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FAIRFAX, Va.---Walk into Virginia Montecino's advanced English composition class and you will see an empty room.
Montecino is one of a growing number of professors at George Mason University, in both technical and nontechnical fields, who are offering whole courses over the Internet. Her students log onto the system from home, at whatever hour is most convenient for them, to write papers which they then e-mail to Montecino or post on the class Web page for other students to critique. Many are even signed up for other, real-time courses at the same time.
Last fall, Sid Das, an associate professor of decision sciences, offered the first on-line course in George Mason's business school -- a graduate statistics course for MBA students that he plans to extend to undergraduates next spring. Students who aren't comfortable using the Internet can still sign up for a traditional version of the class, which meets twice a week. Those who choose the on-line version must show up in class only five times during the semester, to take exams. All lectures take place on the Web, and a chat room allows a continuing dialogue between students and professor.
"Entire degrees will be granted over the Internet someday," says Das. In fact, Don Lavoie, Koch Professor of Economics, has an on-line degree in the works -- a master's degree in new professional studies out of George Mason's program on social and organizational learning. By the fall of 1998 the degree should be completely on-line, with the exception of five or six weeks spent physically on campus.
"You can earn this degree from any address in the world if you can get a couple round-trip plane tickets to campus," says Lavoie. Lavoie also offers a course over the Web -- one that breaks some of the conventions already being set in this unconventional medium.
"Many on-line courses consist of browsing the Internet and mechanically responding to canned questions," Lavoie says. "They don't provide the interactivity that good teaching demands. Likewise, e-mail discussions are scattered and disconnected -- a series of isolated opinions, not engaging students with the original text."
Lavoie's class doesn't include exams, quizzes or papers. All homework is done in hypertext format -- students install readings onto their hard drives and add their comments directly into the text.
"It's a nice way to make commentary on their text," he says. "This method doesn't reduce interactivity between students. It dramatically improves interactivity."
Das ticks off more advantages of Web courses: those who miss class can still learn, there is no commute and George Mason saves on classroom and parking space.
"My class is aimed at people who work and who travel half the time," says Das. "Now they can e-mail me their homework from California. You could be in Russia and log on to my class."
English also lends itself to the Web, says Montecino, who teaches her on-line course for students majoring in the sciences. "This class is text-based instead of oral, so they get more practice writing," she says. "There's also an interplay that you don't get in a traditional setting. Students who might be uncomfortable in the social setting of a classroom are more likely to speak up in this format. This is the world that the students will be operating in, if they aren't already. It preps them for that world of work and culture."
"On-line courses are the wave of the future," agrees Das. "The benefits are unmistakable, especially at a time when every school now is trying to do more with less. It reduces the unit teaching load for the faculty and allows more students in one class."
This innovative teaching approach has broad appeal to other universities as well. In fact, last spring Xavier University in Cincinnati offered an on-line statistics course modeled after Das', and George Mason will receive royalties from the transaction. University Online, the private carrier for the course, is now marketing the course on a national level.
Last month, Lavoie traveled to Pretoria at the invitation of the University of South Africa to present a model of his on-line teaching method, and received rave reviews.
"The world is moving toward the Internet," says Das. "The people who are first in line have a lot of potential. George Mason prides itself in being information technology oriented, and this is part of that thrust. It's going to snowball."
Media Contact:
Elena Barbre, (703) 993-8782; ebarbre@gmu.edu
7-18-97