Students flocking to online study as a flexible way to work for degree

Forget those uncomfortable, plastic classroom chairs and their 12-inch, fold-down, wannabe-desk extensions.

Millions of college students around the country attend class from living-room sofas, kitchen tables, home offices and even park benches -- part of an ever-escalating trend of attending school online.

The trend is being set largely by community colleges, with their propensity for nontraditional students who need an easier, more flexible way to earn degrees. The number of students taking online classes in Washington has jumped 75 percent in just four years.

In Seattle, North Seattle Community College is leading the way with a course catalog that lists an increasing number of online options.

Sabrina Hutchinson, a busy staffing account manager and recruiter who works as an event planner on the side, enrolled at North Seattle this quarter to see whether she could juggle two jobs and college classes. It had been more than a decade since Hutchinson attended college. She decided on the high-tech option: an online course examining how the study of dinosaurs overlaps with a number of scientific fields.

Online classes -- or distance learning, as it's often called -- is the only option for Hutchinson now, given her hectic schedule. Although she finds the class is surprisingly interactive, it has a downside.

"I'm on the computer all day, and then I come home and I'm on the computer again," she said with a laugh.

If she continues taking college courses, her lack of options probably won't change -- and for now, she's OK with that.

"Online would be the way I would definitely want to go," she said.

In Washington, there were almost 70,000 community college students enrolled in online courses during the 2006-2007 academic year. Just four years before that, there were fewer than 40,000 students taking classes online.

And though many courses are being taught online with few or no face-to-face class sessions, there are also a plethora of hybrid courses sprouting up -- a sign that more instructors are welcoming the forums and online course supplement as valuable teaching tools.

"In person, of course, you're somewhat bound by space and time," said Cable Green, eLearning director for the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges. "But that's flexible now. You can be anywhere you want, attend class anywhere you want."

The cost of an online community college class tends to be comparable to on-campus counterparts. But it might be difficult for a student to earn a two-year degree entirely online, considering that class offerings tend to be sparser.

Going to school online isn't the virtual world one might imagine (though a few university professors are already taking online instruction to that level). Discussion boards, reading material, e-mail and audio lectures usually characterize Web-based courses at community colleges.

North Seattle instructor Tim Fiegenbaum uploads lectures and visual aids to the site for his course, an online survey of electricity and electronics. Once inside the course interface, students can listen to Fiegenbaum explain basic trigonometry equations while watching the calculations appear on what looks like a virtual blackboard.

Some instructors are initially resistant to technology invading their traditional classrooms, but Fiegenbaum says the changes have come decades too late.

"I wish when I was going to school I had something like this," he said. "I would want to say 'please do this again,' or I would be too worried that I was the only one who didn't get it.

"Now if the student doesn't get it, they can just go down to the scroll bar and watch it again," he said.

Not all classes are suited for online learning, Fiegenbaum pointed out. A curriculum that demands a lot of hands-on work with computers, for instance, is probably better suited for a classroom.

But at North Seattle, online credits earned last fall added up to be equivalent to 450 full-time students -- the highest percentage of Seattle's community colleges, even though that college has the smallest full-time equivalent totals (about 4,300 over the course of the 2005-2006 academic year).

South Seattle and Seattle Central each had the online equivalent of more than 200 full-time students last fall. Over the academic year beginning in 2005, South Seattle had a full-time equivalent rate of about 4,900, and Seattle Central had a rate of about 6,000.

A report published in 2007 by the Sloan Consortium -- an online-education association based at Babson College in Massachusetts -- found that online enrollment across the country is growing at a rate that vastly exceeds general student-growth rates. The survey found that almost 3.5 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall of 2006.

Nearly 20 percent of all college students in the country were taking an online course during the fall of 2006, the study found.

Two-year schools account for more than half of online enrollment, but students are also enrolling at online universities such as the University of Phoenix and Capella University -- both of which are for-profit schools. And many traditional universities are upping the ante with online courses, especially in graduate programs that cater to working professionals.

Some debate over the quality of online learning persists, but Green said a recent survey of student learning in distance classes and traditional classes showed the results were similar.

"What the research says is that it's the same," he said.

But the world of online learning isn't always ideal. If an instructor isn't accessible and responsive to queries, students can start feeling lost and disoriented, which translates into dropped classes and low grades.

"People ask me what's better -- an online class or a campus class," said North Seattle Director of Distance Learning Tom Braziunas. "I think that's the wrong question to ask. What makes a difference is the instructor."

And if you're not a self-starter, better stick to the campus classroom, said North Seattle student Melissa Cheesman.

"It ends up being more work than a regular class," said Cheesman, who is taking her sixth online class this quarter. "If you're not a responsible individual, you're not going to pass an online class."