Interactive Distance Education Alliance (IDEA): Collaborative Model Delivers On Demand

The Engineering Management Program at Cal Poly offers graduate students a dual-degree over a 24-month residency. The program is a partnership between the Colleges of Business and Engineering and 17 California-based organizations. A research study of Cal Poly alumni indicated that potential students and their employers were both highly interested in on-site, on-demand graduate programs. The IDEA proposal -- a distance learning solution -- was presented to several companies, with two firms, Intel and TRW, agreeing to fund initial study projects beginning in January 1996. The following highlights the lessons learned going rapidly from a feasibility study to a pilot course in manufacturing strategy that was delivered over the World Wide Web. * Feasibility Study The initial IDEA effort was dedicated to researching five areas of distance learning with respect to the feasibility of actually delivering graduate courses using available technology. The areas evaluated and our preliminary results are noted below: Area #1. Customer Requirements: specifically the need to deliver education to industry employees at the workplace or home locations. A survey of 6,2000 Cal Poly engineering alumni confirmed that there was a high level of demand for distance programs encompassing both continuing education and graduate degree programs in both business and engineering disciplines. Focused interviews with human resource management at several companies confirmed their desire for employees to pursue life-long learning/education "on-demand. " Area # 2. Delivery Technology: an evaluation of available and compatible technologies that could be used to meet the demand in Area #1. The technology focus was identified as being two-way interactive teleconferencing and/or some form of Web-based delivery depending upon needs, costs and functional capabilities. Area# 3. Academic Pedagogy: an investigation of changes to traditional delivery modes that are necessary to deliver course material in a technology-intensive environment. Ongoing experimentation using interactive teleconferencing showed that most faculty could readily adapt to the electronic classroom with minimal training and the appropriate technical support. However, using the Web as a delivery vehicle is considerably more complex. There are additional faculty preparation needs; technical resource requirements translate to relatively high development costs; plus certain technology and network constraints can come into play. Finally, throughout all facets of courseware design and development, deliberate care must be given to mitigate potentially passive student interaction. Area # 4. Administrative Procedures: research into accreditation issues, alternative structural mechanisms to offer the course, and ensuring the "fit" of distance education into the university's mission. After extensive discussion, the decision was made to initially use only existing courses delivered via Cal Poly's Extended Education program to eliminate any issues that might develop with experimental course material. Area # 5. Competitive Analysis: included a broad assessment of what other institutions were delivering and the modes of distance education utilized. While hundreds of universities have some form of distance education and offer a variety of programs, delivery is most often an adjunct to existing programs rather than stand-alone in nature. However, there is some consensus that distance education is the wave of the future and any institution not offering some courseware in this mode will be at a significant competitive disadvantage going into the next century. The very fact that major research schools such as MIT and Stanford are actively pursuing distance learning programs suggests that other universities should initiate experimental projects using this concept. Synthesis of the Feasibility: Study findings resulted in the conclusion that distance education was generally feasible for Cal Poly using either an electronic classroom (equipped with interactive audio/video) or some form of Web-based structure. …