By Matt SpectorThe Daily Northwestern
A program to train healthcare and information technicians to transfer hospital data to electronic form will be available online beginning next quarter, making it the first Northwestern master’s degree offered online.
NU’s Medical Informatics degree program will be offered through the School of Continuing Studies, administrators announced this month.
“I definitely think that the implementation of the program demonstrates that SCS is growing, expanding and reaching out to students in nontraditional ways,” said graduate student and Student Advisory Board President Franz Paul.
The year-old informatics program, developed with the Feinberg School of Medicine, is also the first full academic initiative between the two schools.
The online degree is one of the steps SCS has taken recently to increase its emphasis on distance education through which students can complement their on-campus classes with online courses.
The school’s changes reflect a trend in continuing education programs nationwide toward distance education and a reliance on emerging technologies to replace or augment the traditional classroom experience.
There have been a number of attempts at some universities to develop distance education projects, but many have “gone bust” due to insufficient funds and lack of student interest, said Thomas Gibbons, dean of the School of Continuing Studies.
“You don’t want to spend millions of dollars and not get any students,” he said.
The administration saw how other colleges failed and what they had been doing well. SCS developed its own program with newer, more reliable technology, Gibbons said.
The program will use streaming video, chat rooms and Webex online meeting services. Due to the rapid development of Internet technology in the past decade, SCS and programs like it can utilize new multimedia resources.
SCS Associate Dean of Academics Linda Salchenberger said the program will use videoconferencing so faculty and students can schedule Web meetings to discuss interesting or challenging topics, work on a group project or even review for an exam.
“It gives students more options – as they add more disciplines, more majors are added and SCS strengthens,” Paul said.
Distance education technologies have become more reliable, use broadband Internet rather than traditional communication lines and now are accessible to anyone who has access to the Internet, Salchenberger said.
“It’s a very complicated and expensive program,” Gibbons said. “First having the right technology and then doing research into good pedagogy and good learning models.”
To keep the course fun and exciting over the Internet requires adaptation and intensive work with faculty and students. Last year the SCS moved from a semester system to NU’s quarter system so administrators could work with faculty in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Communication.
“Our first concern is that our programs are of an extremely high quality and it’s a lot of work to maintain that quality – it’s our first and foremost priority,” Gibbons said.
Colleges such as New York University are among those increasing their online course offerings. According to Salchenberger, peer institutions such as Harvard University have offered a broad array of Internet classes and programs for many years.
“You’re starting to see the beginning of a pretty big momentum shift with the rise in online universities and the expansion of programs like SCS,” Paul said.
Reach Matt Spector at [email protected].
