After its first year, OPA had few courses in its catalog and a only dozen students enrolled. Because this is such a fluid field, police face virtually annual update training in many existing and new subjects. It's expensive to send instructors to some distant academy. It's a budget item if you bring in an outside instructor to do the training for you. With the advantages of telecommunications, we can bring that training right into the student's own home or office.
Some police academies offer courses by correspondence.
Earl M. Sweeney, director of the New Hampshire Police Officer Standards and Training Council, tells me he hasn't classroom space to provide basic training to part time officers. Far as I know, OPA is the first effort to provide aggressive police training by telecommunications. During the fall of 1996, Jerald G. Schutte at California State University, Northridge, ran an experiment. Using 33 students in a Social Statistics course, one half were taught in a traditional classroom and the other half taught virtually on the World Wide Web. Texts, lectures and exams were the same for both halves.