Distance learning puts degree work on desktop

Being rear-ended at a stoplight abruptly and forever finished Sue TeStrake’s 23 years as a neuroscience nurse.

After recovering from her injuries enough to think about going back to work, she discovered that she couldn’t. The permanent soft-tissue and neurological damage she sustained precluded any return to the work she adored.

“There’s a requirement that neuroscience nurses be able to lift 100 pounds,” she recalls. “I barely could lift 10.”

Unemployed and deeply depressed, TeStrake contemplated early retirement.

“People told me how lucky I was to be able to quit work at age 46,” she says. “I didn’t feel lucky. I wanted to work, to practice nursing.”

Online learning through the UW Collaborative Nursing Program rescued TeStrake’s career in 1996. The CNP pools resources, electronic and human, from five UW System campuses: Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Oshkosh and Eau Claire. Students choose a home campus, through which they register and get advising, and which grants the degree. However, instructors and classmates may come from any of the five participating institutions.

TeStrake earned her bachelor’s degree from UW–Madison through the CNP in 1998. The flexibility that online learning affords students made that new career possible, she says. “I simply couldn’t have done it any other way. Because of restrictions from the injury, plus family obligation, I couldn’t travel very far.”

Most CNP classes can be taken at will, within a set time frame: The instructor posts the material, and the student can study it any time, any day within the allowable window. When synchronization is necessary, online students still enjoy a major advantage in not having to commute.

Indeed, Sharon Nellis, assistant dean in the UW–Madison School of Nursing, is a particularly enthusiastic fan of distance learning. She says the impact of the CNP already is being felt as Wisconsin deals with an acute and growing nursing shortage.

“Our students already have an associate nursing degree, and are holding full- or part-time jobs,” she says. “Most of our online degree candidates would not be able to go back to school without this convenience. Being able to earn their bachelor’s degree means they are able to move up the career ladder.”

In fact, most observers foresee growing on- and off-campus use of electronic delivery of degree programs. Yet the idea of learning long-distance has been a staple of UW–Madison’s educational repertoire for close to a century. Howard Martin, associate vice chancellor for extended programs, says the earliest incarnation of distance learning was the correspondence course, still used widely today through UW Extension.

“UW always has been a leader in this kind of learning,” he says. “When UW President Charles Van Hise started mail correspondence courses in 1906, students from all over the country began taking them almost immediately. The tradition continues to the present.”

Nor was distance learning slow to employ new technologies as they developed, Martin says. “In 1925, the university’s radio station, WHA, began offering expert information. In 1933 we launched University of the Air, broadcast statewide.”

Kathy Christoph, assistant vice chancellor of learning technology and director of academic teaching solutions in the Division of Information Technology, says that academic units continue to use telephones, broadcast media, videos or various combinations to deliver their instructional payloads to students, wherever they might be. In addition, new technologies such as Web browsers and streaming videos make higher education more accessible, convenient and often enjoyable for students of any age, circumstances or level of knowledge.

At last count the university offers nine degrees available through technology programs. Clients include professional engineers, pharmacists, health-care
professionals and more. One program gathering a promising head of digital steam is the year-old professional master of French studies, offered in the Department of French and Italian.

According to Gilles Bousquet, department chair, the master’s degree traditionally served as a stepping-stone to the Ph.D., mainly targeting those preparing to study and teach French literature and language.

“This new option is a way of updating and expanding our master’s program,” he says. “It’s for students who want to combine the study of French language and culture with another discipline, say, with business, politics or art and culture.”

Bousquet says that UW–Madison’s is the first of its kind on the United States to require an internship in the student’s area of concentration. He says that this aspect of the degree will be the only requirement not available online when the entire degree will be goes electronic in fall 2002.

In the College of Engineering, perhaps not surprisingly, distance learning has been a staple for professional degree development since 1984.

According to Helene Demont, program manager for engineering development, about 100 students are taking courses through the Engineering Outreach Program. About a third are working on master’s degrees in electrical or mechanical engineering, or in technical Japanese.

“The others are taking courses for professional development, or to make up deficiencies needed to be accepted into a graduate program,” she says. But whichever the motive, “we bring the classroom to them.”

Demont has found videotape to be the most efficient distribution method for her program; however, since 1998, the College’s Department of Engineering Professional Development has relied on Web-based delivery of its Master of Engineering in Professional Practice degree.

MEPP program director Wayne Pferdehirt says up to 30 seasoned engineers enter the program each year and progress through the two-year curriculum as a group, building strong supportive relationships with each other and the faculty along the way. The first 22 MEPP master’s candidates will receive their degrees in May, and Pferdehirt says that even though they are scattered around the country, many plan to attend the ceremony at the Kohl Center.

But regardless of the delivery method and whatever the discipline, the results are unmistakable. TeStrake, for example, today coordinates Dean-on-Call’s Nurse Triage Call Center. The center is on the very frontier of the nursing field, performing over the phone highly exacting patient needs assessment, determining the right level of care, the right time frame and the right provider. Last year, the 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week service logged 98,000 calls, TeStrake says.

“CNP granted me an opportunity to enhance my 23 years of nursing practice,” she says. “The degree I earned afforded me professional growth in a management arena and allowed to me continue to work as a professional.”

For more information, contact the Division of Continuing Studies, 262-1156, cont.ed@mail.dcs.wisc.edu