Campus vs. online p1 - Military - Career Choices - Military Times EDGE

If you’re active-duty military and taking college courses, you’re likely doing so online.

Distance learning online has proven wildly popular with service members.

Defense Department data show that nearly two out of three troops who voluntarily enrolled for college courses last year did so through distance-learning programs.

Two themes key to the continued success of such programs emerged during the Council of College and Military Educators’ annual symposium in January: How to ensure quality in online degree programs and how to provide prospective students at any college with more consumer information, such as demographic breakdowns of the students or how many successfully obtain degrees or go on to get jobs in their fields of study.

“It’s not a complete picture today,” said Frank Mayadas of the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit organization of more than 260 schools — traditional and online-only — dedicated to improving the “quality, scale and breadth” of online education.

“There’s no aggregate information nationally on either classrooms or online learning,” Mayadas said.

Sloan-C created Quality Matters, now an independent organization. Quality Matters provides a standardized system of evaluating the quality of online courses. But Quality Matters — and online learning in general — are still very new when compared with the classroom-based model. So while the online programs continue to work out their standards, here are some factors that students, faculty members and education experts say you should consider when deciding which is best for you.

Interaction

the face-to-face interaction and potential one-on-one time with students are what David Alpher values most in the classroom.

The Army vet, Ph.D. candidate and instructor at George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution in Fairfax, Va., relies on visual cues to figure out when a student may not be getting the gist of a lesson. He estimates his classes are about 60 percent planned lessons and 40 percent discussion.

“I try to draw out a high level of participation in students,” Alpher said. “For me, I can’t do that nearly as effectively if I can’t see their faces.”

Alpher worked in conflict resolution as a program operations officer for NGO International Relief and Development in Anbar province, Iraq, for several months in 2007. Those experiences play a big part in the courses he teaches on international conflict and social dynamics of terrorism.

“What we study is emotionally hard,” Alpher said. “The burnout rate is extremely high for people working in the field. One student asked, ‘How do you deal with this?’ That wasn’t in the syllabus. It’s not part of the official discussion, but it was a very insightful question.”

He also believes the social aspects of college can be valuable for vets returning from combat.

“My own experience coming back from a place like that says, ‘Do not be in isolation,’” Alpher said.

The value of interaction among students, teachers and classmates isn’t lost on distance-learning schools.

“Learner engagement” is one of the eight “pillars” of the Quality Matters program, with points assigned for learning activities that foster “instructor-student, content-student ... and student-student interaction” as well as standards for instructor responsiveness and clearly articulated requirements for student interaction.

Convenience

Ohio Army National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Stephanie Bacskay wouldn’t be going to college at all if she didn’t have the option of going online.

Bacskay found her school, Post University, when a representative from Post spoke at a National Guard training class she attended in Arkansas.

She’d started working toward a degree at Lorain County Community College near her home in Elyria, Ohio, but working full-time as a National Guard recruiter — and starting a family — made it difficult, and then impossible, to get to class.

Bacskay is working one class at a time toward an online bachelor’s degree in business administration.

Even going to school online is tough with a 1-year-old daughter in the background.

“She doesn’t like it when Mommy is on her laptop,” Bacskay said.

As her daughter gets older, Bacskay hopes she’ll be able to take more than one class at a time.

Credits

Bacskay’s first National Guard job was as a military police officer, and she originally planned to major in criminal justice.

But she figured out that her experience as a recruiter was worth more automatic credits toward a Post University bachelor’s degree in business administration than her work as an MPwas toward a criminal justice degree.

“Post University does award a lot of college credits for things done in the military, so I was really excited about that,” Bacskay said. The five-week-long National Guard Recruiter Basic course netted her 48 credits, and the two-week-long Advanced Recruiter course was worth another 12. Those 60 credits are the equivalent to about two years’ worth of classes at a typical four-year college.

The number of credits you may or may not receive based on your military training and experience will depend on your school and how it designs its degree programs, your level of military training, and how closely your military experience matches up with your desired degree, according to the American Council on Education.

Cost

As long as a school — online or otherwise — charges no more than $250 per credit hour, service members who qualify for federal tuition assistance can take 18 credit hours a year (the equivalent of six regular college courses) and have their tuition fully covered. Many troops earn undergraduate degrees while in uniform using tuition assistance, saving GI Bill education benefits for graduate degrees after leaving the service.

Many schools limit military students’ per-credit-hour cost to match the federal rate. Examples include Central Michigan University, with both campus and online programs, as well as the online schools American Military University and TUI University.

Others, such as Peirce College and Capella University, give percentage discounts to military students to help lower out-of-pocket expenses.

In these instances, the amount you pay may only come down to the cost of books. And schools such as Post University — Bacskay’s college — include the cost of books in their military price, so military students using tuition assistance pay nothing out of their own pockets, up to the federal government’s $4,500-per-year cap.

Availability

For some service members, college choices are based not just on convenience or cost, but availability — period.

Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Joelle Olson attended six colleges over the course of five years, all for a single associate degree. Her job as an operations specialist aboard the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy kept her out to sea about nine months out of each year.

Olson started her college career by taking College-Level Examination Program tests and a single classroom-based course from Florida Community College at Jacksonville, on base at Naval Station Mayport.

She later took instructor-led courses at sea offered by Central Texas College and Coastline Community College through NCPACE (Navy College Program for Afloat College Education), a proctored University of Oklahoma CD-based course while deployed to Djibouti, and online and classroom-based courses from Hawaii Pacific University and the University of Hawaii.

Olson said she enjoys the face-to-face interaction of classroom courses but found she’d grown accustomed to the independence that goes along with studying online. She’ll get to complete her bachelor’s degree in sports psychology on campus through a Navy commissioning program.

She’ll start college under that program — she hopes within the University of California system — in the fall. Olson credits her selection as an officer candidate to getting those first two years of college out of the way.

Choice

One of the big draws to online education — especially for military students pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees — is the ability to study just about any subject from anywhere in the world, said Michael Offerman, vice chairman and past president of online Capella University.

In addition to its 18 bachelor’s degrees, Capella offers 60 master’s degree specializations and 34 doctoral specializations, including instructional design for online learning.

Distance-learning giant University of Phoenix offers more than 100 degree programs at all post-secondary academic levels, and the mostly online University of Maryland University College, which enrolls about 60,000 service members, dependants and veterans, offers nearly 700 courses online.

Offerman views online learning as the future of higher education.

“Very, very few colleges and universities don’t do online,” he said. “When big-name institutions are doing it, why wouldn’t you think it’s real?”