Shining in the distance: the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium helps IHEs entering online distance ed stay focused on their mission: teaching. (Virtual Universities).

THE MULTI-INSTITUTION VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY IS THE HOLY GRAIL OF higher education. States, regions, university systems, even a group of governors have attempted various experiments in the quest to get courses online, in one place, for the maximum convenience of students. A few attempts have met with success; others, such as California Virtual University and Western Governors University, have been well-documented disasters. All have struggled to determine what structure will work best. One state seems to have pulled it off.

The Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium (ctdlc .org), a four-and-a-half-year-old state agency and membership organization, supports 46 two- and four-year accredited institutions of higher learning, both public and private. CTDLC, like other such consortia, gives institutions an aggregated Web site and single point of entry for course registration--but it also provides technological support, multiple delivery platforms, faculty development, K-12 teacher training, workforce development, national and international marketing, research, e-commerce, and student services. The Consortium serves its members, but it also pushes them: It awards grants for course as well as program development (ensuring there's no duplication of effort), and helps put registration, financial aid, even tutoring services online.

"The growth curves for courses and students continues to be the same," says CTDLC executive director Ed Klonoski. "We're growing at a rate of nearly 100 percent a year." Astonishing, considering that the Consortium began in fall 1996 with four pilot courses and no state money. The following year, the Connecticut legislature gave the CTDLC $200,000 for 1998-1999. By 2000, it had half a million dollars for operating funds, plus $2 million from the state budget surplus--not to mention 148 courses with 2,000 students enrolled. Last fall semester, there were 4,000 students and 275 courses; this spring, 5,000 students, 365 courses, and 23 full degree programs.

Still, the Consortium may have just passed its toughest test. With state coffers empty, Gov. John Rowland's proposed budget doubles the Consortium's core operating funds to $1 million next year. CTDLC is the only higher-education unit in the state to receive an increase. "In this economy, it's a real compliment," Klonoski says.

It is more than a compliment. While it was easy for states to devote funds to experimental educational programs in the late '90s, for Connecticut to do so when it faces a $350-million deficit this fiscal year is proof of CTDLC's unprecedented status. Yet, why has this consortium succeeded, where others have failed? Primarily because it was able to solve some of the largest problems facing online-course clearinghouses by making a few key decisions:

* Most importantly, CTDCL developed a built-in method for converting disparate courses and credits into whole degrees. The Consortium grew out of a 25-year-old IHE (Charter Oak State College) that acts as a "credit bank," aggregating courses into degrees.

* The Consortium keeps itself out of the tuition stream. All tuition reverts to the institutions, so members have nothing to lose by registering students through the Consortium.

* To create a dependable revenue stream, CTDLC offers technology support to its members; it provides the technological infrastructure so that colleges and universities don't have to understand it, fix it, upgrade it, or worry about it. In this manner, the Consortium recovers more than half of its expenses. And by operating as an applications service provider (ASP) for members, it creates an additional means of recovering costs, perhaps eventually becoming entirely self-sufficient.

* The tech support the CTDLC provides helps even the smallest school stay up-to-date with the latest technology. Additional services such as faculty development and grants for course development give the Consortium a degree of control over the quality of the offerings.

* Finally, these services provide the value-add that makes membership in the Consortium appealing for institutions.

Other states are taking note. There's even a national initiative now underway, directed by Klonoski, Mary Beth Susman (the former executive director of Kentucky Virtual University), and David Spence (director of Michigan State University Online Learning & Continual Education), among others. Once called the Lexington Group, a loosely organized collective of representatives from 40 states, it is now the American Council of Virtual Universities. In April, the Council held its first board meeting.

Throughout the last four years, however, the CTDLC's formula has remained simple: maintain steady but modest growth, leave the technology to the experts, concentrate on pedagogical training, and get those courses, degrees, and services online. But above all else, says Klonoski, the Consortium has consistently focused on integrating technology into teaching and learning, "changing pedagogical practice based on not just what the technology can do that's like what you do in an on-ground classroom, but what the technology can do that's actually better."

CTDLC'S ACE IN THE HOLE: CHARTER OAK

The challenge of getting a degree online has been one of the toughest facing statewide consortia. Though start-up costs and the time it takes to get courses online are factors, the primary challenge lies in the key contradiction at the very heart of the virtual university idea, These consortia are based are the principle of convenience; the idea that students should be able to find, in one place, all of the courses they need without being restricted to the courses of any single institution. Early research has shown that, indeed, online students take the courses they want, regardless of source. Unfortunately, taking several courses from several different institutions is no way to get a degree.

For CTDLC, the problem of aggregating courses for degrees was never an issue. In fact, the concept of the Consortium came from an institution that had met this challenge 25 years ago: Charter Oak State College (www.charteroak .edu). "It's our ace in the hole," says Klonoski.

