UC Irvine Distance Learning Center Focuses on High-Quality Online Courses for Degreed Professionals

From the Orange County Business Journal — February 5, 2001

The University of California, Irvine is a young university — at just over 35 years old — but has evolved quickly into a national powerhouse. Recently ranked among the top 10 public universities in the country by US News & World Report, UCI is just as proud of its ranking among the top 45 of all universities in the country — private and public.

In addition to traditional undergraduate and graduate students, UCI also serves about 20,000 professionals each year through its Extension program — the continuing education branch of the university. Extension students are seeking a quite different experience than traditional students encounter. They want immersion in a particular topic or subject matter for their personal enrichment or, more often, for a career advancement or career change.

UCI's continuing education students are working professionals — most with a degree in hand — and they're balancing work, life, and education. As much as they want more classes and training, it's often difficult to find the time. The UC Irvine Distance Learning Center caters to that time crunch. Students can regain control of their schedules by taking classes online. It's anywhere, anytime education.

Each online course is crafted to fit well into Extension's full set of programs — offering students increased choices in their learning experiences. And students can trust that they're still getting the quality of education they expect and demand from an institution like UCI. Gary Matkin, Dean of Continuing Education notes, "As online education becomes more prevalent and common, quality becomes a significant issue. It becomes hard for an unsophisticated consumer to discriminate between good and bad until they've had an outstanding online experience." And good instructors and good instructional design are keys to quality online, just as they are in person.

Of increasing importance online is instructional design, which Matkin defines as the "selection and sequencing of learning objects" such as lectures, charts, tests, and other components that an instructor uses to design a course. "Good instructional design is always important, but it's absolutely critical in an online course," he says. "There's an art to sequencing the learning objects — in addition to the instructor's personality, skill, and content knowledge that come through the online experience."

With these issues at the forefront of UCI's push into distance education, the extension staff is ensuring that only the highest quality online courses are offered. UC Irvine, under the guidance of Gary Matkin, has convened a distance education alliance of major research universities including University of California, Berkeley; Penn State; University of Washington; and University of Wisconsin.

The alliance will focus initially on four areas: benchmarking institutional practices and standards, assessing opportunities from the private sector, joint sales efforts, and exploring opportunities for collaborative program development. Groups from these institutions are studying, discussing, comparing, and disseminating standards and best practices. They expect the results to be of immediate use to guide their own strategic planning for this educational delivery mode, as well as to raise the bar for online education and training in general.