Monday, 21 June, 11.00-12.30, Hall E 2

Destination 2010:

Global Futures for North American Distance Education

The panel presenters are:

• Don Olcott, Jr.
  Moderator, University of Arizona

Panelists:

• Gary Miller
  Penn State University
   
• Darcy Hardy
  University of Texas
   
• Dominique Abrioux
  Athabasca University (Canada)
   

The proliferation of advanced telecommunications systems has transformed the higher education landscape in North America. Five years ago distance education was considered a viable option for institutions . . . today it is considered a broad-based mandate to provide access, convenience, and alternative learning tools for students at a distance. This growth has been accompanied by a blurring of the boundaries between campus and off-campus delivery. As a result, we have embraced news terms such as distributed learning and asynchronous communications to describe the expanding continuum of educational options available to students via technology.

In North America, many institutions have assumed leadership roles in shifting higher education towards new modes of thinking about distance learning. The use of new online technologies has changed the role of distance education in traditional institutions as well as the ways that colleges and universities relate to each other and to organized clientele such as government agencies and business and industry. The world is our campus is becoming a viable reality for the future of distance learning in North America.

This session will examine three major distance learning universities in North America that are creating global possibilities for the future: 1) Penn State's World Campus; 2) the University of Texas System TeleCampus; and 3) Athabasca University.

Penn State University has a long tradition of providing national leadership in American distance learning. The creation of their World Campus is an extension of these traditions to provide global access to their high quality academic programs. This new initiative blends a variety of delivery system technologies to provide convenient and asynchronous access to learners worldwide. Without underscoring the long history of Penn State as a distance learning leader in North America and beyond, their program extends nearly all major curricular areas through a variety of technologies and traditional distance learning modes.

The University of Texas TeleCampus was created initially to centralize coordination of distance learning offerings between the 15 University of Texas System institutions. During their first 18 months of operation, the UT TeleCampus has already served over 5,000 students and this fall will implement a masters degree in Education Technology and a Masters in Business Administration. The initial success of the UT TeleCampus has provided the impetus for the Chancellor the UT System to move forward with Phase II of a major strategic planning initiative to position the UT TeleCampus for major expansion initiatives in North America and globally.

As Canada's Open University, Athabasca University is a single mode institution, committed through distance education, to increasing accessibility throughout Canada and internationally to university-level study. As a learner-centered organization, Athabasca University seeks to maximize the advantages of both individualized distance education and open learning environments. At the undergraduate level, the university is mandated to offer distance-delivered degree programs, credit certificates, and some 450 university transfer courses in the natural and pure sciences, humanities, social sciences, interdisciplinary studies, administrative studies, commerce, nursing, and allied professional fields.

In summary, this session will provide participants three exemplary examples of institutions who have evolved from very different origins, responded to different kinds of market demands, and responded by maximizing the resources of their institution to create responsive and future oriented programs that 1) place the needs of their students first and foremost and 2) provide the resources to support their faculty as the instructional leaders of their programs. These three institutions exemplify the successful attributes of the "world is our campus."

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