                             THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, March 19, 1995                 TAG: 9503190038
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER 
DATELINE: RICHLANDS                          LENGTH: Long  :  201 lines

STUDENTS TUNE IN ELECTRONIC COLLEGE ODU TELETECHNET BEAMS COURSES TO 800 STUDENTS ACROSS THE STATE

Whenever the Old Dominion University counseling professor made a point, Kim Davis piped up.

Davis, 33, didn't see the point in ``reflection of feeling.'' That's when a counselor summarizes a client's mood, such as ``Down deep, you must have been furious.''

``This is a boring subject, don't you think?'' Davis, a substance-abuse counselor, asked her fellow students. ``You can tell if someone's mad or happy.''

Davis didn't buy some other approaches, but she agreed with the professor that patients often evoke mixed feelings, sometimes in the same sentence.

Her classmates appreciated her real-life insights. The professor, Julie Ancis, didn't mind, either. In fact, she didn't hear a word.

Davis was about 400 miles away, watching Ancis on TV at Southwest Virginia Community College.

She is among about 800 students in Old Dominion University's Teletechnet program, which beams courses leading to bachelor's degrees to 13 community colleges across the state.

Teletechnet is Virginia's fastest-growing entry in an education trend sweeping the nation. It's the '90s version of the classroom without walls, and it's called distance learning.

From Iowa to Maine, tens of thousands of college students are taking courses - via TV, computers, cassette tape - without setting foot on campus. Even the nation's most-talked-about politician is onto it: House Speaker Newt Gingrich offers a Saturday morning history course, ``Renewing American Civilization,'' that is beamed across the country.

``Distance education is undoubtedly going to be a significant subsection of higher education,'' said Michael Simonson, associate director of the Research Institute for Studies in Education at Iowa State University. ``It is not going away.'' At Regent University this semester, the distance M.B.A. program overtook the on-campus program in enrollment.

Arthur Levine sees the day, in 50 years, when most colleges - except for prestigious liberal arts schools and doctoral universities - will no longer serve as residential campuses. They'll just offer classes electronically.

More students are adults squeezed for time, and ``the reality is they're not spending their lives'' on campus, said Levine, president of Columbia University Teachers College. ``If they can save some time driving to campus and worrying about parking and crime and get it at home, I think they're going to get it at home.

``I'm not sure they're going to lose anything, but I don't know.''

For students at Southwest Virginia in Richlands, which is an hour and a half from the nearest public four-year college in Virginia, the televised courses are an unqualified hit. ``We're thirsting for higher education here,'' said Debra Magee, 37, a registered nurse at the Buchanan County Sheriff's Office working toward an ODU bachelor's degree in nursing. ``We don't have anything convenient to the people.''

Skeptics fear that distance learning will overburden professors and deprive students of the close contacts cherished as the hallmarks of a college education.

``A good deal of teaching and learning comes from the interaction of students and teachers and with students and other students,'' said James Newman, executive secretary of the Connecticut chapter of the American Association of University Professors. ``I just think that's powerfully difficult when students are sitting at home, watching a televised class.''

But students, at ODU and off-campus sites, say Teletechnet encourages other kinds of interaction, such as Davis' banter. And professors say it's made them more organized, benefiting students on Hampton Boulevard, too.

Michael Pearson is a convert. The associate professor of English first balked at teaching feature writing on Teletechnet, but midway through the telecourse this semester, he's sounding like a booster.

``This,'' he said, ``can improve your teaching and make it a better course to take back to the traditional classroom.''

The premise of Teletechnet is straightforward: Bring education to ``place-bound'' students in Virginia, who either live far from state-supported universities or live near one that doesn't offer some of ODU's programs.

The program began in 1985, when Old Dominion started beaming nursing courses to Northampton Accomac Memorial Hospital on the Eastern Shore. Nursing is still the most popular degree, but ODU now provides nine others, including counseling and criminal justice. Twenty-seven courses are being offered this semester - from Digital Electronics to Abnormal Psychology.

This is what it's like: The courses are televised live. Students at the Teletechnet sites see the professor - and any accompanying visual displays - on their screens. They, in turn, cannot be seen, but can be heard if they choose, by their counterparts in the classes at ODU. With a click of their black microphones, the far-flung students can chime in to raise a point or answer a question. Or, like Davis and her peers, they can talk amongst themselves.

The students never see professors face to face, but say it's easy to reach them by phone. Handouts and terms papers are sent back and forth by Federal Express, and tests are taken, with proctors, at the Teletechnet sites. For a full courseload, annual tuition is $3,450 at all sites, slightly less than $3,885 on campus.

