Evergreen Goes Online, With Some Discomfort

CAN a college that features personal student-instructor contact adapt to the myriad online applications that are finding their way into every facet of higher education?

The Evergreen State College, which prides itself on its small seminars taught by teams of teachers, is going through a crisis of conscience as it moves into the 21st century world of distance education.

Over the past two years, Evergreen quietly has been experimenting with Web pages, electronic bulletin boards and other computer technologies to expand the seminar experience for its students.

But last summer, Evergreen took a step further, offering its first fully online class. And this month, the college began offering its first telecourse - a class on labor economics taught via live television to students at its Tacoma campus from the Washington State University campus in Pullman.

The telecourse, in particular, has become the focus of a growing debate at Evergreen over how technology should be used to teach, and whether distance learning has a place in a college where "seminar" is used as a verb, and where the top core value is good teaching and the "close interaction between faculty and students."

"We seem to be riding in the passenger seat of a vehicle driven by technology, and we don't know where we are going," said Bill Arney, a professor of sociology.

Arney is one of several professors who worry Evergreen is compromising its teaching mission to get a handhold in an

increasingly competitive educational market. They say the college is bowing to pressure from legislators who believe distance education is a cheaper way to reach more students.

They also worry that the college could go the way of some community colleges, relying on technology and part-time instructors to cut costs, at the expense of quality.

College administrators, however, say Evergreen is only testing new technologies, to see what can make good professors into even better teachers.

"Evergreen may be in a position to add to all the experiments going on in the state in distance education," said Lee Lyttle, an academic dean at Evergreen. "We are still undecided. We are still probing the place of distance education at Evergreen."

Some, like Joye Hardiman, director of Evergreen's Tacoma campus, think distance education could give Evergreen access to classes that it couldn't otherwise offer. Her campus, for example, is too small to offer a regular class on economics, and the WSU telecourse helped fill that gap.

The issue of how to deal with technology and distance learning has caused so much soul-searching at Evergreen that President Jane Jervis took a month off last year just to work out her thoughts on paper.

The essay, titled "Computer technology at Evergreen: It's Not Easy Being Cybergreen," compares the digital revolution of the 1990s to the invention of the movable-type printing press in 1454.

"We are . . . something like where folks were in 1500 with respect to printing technology," she wrote. "We may have an inkling that big changes are afoot but don't really know where those changes will lead. We may lament the good old days."

Jervis concluded that to keep up with the times, Evergreen needs to embrace computers to improve administration and student services. As for education, she believes the school needs to experiment with technology only to improve the educational experience for its students. Evergreen also can use those experiments as academic research, publishing and sharing the results with colleagues.

"We know quite a bit about teaching. We are getting to know how technology works, and we are trying to understand how to put these two together," Jervis said.

Some of Jervis' recommendations already are happening. Last summer, Professor Jose Gomez taught a political philosophy class entirely online, the first such class at Evergreen.

Students met each other in person only once, to get acquainted and take digital pictures of each other for their Web pages. All other class discussions took place through e-mail, message boards and chat rooms. Gomez's goal was to see if the kind of exploration that happens in a face-to-face seminar could take place in a virtual community.

Gomez said the message boards worked very well, allowing even shy students to voice opinions and take apart issues from the course readings. Chat rooms, on the other hand, were not a good way to carry on a seminar, and he doesn't see himself using them again.

Though the class worked, he had some concerns about the effectiveness of his experiment.

"I would never do this during the regular year," he said. Regular classes at Evergreen, he said, are 16-credit, multidisciplinary programs that are too complicated to try fully online. But the summer classes are smaller, four-credit courses that are easier to manage.

Arney, the sociology professor, said the issue is whether Evergreen wants to remain a teaching college, or follow the national trend in higher education to become a place where people train for skills.

"If the state wants well-trained workers, moderately informed, then do it by satellite," he said. "If you think college is about thinking and reasoning, that has to be done face-to-face."

Charles Pailthorp, a professor of philosophy, said he has no problem with experimentation in technology. But one of his concerns is that some technologies may have less to do with teaching than with political pressures.

The state has invested heavily on the K-20 network, a system of fiber-optic lines and routers that will eventually connect every public and private school and college in the state. Many legislators are now pressuring colleges to use it, particularly to teach distance classes, in the hopes that such classes will save money and reach many of the 80,000 additional students who will seek college in the next 20 years.

"We are all under the gun," Pailthorp said."But this is not being driven by students, I can tell you that. I don't have students on the campus who are clamoring to use this technology."

Students at Tacoma's telecourse have a different view. Renee Munoz, a 40-year-old taking the telecourse at Tacoma, said the technology made it possible for her to take a class on economics without having to leave Tacoma. Munoz works part time and carries a full school load.

She agreed that her distance class hasn't been as intimate as a face-to-face seminar. However, Evergreen has made sure that some of the crucial elements of the school's style are still present. Students get evaluations, not grades. Class discussions still work as a seminar, online or in person.

"There is a difference. But I definitely think they haven't hindered anything," Munoz said.

Bill Bruner, dean of libraries at Evergreen, said the college is still not sold on the telecourse, but it is willing to experiment with that and other distance learning techniques.

"We are trying to see how the technology fits with the power of our education," Bruner said.

Despite their differences, professors said they have faith that Evergreen will stay true to its roots as a place of discovery and learning, where assumptions will be challenged.

"Evergreen is about experimentation, innovation. Even when some of my colleagues question me about this (online experiment), that's what Evergreen is about, too," Gomez said. Roberto Sanchez's phone message number is 206-464-8522. His e-mail address is: rsanchez@seattletimes.com