institution, in which there is little distinction betweenonline and on-campus teaching. It will demonstrate directly how ALN can serve as a change agent andcan transform a regional institution into an institution with national visibility and reach. The UIS virtualcampus will serve as a model for regional colleges and universities throughout the nation, and will showhow these institutions, which are the plurality of higher education in the United States, can integrate ALNinto their institutional missions in order to provide a broad range of high-quality educational opportunitieson a scale never before imagined.V. RELATIONSHIP TO THE SLOAN-C QUALITY PILLARSIn 1998, Mayadas first used the metaphor of the five pillars that support quality in online education [27].The five pillars are learning effectiveness, access, student satisfaction, faculty satisfaction, and costeffectiveness. The Sloan Consortium has adopted these five pillars as part of its quality framework [28,29]. It is worth examining the pillars in light of the implementation of the virtual campus at UIS.109