By Rebecca Douglas

There were plenty of questions and more than a few barbs slung when University of Phoenix began offering online courses in 1989. But no one is doubting now.

According to a Sloan study released in November 2005, enrollment in online courses grew 10 times faster than originally predicted by the National Center for Education Statistics. Nearly 2.4 million students were enrolled in one or more online courses at the 1,000 colleges and universities surveyed. More than 200,000 are enrolled at University of Phoenix alone.

Put into context, skepticism toward University of Phoenix’s online foray was understandable: E-mail was just beginning to gain popularity and the launch of the World Wide Web was still a few years away. Undaunted by the worries of traditional educators and encouraged by the early research, University of Phoenix maintained that online education was a practical way to make earning a degree highly accessible to its key constituents: people working full time.

Compared with some of the university’s current offerings—online tutoring, interactive virtual corporations, vodcasts accessible through iPods—the early online campus seems incredibly low-tech. It was, after all, a simple teleconferencing system operating at very low speeds. At the time, however, it supported a leading-edge online learning model that became an example for countless other universities.

“When you’re a pioneer, you have the opportunity to set the standards, and we did,” says Terri Bishop, who was the founding director of Online.

Technology for learning’s sake

“It’s easy to get caught up in the speed and glitz of technology,” Bishop notes. “We make sure our technology services serve very real educational purposes. We don’t invest in technology just for the sake of technology. It has to enhance the learning experience.”

Streaming video, for instance, wasn’t immediately embraced.

“It was the hot thing at many universities,” Bishop recalls, “but in the early days, it didn’t really help the students. It was a herky-jerky image of the faculty member giving a lecture. We found that students would rather engage in lively discussion and debate, and that’s how we developed our programs.”

University of Phoenix also studies failed or failing online programs. “Many thought content was king,” Bishop explains. “But people just didn’t buy into the concept. Having a slick, rich media presentation just isn’t enough; quality course material and old-fashioned student collaboration are essential.”

That doesn’t make University of Phoenix the technological equivalent of a blind date with a great personality. True to its history of online pioneering, the university continues to explode with techno-forward programs. And students embrace them enthusiastically.

Reading, writing and downloading

WritePoint, the university’s automated system that reviews draft papers, receives about 5,000 submissions every day. In November 2005, less than two years after its introduction, it received its 1 millionth submission. The 24/7 online service allows students to submit papers for university-level grammar and plagiarism checks; notations and suggestions are sent back within minutes.

The university’s electronic library provides a wealth of incredibly current information in a few keyboard clicks. The collection includes approximately 25,000 periodicals and professional journals (most updated daily), 2,500 online books, financial reports from corporations worldwide, and more than 100,000 dissertations.

Each month, University of Phoenix students access more than 2.5 million of the library’s electronic resources from work, home or wherever it is most convenient for them.

“Unlike most university libraries, we started digital and have always viewed digital as primary,” explains David Bickford, Dean of University Learning Resources and university librarian. “We were among the earliest adopters for our vendors’ Web-based products, but we also offer services found at bricks-and-mortar libraries.”

Ask-a-Librarian, for example, provides customized responses to more than 2,000 research inquiries per month.

Hundreds of textbooks and other resources are also available in electronic form, allowing students to enjoy the portability of electronic content.

Not all fun and games

University of Phoenix also leverages “serious gaming.”

“The concept of using traditional gaming platforms to convey academic business concepts is literally exploding,” explains Nancy Blankinship, vice president of APLeT, the new subsidiary of Apollo Group created to handle the research and development of new technology products for University of Phoenix. “The military and large oil companies used to be the only ones using the technology, but now everyone’s interested.”

University of Phoenix students regularly use computer simulations and virtual organizations to hone skills, and experience the professional world on a surprisingly real level.

“They ‘play’ a character and navigate through a professional environment such as a business, hospital or elementary school,” Petko explains. “They’re asked to analyze data and make decisions to achieve specific goals. The ‘game’ changes based on the decisions they make. It’s a vicarious learning project that really immerses them.”

The university’s virtual organizations provide students with unfettered access to composite corporations—everything from financial statements and marketing plans to human resources memos. Instead of just reading about sample corporations, they experience what happens when they manipulate their variables.

Prototypes of vodcasts—highly compressed video files with accompanying documents on a central server—were being tested at University of Phoenix earlier this year. Vodcast subscribers receive automatic updates, so the university doesn’t have to rely on students logging on to a Web site for new information. The free service is even accessible through iPods.

A long list of topics for vodcasts is already queuing up—from facilitator training and guest lectures to effective presentation styles, a University of Phoenix standard.

Beyond bragging rights

New e-learning programs at the university provide more than convenience for technologically savvy working people, they define a new academic ecosystem, as John Witherspoon, senior advisor for the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications, calls it.

Referencing sentiments expressed in The World Is Flat, a best-seller by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Witherspoon believes that as a result of changing technology and the increasing collaboration it allows, the learning landscape will continue to evolve away from traditional classroom settings. As new generations embrace new media, the way we learn and process information also is changing. Therefore, the delivery of that information must keep pace.

What that means for education as we know it now—from classrooms and campuses to libraries and lectures— remains to be seen. But Witherspoon predicts that distance or e-learning will be at the core of the academic ecosystem by the year 2020.

For University of Phoenix, those predictions have already come to pass. The university’s online courses allow students with demanding schedules to enjoy the same collaborative education they would get if they attended in person at one of its many local campuses.

As a bit of an insomniac, Bishop knows the advantages of being able to log on to the Internet at 3 a.m. and get some work done. “By taking advantage of our new technology-driven programs,” she notes, “working people and students with families can maintain a full-time career and earn a baccalaureate degree in the same amount of time it takes most traditional full-time students to earn a degree.”

Now that’s leveraging technology to its full advantage.

Sound Like Anyone You Know?

Meet the Net Generation, students born between 1981 and 1995 as defined in a three-year survey of 6,000 people by California State University. Its members are “digital, connected, experimental, immediate and social.” Specifically, the Net Generation has:

• Sent or received 200,000 e-mails
• Spent 20,000 hours watching television
• Spent 10,000 hours with video games
• Spent 10,000 hours on a cell phone
• Spent less than 5,000 hours reading