Get With the Program: Smart Strategies for Online Teaching

Remember when e-learning was the Internet's greatest hope for the future? When Zdu.com and Jones International University boasted an egalitarian approach to education that put a classroom in every home? When university presidents began consulting dotcoms for curriculum guidance? Well, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

While myriad dotcoms hit the skids in 2001, e-learning actually hit its stride. In fact, the online-education industry is generating profits, expanding overseas, and generally keeping its vision of e-enlightenment intact. Last year, for example, the University of Phoenix Online, an arm of the largest private U.S. university, saw profits increase 82% to $32 million. America Online launched its first-ever online campus just one month ago. And Duke University's Fuqua School of Business now offers a "Cross Continent" MBA program that supplements international classroom teaching with distance-learning courses. The 20-month program costs $74,000 and boasts a rigorous application process -- students are clamoring to enroll.

Still, e-learning is a rogue concept. Scholars debate the quality and rigor of an online curriculum, startups experiment with unproven teaching methods, and students approach most Web-only institutions with skepticism, fearing an online degree just won't confer the same status as a brick-and-mortar mortarboard. In the business world, corporate trainers are beginning to reap financial benefits from streamlined e-courses, but no industry standard yet exists.

How can we best train our people using a Web-based curriculum? How can we build relationships online? How can we save money in the long run without cutting corners today? Those are the questions circulating through Motorola, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, and Adams County School District 14 in Commerce City, Colorado.

Adams County, however, is facing a special challenge: It's trying to make e-learning work for a generally apathetic set of consumers -- teenagers -- in a generally bleak and neglected establishment: the U.S. public-school system. Yet the high schools in District 14 are making educational and financial headway thanks, in part, to a Nebraska startup called class.com.

Launched at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Division of Continuing Studies, class.com is now an independent entity serving 4,462 high schools in the United States with more than 40 courses that meet the national curriculum standards in math, science, social studies, language arts, and foreign language. In addition to providing American children with education alternatives, class.com is also boosting schools' tax revenues, widening the reach of exemplary teachers, and gathering valuable data about how people learn online.

"We can do a better job in our schools," says Katherine Endacott, president and CEO of class.com. "There are dedicated teachers to whom we must give new tools and new solutions so they can reach today's students."

Here, Endacott offers a curriculum for e-learning that makes sense beyond high school.

Customize Your Syllabus

Though class.com offers a standard range of courses and lesson plans, it works with each individual high-school client to customize the content for its particular student body, timetable, and staff. (Participating high schools pay class.com for every e-course offered.) It also conducts hands-on training with the teachers who preside over each class.com course.

"We spend a great deal of time tailoring our programs," Endacott says. "We help teachers understand how to use our e-learning product with their students, and we help them understand what it means to be an online teacher -- how to help students learn best and how to support students who are working online."

This willingness to alter and adapt course content has allowed class.com to capture a diverse range of clients: urban and rural schools serving at-risk, gifted, and returning students with varied needs and expectations.