It was 1973 when a group of educators and activists in Connecticut, led by the American Association of University Women, brought attention to the idea that adults learn independently and creatively, as part of a natural progression. But those natural tendencies, they pointed out, are not acknowledged by--and in some cases are anathema to--traditional credentialing processes. So the Connecticut assembly created a Board for State Academic Awards, which then established Charter Oak College ("State" was added to its name in 1985). The college's role was not to educate, but to grant credit and degrees to adults who could demonstrate specific knowledge and skills. Charter Oak relied on faculty members from other state institutions to set the degree requirements and determine when students had met them. In essence, the college cobbled together courses and experience gained personally and professionally, and granted associate degrees. By the end of 1974, the first students had graduated. By 1975, the college began offering bachelor degrees. Today, Charter Oak is regionally accredited and has more than 5,500 alumni. In 2000 it was selected as one of 15 institutions--and one of five nontraditional institutions--to participate in a Department of Education program to create a set of procedures for the distribution of Title IV funds to distance-education students. The college has an endowment of $590,000, a $750,000 capital campaign underway, and 36 employees.

Still, it is this ability to aggregate classes and grant degrees that has been crucial to the establishment and success of the virtual university. "It's the jewel in our crown," Klonoski says, "because in Charter Oak we have an external degree-granting institution with no residential requirements and 25 years of experience helping adult learners."

In fact, the relationship between the Consortium and Charter Oak is symbiotic: The two organizations share an office building and are governed by the same state board. Merle Harris is the president of that board, but she has also been president of Charter Oak since 1989, and so leads an institution that is a member of the Consortium, paying dues and applying to the CTDLC for grants.

In many ways, the Consortium is Harris's brainchild. In 1996, she began to notice online learning classes on the transcripts of students coming to Charter Oak. At the time, however, no institution in the state offered a single course online; distance learning was the province of College by Cassette, PBS, and others. Harris recognized the opportunity immediately. "We knew that there was so much more power in the Internet. Though we began to connect some of our students to various programs, we felt that Connecticut institutions should be offering their own online courses."

That year, the board launched a strategic plan to do just that. Charter Oak provided the staff (Klonoski, then the school's IT director), the Consortium bought the equipment, and Avilar Technologies Inc (www.avilar.com) donated its WebMentor software. Finally, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded CTDLC a grant to pay faculty and offer the first courses. The first year, 27 institutions joined the Consortium, each paying $1,000 (the membership fee is now down to $500).

The initial goals for the Consortium, Harris says, were to make it as self-sufficient as possible, charge reasonable fees, standardize credit-bearing courses, and build a revenue base. "But the real challenge is to keep on assuring that there's quality; that real learning is taking place," Harris says. She's already seeing advancement. "One major change has been in acceptance of online-learning programs and the people coming out of nontraditional programs," she says. "Students have gone on to do very well, and the public is taking note."

Of course, the early challenges to distance learning have been enormous. With technology, she points out, everything grows more complicated. Nevertheless, Harris says, she was immediately convinced that online learning could be powerful--"but it's not always done right," she adds.

GETTING IT RIGHT

The process of "getting it right" has become Ed Klonoski's crusade. Hyper-articulate, he asks questions like: "Where are the change agents, the risk-takers in higher education? Who's going to manage the revolution?" A self-described agent of change, Klonoski has spent his entire career, he says, "surfing the edge of what's necessary." Before going to work as Charter Oak's IT director, he spent 19 years teaching writing at Connecticut State University. "When word processing gave way to the Internet, I just kept riding that curve," he says. His transition to digital learning is part of a logical progression.

In fact, the technology for Internet-based learning is at the core of the Consortium's activities; it's what allows the Consortium to draw the fees by which it inches toward cost recovery. Because CTDLC provides the technological infrastructure to colleges and universities, it has none of the costs of implementation, no support or maintenance headaches. And as the start-up costs for distance learning continue to rise sharply, and the big names in course-management systems increase their prices, the appeal of this setup is obvious. Plus, via hosting from the Consortium, colleges and universities are relying on a partner--a nonprofit with a government-mandated duty to support them--rather than a commercial vendor.

In the past year, CTDLC has upgraded to six servers; it's adding processors, bigger hard drives, and additional memory, making sure each server is up to enterprise standards. It has three course management systems: two WebMentor licenses (each for 3,000 simultaneous users, and it's now upgrading one of those licenses to support 10,000 users), and it has just upgraded its Blackboard license to the enterprise edition (which is serving five institutions but has the capacity to serve 11). This year, CTDLC rolled out WebCT to the entire Connecticut Community College system; and in the summer it plans to upgrade to WebCT's campus edition, connecting it to the Consortium's student information system.

