Minot State University:
Learning at a Distance
Minot, North Dakota
Universities play vital roles in the lives of communities. In places like North Dakota, where the population is spread over vast stretches of prairie, however, it takes extraordinary effort for academicians to reach the public they hope to serve.
Minot State University is seeking to meet that challenge by building a wide area network linking it with seven small communities scattered across northwest North Dakota. Launched in 1995, the North Dakota Wide Area Network (NDWAN) has quickly proven itself to be a valuable addition to prairie life so valuable, in fact, that university officials now plan to make their entire core curriculum available to students online within the next five years. At the same time, the project has spun off a variety of community-building activities in the small towns linked to NDWAN. One such town, Stanley, North Dakota, has even acquired its own server through their local telecommunications carrier to continue and expand online activities now that the project's TIIAP grant has run out.
Aggregating Demand Brings Advanced Placement Courses to North Dakota
Distance learning benefits both students and the university, argues Joseph Ferrara, Project Director and Professor of Special Education at the university-run North Dakota Center for Persons with Disabilities. In the small towns of North Dakota, he says, many high schools do not have enough students to justify hiring teachers for all the different courses one finds in larger schools. Lacking advanced placement courses, for instance, a number of seniors each year exhaust the curriculum before they graduate.
By reaching many small schools at the same time over its network, Minot State University can assemble enough students to warrant courses the high schools cannot afford individually. Students who have completed their high school course requirements can now start collecting college credits, and the university has a leg up on its competition in attracting students who may subsequently enroll full-time. "We see this as a powerful recruiting tool," says Ferrara. "If we do a good job (online), kids will want to come here full-time."
Success does not come automatically, though. According to Ferrara, numerous obstacles must be cleared. Deans must be convinced of the value and quality of distance learning courses. Professors need help preparing course materials for online presentation. University and government officials must be persuaded that remote students should be counted in formulas that base funding on the number of students the university is teaching. And online students themselves must be able to receive the full array of university services ranging from financial aid information to counseling available to resident students.
"If a kid has questions about scholarship money, you have to have a button he can click and get an online response the next day," says Ferrara. "You're going to be viewed as competent or incompetent depending on how well you respond."
Minot State University has made a substantial commitment to offering high-quality services online. It has established a full-time position of director of MSU Online to facilitate course development and presentation. It developed its own software for offering courses and administering online tests. And it has a graphic designer to help prepare course materials, some of which professors end up using for on-campus as well as electronic classes.
Providing On-line Education for Lifelong Learners
Meanwhile, the North Dakota Wide Area Network also helps the university serve adults throughout its region. One professor conducts a lively forum on early childhood issues, such as attention deficit disorder, offering online participants a steady stream of resources and advice. Another hosts a forum on vision problems, drawing on internationally-recognized authorities. Yet another sponsors a listserv an Internet mailing list for Vietnam veterans. And the university is working with an Illinois consulting company to offer health, or "wellness," instruction to North Dakotans. This program is generally available only to large corporations, which offer it as an employee benefit in hopes of reducing health insurance costs. Because there are no large employers in northwest North Dakota, the program previously was not available to residents of the region. But NDWAN believes it can assemble an audience large enough to bring the program to the rural area.
In addition to enabling the university to spread knowledge through its region, NDWAN also helps scholars collect valuable information. Ferrara notes, for instance, that he and his colleagues have benefitted from contacts with disability workers and other human-services professionals, who use NDWAN for e-mail and Internet services. "It's very useful to have contact with these people, to find out what they need in the way of research," Ferrara says. "The more contact we as a university have with people who are out in the field, the more opportunity we have to direct our research in ways that are truly useful."
In Stanley, high school principal Allen Burgad is very enthusiastic about the project. The school has about 260 students in grades 7-12. In the 1996-1997 school year, four students took English 101 at Minot, and eight more plan to do so in 1997-1998.
Being able to take college courses is just one of the advantages Burgad sees to being online. His school has put in extra lines to accommodate a full-time consultant who advises about 50 farmers on accounting and computer issues. Farmers pay the coordinator's costs and get Internet access as a bonus. Students at the school, meanwhile, have designed web pages for various community organizations and businesses including Prairie Knife Outfitters, which offers trail rides in the North Dakota badlands, and Flickertail Village, a tourist attract that features a model of small town life around the year 1800.
The school also is designing a sociology course on issues faced by senior citizens. Students who take the course, which is planned for the 1997-1998 school year, will subsequently help seniors in the community learn how to use the Internet themselves.
"We're so remote it's hard to communicate," says Burgad. "This is a great opportunity for teachers and students, and also people in community. We're proud of what we've done."
Joseph Ferrara
Project Director
(701) 858-3495
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
Office of Telecommunications and Information Applications
Last Modified: 18 Dec 97