Second Class No Longer: Online Degrees and Microcredentials are Sweeping the World. How a Thirty-Year Transformation Has Touched Every Corner of Education and Business in the U.S. and Abroad

By Phillip L. Beukema

No one could have predicted thirty years ago that online learning would become such a key facet of our educational landscape in nearly every corner of the world. Online teaching and learning have evolved rapidly and far more widely than imaginable, accompanied by huge impacts on business, society, and our entire educational enterprise.

Drawing on his extensive experience in online teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate level as well as his 25 years in higher ed administration, the author paints a global picture of the evolution of online education. He describes how one country after another has witnessed the astonishing growth of online degrees and “microcredentials” of all kinds. Along the way, he dispels the myths and misperceptions that have grown up around online learning.

With incisive analysis built on sold data, the author demonstrates that online programs are no longer regarded as second class but in fact are fully in the mainstream of higher education. Not only that but he predicts that, by 2030, they will become the gold standard by which the more traditional degrees will be judged.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781663255082

Phillip L. Beukema

Teaching online was both a passion and an avocation of the author for close to ten years. He taught more than 50 undergraduate and graduate online courses over a ten-year span, in subjects ranging from entrepreneurship to organizational behavior, research methods, sustainability, and management. Prior to this, the author’s career took him from the University of Southern California, where he received his doctorate, to five private colleges and universities and two public universities where he served as a faculty member and, later, as Dean of a business school and Vice President of Academic Affairs.

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SECOND CLASS

NO LONGER

Online Degrees and Microcredentials are Sweeping the World.

How a Thirty-Year Transformation Has Touched Every Corner of

Education and Business in the U.S. and Abroad

PHILLIP L. azBEUKEMA

SECOND CLASS NO LONGER

ONLINE DEGREES AND MICROCREDENTIALS ARE SWEEPING THE WORLD. HOW A THIRTY-YEAR TRANSFORMATION HAS TOUCHED EVERY CORNER OF EDUCATION AND BUSINESS IN THE U.S. AND ABROAD

Copyright © 2023 Phillip L. Beukema.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-5507-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-5508-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023914290

iUniverse rev. date: 10/16/2023

To Charla –

My lifelong companion

online and offline

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Distance Education: How We Got From There to Here

Chapter 2: Virtual Classes and Virtual Schools: Making Their Mark on K-12 Education

Chapter 3: Online Learning in the Higher Ed World: A Different Landscape

Chapter 4: The Great Conversion: Online Degrees and Programs Going Mainstream

Chapter 5: Distance Education International

Chapter 6: Online Technology Drivers and The Role of Platforms, LMSs, and OPMs

Chapter 7: Taking Online College Courses: Models and Myths

Chapter 8: The Price of Online Courses and Programs: Who Comes Out Ahead – Student or College?

Chapter 9: Our Best Online High Schools and Colleges: What the Rankings Industry Has to Say

Chapter 10: The Rise of the Microcredentials: Many Questions, Few Answers

Chapter 11: Efficacy of Online Learning – Time To Move Beyond the ‘Technology Issue’

Chapter 12: Teaching and Learning Online: Quo Vadis?

Notes

Preface

When I began university studies in 1961, I had only the faintest notion that I would devote the better part of 50 years traversing our cherished halls of ivy, as I titled my last book. All I knew was that the life of a college professor sounded like my cup ‘o tea, like a profession I could be comfortable and well-satisfied in following.

And so it was. Fast forward nearly four decades to the turn of the century, and the incredible combination of the internet and one’s personal computer created, almost overnight, the potential to transform traditional education in ways we could only dimly perceive.

That transformation has now been on the march for 30-plus years, affecting nearly every corner of higher education here and abroad. It’s also affected many corners of K-12 education, albeit to a more limited extent.

The worldwide reach of the internet and transformation of teaching and learning that online education brought to practically all corners of the globe is no understatement. MOOCs, online learning platforms, online program managers, microcredentials, immersive reality options, online and hybrid degrees – these and other features occupy vital space in the global online landscape.