For those institutions still smarting from a less-than-satisfactory ERP implementation--or those too small to support a substantial IT department--relying on the Consortium makes sense. A lot of the early experiments with online vendors failed, Klonoski believes, because like it or not, institutions weren't purchasing just software, they were buying a partner. "To do new things with technology, higher education needs help with it," he says. But "it doesn't make sense to have the tech support come from commercial vendors," he adds. After all, "is an institution of higher education better off partnering with a for-profit company or with a nonprofit state agency?"

The fees CTDLC charges vary by platform and degree of service. WebMentor, for instance, is not a do-it-yourself model, so the Consortium charges an institution $200 to build the course, and $20 per student for enrollment and help desk services. With WebCT and Blackboard, faculty build their own courses, so CTDLC charges an institution $1,500 a year for server maintenance. For an additional $500 a month, an institution can have access to the Consortium's seven-day-a-week help desk. But even these arrangements are negotiable: Klonoski is finalizing a license for the entire community college system to use the help desk. CTDLC has also built online registration and e-commerce systems for members.

The Consortium's strength, then, is that it can experiment with the infrastructure, while leaving the teaching to the universities. "We handle the nuts-and-bolts of the systems, and can do that more efficiently than individual institutions can. Infrastructure costs money," Klonoski says, "and when the technology shifts, it's hard to get a handle on it. But that's our reason for existing: figuring out this stuff so that the institutions don't have to."

TRAINING THE TEACHERS

What institutions should be doing, instead of worrying about technology, is what they've always done best: educate students. This is the CTDLC's philosophy, and it's key to the venture's success.

To that end, the Consortium has put in place a range of activities to train teachers and professors in course development and associated skills. At the CTDLC's annual conference, the Consortium makes awards to individual teachers, and offers grant money for course development. (So far, it has given $246,000 in individual course awards to 19 colleges and universities).

In 2001, CTDLC began by training 200 individual teachers, then refined and broadened the process this past year. It ran workshops in which it trained trainers who can then go back, using the material from the Consortium, and show other teachers how to use an online unit. After just one year of this kind of training, Klonoski and his staff have learned an important lesson: Don't spend your energy on application training, because that technology is a constantly moving target.

"For a while, we chased that moving target. We said, "If we could just get these faculty experts up to speed on whatever the newest up-to-speed was, the rest will be fine.' Well, the rest wasn't fine," he says. What faculty and teachers really need, he explains, is to understand how to integrate the digital universe into the learning paradigm. So CTDLC focused on training teachers first to use a well-designed Internet-based lesson and then to create a well-designed one--not by worrying about how to center graphics on a Web page, but by focusing on the pedagogy.

"We got out of the business of teaching people how to use HMTL editors. We just did an end-run right around that stuff, because it's not about learning how to use a lot of software," Klonoski says.

A VICTIM OF ITS OWN SUCCESS?

Klonoski insists that his organization's strength lies in its nimbleness--that's what sets it apart from traditional higher education institutions, he maintains. But as the Consortium--and distance learning in general--continues to broaden its scope, could the CTDLC become a victim of its own success?

The idea of a state-based consortium (with in-state and out-of-state tuition, membership restricted to state institutions, and funding coming from state government) is contradictory to the reality of digital learning as boundary-less. This spring, for instance, Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, whose Masters of Library Science program is rapidly attracting students, saw its first student complete a degree entirely online. The individual had never set foot on the campus.

A nationwide system seems to be the next Holy Grail, but it could be another disaster because the challenges are many. For instance: Can a group of institutions with a good product be scaled? How do the individual states and their public institutions fit into a national version of the virtual university? (It's one thing to mandate by giving grants that there's no duplication of online degrees by Connecticut institutions. But in a national marketplace, only quality will rule. The institution that delivers the best program will get the students.) More importantly, will the viable funding stream scale to a national model? (This is even more crucial if it doesn't rely on state funds.) And if the ASP model never makes it to cost-recovery, will states tolerate funding for a system that supports out-of-state students?

No matter what, the need for online classes--either in conjunction with on-ground classes, or in place of them--will not evaporate. What's more, with the age of students dropping (high school students now take college classes online), the quality of an online class will become representative of its institution, in effect "marketing" its school. Online learning will then become an essential part of the recruiting process. After all, for a significant part of the population, on-ground classes aren't an option. Says Klonoski: "Distance education is the right delivery mechanism for a whole new group of people who really can't take advantage of education any other way."

[HIGHLIGHTS]

* CTDLC has a built-in "credit bank" for converting disparate courses and credits into whole degrees: Charter Oak State College.

* CTDLC's revenue stream comes primarily from technology support and the technological infrastructure it provides colleges and universities, plus its ASP services.

* Faculty development and grants for course development give the Consortium some control over the quality of offerings.

* The Consortium's strength: It can experiment with infrastructure, while leaving the teaching to the universities.

Andrea Crawford is a New York-based freelance writer, and a former features editor of this publication.