Friday, December 7, 2001

Stanford U. Begins Discussing Guidelines for Distance Efforts By JEFFREY R. YOUNG Dabble first, develop a strategy later. That appears to have been Stanford University's approach to distance education. The university, which has already joined at least six different online-education efforts, announced this week that it has begun a campuswide discussion to develop formal guidelines for distance-education projects. To kick off the discussion, the university's Committee on Research presented a set of basic principles concerning distance education at a recent faculty meeting. Some professors were surprised by how many projects the university is already part of, says David W.G.S. Leith, a professor of physics who led the committee that drafted the principles. Stanford is involved in high-profile national efforts, such as UNext, as well as smaller, home-grown projects, such as Stanford Radiology Online, which sells 20- to 90-minute radiology lectures that are distributed over the Internet. The committee's statement of principles says distance-education projects can distract professors and administrators from their primary commitment to colleagues and students at Stanford. The statement says commercial distance-education projects should not interfere with scholarly traditions like sharing information and preserving the accessibility of research materials. "Stanford is an academic community engaged in a cooperative enterprise of research and teaching," the statement says. "Materials developed by faculty and students should be available for fair use throughout the university." Mr. Leith says that the time is right to step back and review the university's overall distance-education strategy, now that fewer people are rushing to try to make money from such efforts. "I think that many universities went too fast and too far into distance learning, seeing it as a potential cash cow," he says. "This is not an area where one's going to make a lot of money, but it is certainly a very important tool." But if Stanford has already committed to several projects, is it too late to set basic ground rules? Better late than never, says Mr. Leith, who adds that the university's provost asked his committee to draft the principles. "The university better face these serious questions sooner rather than any later." "There's an opportunity to look at [the university's existing efforts] hard and to come up with a good policy that has buy-in from the community," Mr. Leith adds. He says he hopes that professors and administrators will discuss the issues in the next few months and that draft policies could be developed as early as the end of this academic year. It's not so unusual for colleges to experiment before deciding on institutional approaches to distance education, says Russell Poulin, associate director of the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. "I think it's only natural that you get your toe in the water [to] find out the initiatives that you want to get into, and afterwards figure out how these initiatives fit into the overall mission," says Mr. Poulin. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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