Of course, as with many a social and cultural phenomenon, myths, misconceptions, and assertions of all kinds emerge to challenge either its legitimacy, value, or staying power. So it is with online education. With 30-plus years of growth and development in the online arena, there are those of the public, and academe as well, who still view online degrees as second class, unworthy to be called a real degree.

What I’ve sought to demonstrate throughout this book is that the misperceptions about online learning are outmoded and wrongheaded. Completing an online degree no longer carries the second-class stigma it once did in large segments of academe and business. Whether online or hybrid, the degree is on a par with that earned via traditional on-campus means, in both quality and acceptability. Beyond that, this book demonstrates that online education – and all it encompasses – has come of age, that it’s fully in the mainstream of higher education. Indeed, it shows every sign of being mainstream in vast areas of the world as the reader will find in Chapter 5, among others.

In developing this project I’ve drawn upon the vast fund of research findings and perspectives that numerous writers have contributed to the literature concerning online education. For simplicity, each chapter contains its own citation sequence, and all reference citations are shown in the Notes section at the end of the text. I’d like to think that careful attention to detail assures an error-free product – wishful thinking, of course. Given the range of subject matter and the extensive detail contained throughout, it’s a near certainty that inaccuracies and oversights have crept in. My apologies for having borrowed or otherwise appropriated an idea from some distant writer who I inadvertently failed to reference. However unintentionally, the error is entirely mine.

Phillip L. Beukema

July 25, 2023

CHAPTER 1

Distance Education: How We Got From There to Here

Technology will not replace great teachers

but technology in the hands of great

teachers can be transformational.

– George Couros

I f I were to take a national survey of teens and adults, asking how they’d define distance education, I’d wager that at least 90 percent of them would respond with something to the effect: It means taking courses online. Of course, they’d be partly correct, but how we arrived at the present state of affairs is a long and winding story. And fascinating, too!

Distance education has often been viewed as synonymous with taking adult courses, correspondence, and even matchbook courses. In that hypothetical survey that I have yet to take, my hunch is that fewer than five percent of my respondents would mention anything about matchbooks! Yet matchbooks were the most common advertising medium for a fair part of the twentieth century. Imagine a two-inch surface of a matchbook cover being the best-read ‘book’ in North America [as the New York Times once called it]. Invented in 1892 by Joshua Pusey, the matchbook cover eventually became the miniature billboard for advertising a long list of correspondence courses – in fields as diverse as art and drawing, plumbing, pipefitting, law, teacher education, and truck driving. [1] They were also, to be sure, used for advertising cigarettes, cigars, health potions, liquor and thousands of other products.

So, where did it all start? Distance learning is frequently traced back to the early eighteenth century, with the start of the first correspondence courses offered during our country’s colonial era. But, if we framed the notion of distance learning more broadly to include epistles, lecture notes, and a wide assortment of written documents created by theologians, philosophers, missionaries and teachers and sent far and wide to students, followers, and religious adherents, distance learning indeed has a long history – going back at least to the first millennium, B.C.E. and continuing apace early in the first millennium, C.E. Those having the stature of such as Lao Tzu, Confucius, Aristotle, Marcus Tullius Cicero, and St. Paul [Saul of Tarsus] produced a great deal of writing that was regarded by many in their time as fulfilling the purpose of instruction, discussion, or debate.

Admittedly, these and hundreds of other historical figures were not all regarded as teachers, nor their followers as students. I’d propose that a more accurate construction of the notion of distance education be phrased something like this: teaching and learning which involves communication between teacher and student who are not co-located, intended for purposes of gaining knowledge, skills or personal enrichment, and typically resulting in completion of a course of study. Under this definition, team teaching is possible, of course, as well as the participation of multiple students. Must the teaching and learning occur simultaneously, i.e., synchronous, or can it be asynchronous? Either. Must it be via the computer or a hand-held electronic device? Not necessarily. Telephone, computer, and mail correspondence all qualify. Not all subject matter, skills, and competencies are equally suited to the distance learning mode. Much more on this later.

