At a 2002 conference on distance
education, a university educator boasted about having 1100
students in an online engineering class, extolling the technology’s
moneymaking potential.
“I told Linda (Smith), ‘I wouldn’t want
to drive across a bridge built by an engineer who was one
of a thousand students in a distance ed class,’”
said Bruce Kingma, Associate Provost for Entrepreneurship
and Innovation at Syracuse University. After the conference,
Kingma and Linda Smith, Associate Dean and Professor at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School
of Library and Information Science (LIS), began a long conversation
that led to the development of WISE, the Web-based Information
Science Education Consortium. The goal of this cost-effective,
collaborative distance education program is to increase the
quality, access, and diversity of online courses available
to LIS students.
For the next two years, Kingma and Smith worked together
to define quality measures and to make it easy for students
to take online courses at Syracuse and Illinois. The concept
took root, and the two institutions were soon cross-enrolling
students in elective online courses.
“We recognized that for quality distance education,
there needed to be a course cap of no more than 25 students,”
Kingma said. “This encourages interaction between the
teachers and students, which is very important.” Another
early epiphany had to do with collaboration with other schools,
Kingma said. “If I run an online course and only 15
students signed up, I have 10 empty slots. Why not open the
course to students in other schools?” he mused. This
is particularly helpful in a highly specialized course, which
might not be economically viable if it was only offered to
students from a single program, he said.
WISE was officially born in 2004, when Syracuse University
and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign received
a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program (LB21) grant from
the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). WISE
used the LB21 grant to provide faculty with online training
in distance education pedagogy and to recruit partner schools.
At an early planning meeting in Chicago, Kingma and Smith
assembled representatives from 12 Library and Information
Science schools. “I said, ‘Let’s do this
for the right reasons – not to make money, but to collaborate
and dramatically expand the selection of high-quality online
courses we can offer students,’” Kingma said.
WISE established three guiding pillars: quality, pedagogy,
and collaboration.
In the ensuing months, educator instruction received substantial
attention. WISE launched a series of face to face pedagogical
instruction opportunities where educators learned to use their
traditional classroom expertise in the online environment.
Workshops took place at the 2005 American Library Association
(ALA) annual conference and the 2006 Association of Library
and Information Science Educators (ALISE) annual meeting,
supplemented by online teaching modules. In summer 2007, WISE
began offering pedagogy workshops online each semester. WISE
also instituted the Excellence in Online Teaching Award in
fall of 2006 to recognize exemplary WISE instructors for their
dedication to high-quality online instruction.
“In the old days, a university had a teaching center
for teachers who needed help with traditional classroom instruction.
With online education, instructional designers help instructors
navigate the new challenges inherent to distance education,”
Kingma said. Ideally, instructors set up an online course
from start to finish before a single student logs in. Technical
bugs are worked out prior to the start of class and students
experience a media-rich environment that might include video,
wikis, podcasts, Skype, and PowerPoint lectures with voice-over
narration.
Another goal of WISE is to minimize administrative and technological
barriers that arise when working with different programs.
Students at WISE member schools register and pay for selected
WISE courses at their home schools even though the courses
are hosted at other institutions. This eliminates the need
to transfer credits and navigate unfamiliar registration and
payment systems.
Some challenges do exist, however. WISE schools use a variety
of online Learning Management Systems (LMS), so students must
be able to adapt to technological differences. Host schools
provide WISE students with technology support and LMS tutorials
to help address this issue. WISE schools also use a variety
of grading scales. Early on, WISE created a grading matrix
that allows administrators to quickly translate grades among
the schools.
The distribution of students in WISE courses is based on a
“balance of trade.” Preferably, the number of
WISE students hosted by a school will be equal to the number
of students they send to other WISE schools. Schools receive
$100 for each incoming WISE student and are charged $100 for
each outgoing student. In addition to these fees, each member
school pays annual dues of $3,000 as well as a one-time, new-member
fee of $2,000.While the student fees go to the schools of
the consortium, the annual dues and new member fees are used
to cover WISE’s administrative costs.
One of the benefits of the WISE design is that the member
schools contribute to the administrative efforts by working
with students interested in WISE courses at their own schools.
This system minimizes the administrative overhead needed for
the consortium to succeed.
“So many distance education programs get started and
they build in an expensive administration. We want a program
that is still sustainable 10 years after the grant runs out,”
Kingma notes.
In 2006, Syracuse University, in partnership with the University
of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh, received a second
Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grant from IMLS
to fund WISE+. This initiative provides funding which allows
WISE schools to partner with library and information science
organizations to develop courses, which are suitable both
for graduate and continuing education. In addition, WISE+
funds online and face-to-face pedagogy training for faculty
and doctoral students, and the establishment of a digital
repository of learning objects from WISE schools.
All of the hard work on WISE is paying off, both in student
satisfaction and professional recognition. In 2006, WISE received
the Effective Practices Award from the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C),
an organization comprised of more than 1000 institutions dedicated
to excellence in online learning. The award recognizes the
WISE Consortium’s leadership role in the advancement
of quality, scale, and breadth of online courses. In 2008,
WISE also received the American Distance Education Consortium
(ADEC) National Award for Excellence in Distance Education
for its dedication to innovation, collaboration, and professional
development, as well as demonstrated positive impact in the
field of higher education.
Today, WISE has 15 active member schools and has received
support from more than 20 professional library and information
science organizations. Each semester, schools choose from
more than 30 elective courses available through the consortium
to increase the academic opportunities available to their
students. Over the last four years, more than 330 courses
have been offered through WISE, and more than 550 students
have been enrolled through the consortium.
“There’s been an enormous amount of interest
in WISE and, while we’re not marketing it, we are putting
it out there at conferences and seeing where synergies can
happen on both sides,” Kingma said. “This is a
very strong model for programs that want to do distance education
right. We’re keeping our eye on quality and the schools
and students are reaping the benefits of collaboration.”
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