The program has won favor across partisan lines in Richmond.

Gov. George F. Allen showed off a Teletechnet display at the National Governors' Conference last summer and didn't touch the program in his recently proposed cuts. And the General Assembly, despite the budget squeeze, last year approved $3.6 million for 1994-95 and $3.8 million in 1995-96. This session, it has set aside an additional $600,000, which will allow ODU to add three sites, including Eastern Shore Community College, in the fall.

State officials say Teletechnet meshes precisely with Virginia's blueprint for higher education: Use technology to educate more students at reduced cost.

Anne Raymond-Savage, the associate vice president at ODU who runs the program, estimates that the average cost of educating a Teletechnet student is $5,200, $590 less than for a student on campus. Once the bulk of the technology is purchased and enrollment grows, she says it will cost half as much to educate Teletechnet students as Hampton Boulevard students.

Of all the sites, Richlands has the most students - 76.

The mountainous town, 45 minutes from the West Virginia border, was named for its fertile soil.

But the residents have faced poor prospects in employment (the area's lifeblood, coal mining, is fading) and education (the closest public four-year school in Virginia is Clinch Valley College, an hour and a half away). Census figures show that the median household income for the surrounding county, Tazewell, is $19,670, compared with Hampton Roads' $30,841.

That's why many residents are grabbing onto Teletechnet like a man overboard grasping for a lifeboat.

``There was no way I could pursue this if ODU was not here,'' said Carolyn Phillips, 35, a hospital worker who's getting a bachelor's in health science management. ``This has really opened up a lot of doors in this area.''

At ODU and elsewhere, professors have found that students at off-campus sites do no worse than their counterparts in traditional classrooms.

``You can learn it just as effectively as you can on campus,'' said Arnold Seigel, director of instructional television for the University of Maryland, who has found no differences in achievement after studying thousands of students. ``You can do this for English, geography or engineering, and it works.''

Newman, the Connecticut professor, still fears off-site students will be losing out. ``I have enough of a struggle getting students to ask questions in class; I have some misgivings whether students will call on the telephone to ask a question across the state.''

But Richlands students say professors usually do a good job including them in discussions. ``If you're not paying attention, he can pop up and say your name, `What do you think about this?' '' Scott Kiser said of his business professor, John Keeling Jr. ``You have to stay on it.''

If anything, advocates say, distance learning opens new lines of communication. ``It's the same as a regular class, but there are more questions asked and more things people can think of,'' said Kimberly Perkins, a graduate student taking a Teletechnet criminal justice course on ODU's campus.

Raymond-Savage, the Teletechnet director, also says students might feel freer to communicate across age and racial barriers if they don't see their peers.

And at Teletechnet sites, students like Davis sometimes bat around ideas, with their mikes off, during the lecture - the kind of ``peer teaching'' that researchers say will become more important in education of the 21st century. ``Kim helps us out a lot,'' said another student, Stephanie Griffith, 21, a waitress who wants to become a counselor. ``When the professor gives an example, Kim will say something that coincides with it.''

Some professors say the experience has improved their teaching style, too.

``I tend to be very anecdotal and informal; this has forced me to focus and be much more organized,'' Pearson, the English professor, said. ``You have a person behind the camera putting his finger across his throat saying, `You have five minutes left.' ''

And because ``the talking head is a killer on TV,'' as Simonson, the Iowa researcher, says, professors tend to use more visual aids and less monotone. Matt Grosch, a junior taking Keeling's management class on campus, has noticed the difference: ``Just the fact that it's on TV makes it a little more interesting. The teacher has to be a little more demonstrative in his body language to get his ideas across.''

Despite its success, concerns have surfaced.

Occasionally, there are technical glitches. The day of the counseling class, the Richlands students couldn't call in because the phone lines were down after a snowstorm. And at ODU, some students wonder whether the home campus has paid for the state's largesse for Teletechnet.

Overall, Old Dominion is to lose $2.5 million in state aid next school year. The General Assembly this session has proposed restoring $1.5 million, not including the $600,000 for Teletechnet. But even without Teletechnet, Raymond-Savage said, ``our budget would have been cut, as all budgets have across the commonwealth.''

Professors say they're not overtaxed yet, but they worry about the university's plan to teach thousands of students by TV within the decade.

Pearson is teaching writing to 35 students across Virginia, with the help of a graduate student, but he thinks he's close to the limit. ``We're not going to be able to communicate, all of us together, if it's too large.''

For now, though, he's a believer. ``All those who think they'll lose touch with the human element - I don't think that's the case. I found that we should take some chances and try new things.'' MEMO: Staff writer Lise Olsen contributed to this story.