What we know as distance education today didn’t spring to life in just a few decades, let alone a century. Education at a distance evolved with reliable postal services, the telephone, radio and television, satellite transmission technology, the internet, learning platforms, and much more. It began slowly, creeping for the first few hundred years, but it picked up with almost lightning speed once the internet and the personal computer came on the scene. I’ve found it fascinating to explore the roots of distance education and discover the role different forms of technology have played. Those roots – and the inception of correspondence learning is my point of departure – are outlined below. My chief focus is on developments which represent firsts in our country’s nearly three-century-long distance learning history: [2]

Timeline of Firsts in the Evolution of Distance Education

It is frequently a matter of judgment to name one or another event a first in a long train of development. Doing so also assumes that we’re aware of all related historical events - admittedly, a shaky assumption when looking back several hundred years! Between my run-down of selected firsts, many other developments occurred along the way – each making a valuable contribution to the shape and substance of distance education up to the present time.

Correspondence courses were the sole vehicle for the ‘delivery’ of distance education for much of the 19th century. In a surprising development – considering the times, The Society to Encourage Studies at Home was launched in 1873 in Boston by Anna Eliot Ticknor, daughter of Harvard University’s president, Charles Eliot. Up to that time, opportunities for higher education were relatively limited, so Ms. Ticknor formed the Society with the idea of broadening those opportunities to reach women who couldn’t afford or had no access to a traditional school that would accept women. She engaged a network of educated women to provide a liberal education via a modern curriculum. With an all-female student enrollment, the Society became the first-known collegiate correspondence school in the United States. [7]

A decade or so later, in 1890, the Colliery School of Mines was established. It initially offered correspondence courses in Mine Safety, and in the decades to follow, it expanded its offerings to include a variety of courses designed for miners, railroad employees, and iron workers. The Colliery School later became into the International Correspondence School and by 1923 counted close to 2.5 million students.

Correspondence courses, certificates, and degrees were the mainstay of our country’s distance education system for the better part of two centuries. As common as they were at the college level, they also made their mark at the secondary school level. An accredited high school diploma could be earned via correspondence in the late 1960s, for example, via the Independent Study High School – operated by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

As the timeline above shows, correspondence education was gradually supplanted by phonograph records, the radio, television, and telephone, although this took a good half-century. In the 1960s, a new distance learning model was created – the open university. Underwritten by the Carnegie Foundation, the Articulated Instructional Media Project led to a growing number of open universities internationally – Great Britain, Spain, and Canada among them – all functioning via a mix of radio and T.V. technologies.

By the early 1970s, telecourses were being offered by numerous community and four-year colleges, public T.V. stations, and many business firms. As of 1976, a California school, Coastline Community College, was staffed and organized to serve as a virtual college, offering college credit and degrees through various telecourses. The college is reported to be the first to have provided students a complete certificate or degree via remote learning at the college level.

However, telecourses would make only small inroads into the distance learning scene. Satellite technology entered the picture in the late seventies and early eighties, but even this vehicle did not add a significant dimension to the realm of distance education at the collegiate level. The world of the internet was just around the corner, along with the assortment of technologies that would revolutionize much of distance learning and much else in everyone’s daily working and personal life.

From a careful look at the timeline above, it’s apparent that the online teaching and learning form of distance education started taking the country by storm beginning with the decade of the 1990s. The personal computer plus the internet and a functioning interactive learning platform made this possible.

I’ve not yet discovered where or when the first fully online course was offered. Still, after a decade of growth in online courses and degrees, the Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics [NCES] took notice and began planning for a new statistical series. Starting in 2003, the NCES surveyed public and private institutions of higher education [two- and four-year, public and private] to capture the size and scope of distance education activity across the U.S.

From this initial data-gathering effort, NCES’ published figures show that as of the 2003-04 academic year, over 15 percent of the nearly 17 million college students that year had enrolled in one or more distance education [D.E.] courses – 2.6 million students. This wasn’t all that surprising to most of us at the time, but few would have predicted