CGS to offer on-line summer classes for Penn undergrads

For the first time ever, Penn students will soon get credit for University classes while participating from desks located across the country. This summer, the College of General Studies will administer a distance-learning program called PennAdvance, enabling students in 15 select cities to take full-credit Penn courses through a combination of live satellite broadcasts, videoconferencing technology and the Internet. Professors will broadcast their courses from a studio at 46th and Market streets, and the four courses will be shown on huge screens at Caliber Learning Centers in selected cities. Penn already contracts with the Caliber Learning Network, a 2 1/2-year-old Baltimore-based company founded by Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc. and MCI Worldcom to provide distance-learning courses to high school students and Wharton School executive-education classes. The four courses offered are Physics 1: Mechanics for the Health Sciences, Psychology 1: Introduction to Psychology, Religious Studies 2: Religions of the West and Sociology 3: Principles of Sociology: Deviance and Social Control. Though there has been some successful "initial experimentation" with high school students in selected markets, this summer marks the first occasion that the distance-learning program will be available to Penn students, according to CGS Director Richard Hendrix. "We never intended it to be just high-school students," Hendrix said The courses will meet bi-weekly at specified times and the enrolled students will attend the high-tech centers in their respective cities. Each student will follow the professor's lecture on the large screen and will receive any visual aids on a small computer screen in front of them. The professor, meanwhile, can simultaneously monitor the progress of each of the 15 classes and can choose to specifically focus on several cities at one time. "The professor could ask the technician to put Boston up on the [large] screen for everyone to see," said Luise Moskowitz, a CGS spokesperson, offering a hypothetical situation. Hendrix said the four classes would have the same amount of coursework as any class offered during the year at Penn, with work including quizzes, midterms and finals. The number of students for each of the four classes has not yet been determined, but Hendrix said he's expecting a total number of 60 students in each course with an average of four students in each city. And while the number of courses offered might progressively expand, Hendrix does not expect the total to ever compare to the 250 courses currently offered by CGS. Moskowitz noted that an added benefit of these summer courses is that students can control the pace at which they learn through their own personal computer because they can review a slide or a handout that the professor had previously distributed. He also claimed that despite initial concern that student-teacher relations would be weak due to the absence of face-to-face contact, several professors who participated in the high school pilot program said they actually befriended some of their students. "The faculty came back saying that they knew their on-line students better than their Penn students," Moskowitz said. And Richard Beeman, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said the on-line program indicates the growing interest in supplementing education with technology. "The great challenge facing any elite residential university is to offer in a first-rate way all of those educational opportunities that a virtual education can offer," Beeman said. The 15 target cities for the PennAdvance program are Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Boston; Dallas; Denver; Houston; Minneapolis; Nashville, Tenn.; Pittsburgh; Portland, Ore.; San Diego; San Francisco; San Jose, Calif.; and Washington, D.C.