Section:GDN BE PaGe:38 Edition Date:170307 Edition:01 Zone:
38
Sent at 6/3/2017 15:50
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education
The Guardian | Tuesday 7 March 2017
Special report act – mostly at postgraduate level – as technology improves. Online degrees now have more prestige than the bad old days, when computers were clunky and students weren’t used to communicating digitally. More than 40 degrees, at both undergraduate and postgrad level, are offered to some 3,000 distant learners worldwide by the University of Derby Online Learning; these cover everything from health and
Communicating digitally brings out a candour that can be missing in faceto-face seminars
Click and go: the freedom of distance learning courses Distance learning courses not only provide a flexible option for busy lives; they also invite frank discussion Helena Pozniak Niall Rowark is a professional rugby union player based in Hong Kong. He’s also a business student – mixing a tight training schedule with an online master’s degree. After a tough day on the pitch, all he wants to do is put his feet up. Fortunately, he can: flexible study at Imperial College Business School allows
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him to catch up on his MBA (master’s in business administration) once he’s got his breath back. “I have to schedule my studying hours around my training and recovery,” he says. Another student on the same global online MBA lives just a mile away from the school itself in central London, but he’s also chosen online over campus, because it suits him better – Alex Sheen is a working dad with a young child and a new baby. The flexibility of an online MBA enables him to juggle working, spending time with his children at weekends and studying. Online degrees might not suit typical school leavers, but plenty of other students appreciate the convenience – and the lower prices. “Many people
want the degree and perhaps less in the way of thrills,” says Howard Fuller, who teaches on the University of Wolverhampton’s master’s in military history by distance learning. This “anytime, anywhere” study suits working people, parents of young families, shift workers, professionals wanting to hone their skills and even retirees. At Warwick Business School, students have even logged on from the Mongolian desert, or while on manoeuvres in Afghanistan. Traditionally, online and flexible degree-level courses have mostly been offered by business schools, and some law schools. But options are growing as more universities get in on the
social care to management. Creative specialist Falmouth University has teamed up with Cambridge Education Group to launch flexible master’s programmes such as photography and screen and script writing, with more courses in the pipeline. About half the students are from the UK; the rest international. Virtual interactions at university are more lively than you might think, says Fuller: “Digital communication seems to bring out a candour that’s sometimes missing in face-to-face seminars.” By the end of a 12-week term, students grow more confident and chattier as they get to know their virtual classmates. Higher education, he says, is all about confidence, and crowded lecture theatres aren’t always the best environment for bashful students. Online, they can bend a tutor’s ear and communicate one-to-one. “From confidence all things flow; the pursuit of knowledge, critical thinking and analysis, creativity and so on.” Typically, online degree students undertake online assignments and reading, take part in forums and
seminars – possibly with occasional faceto-face meetings – and have individual communication with tutors. Falmouth’s new online master’s in photography held a workshop last November at a Paris exhibition, with another scheduled in Krakow, Poland, this May. “At best, it’s a fully interactive environment, where a learner can follow his or her own curiosity and enthusiasm,” says Prof Hazel Rymer, pro vice-chancellor, learning and teaching innovation at the Open University (OU). “You can ‘binge learn’, or you can go slower when you need to,” she says. If anything, says Fuller, there’s a danger of swamping online students with a wealth of resources – from primary (digitised) sources to academic papers: “an infinite library”. Helping students grow more discerning about where they find information is one of the challenges for academics. Moocs, (massive open online courses) are free, shorter courses from universities. Three years after its launch, FutureLearn, the biggest platform for Moocs in Europe, has more than 5 million students online – and offers some 500 subjects, from beginner’s Norwegian to cybersecurity. Last year, universities also began to offer online degree-level courses via FutureLearn – albeit at a cost. Owned by the OU, FutureLearn collaborates with dozens of UK and international universities, as well as institutions such as the British Council and European Space Agency. Musician Sam Morrow says a Mooc from Stanford University via Coursera helped him get a job as a website developer with the BBC. Since then, he’s gone on to double his salary; he now works as a developer within data analysis. By his own admission, he struggled in a traditional classroom, but online study suited him better. He began his three-month startup engineering course in 2013 while travelling home from a gig. “I’d never felt challenged before in a way that motivated me to learn,” he says. “But with the freedom to pursue my own interests, I quickly developed a passion for coding and couldn’t stop learning. Instead of taking several years, you can just click a button and say: ‘This is what I want to study.’”