In an age where the Internet has become a part of day-to-day life, colleges and universities around the country are using it for yet another purpose: teaching classes.
This fall, six professors from six different colleges will give new meaning to the term "team teaching." They are planning on teaching an advanced Latin course together -- on the Internet.
This course will be the first offering in the "virtual classics department," designed to coordinate teaching efforts of professors from 13 of the 15 institutions in the Associated Colleges of the South, including Davidson College, Furman University, Washington and Lee University and Rhodes College.
The Latin course this fall will be taught by six different professors. At the appointed time about 30 students -- some from each of the six campuses -- and the professors will tune in to an online broadcast of a lecture. During the lecture, they will be able to pose questions and comments in a live chat room.
The students will also meet for a second time each week for a tutorial session with their own professor.
The classics department is part of a developing program intended to enable small liberal arts colleges to pool resources in order to enhance teaching and course offerings in ways not currently possible.
Dartmouth, however, is waiting to jump on the boat of distance learning.
"There's a sense of a shark mentality," said Ed Berger, Dean of the Faculty, "people are afraid that if they don't do it now, they are going to miss out."
The College instead prefers to wait. "We are taking a conservative position. We are looking at how this would benefit the way we educate students and waiting to see how other institutions are responding," said Berger.
Indeed, the idea of distance learning, although seemingly attractive, may have its flaws.
Many of these collaborative programs may be motivated by the colleges' fears about competition with new, for-profit institutions. The goal of these cooperative efforts among small liberal arts schools is to improve the quality of education enough to remain attractive to students.
"We are waiting to see if this is something that will benefit our students or just a commercial enterprise," Berger said.
Berger also mentioned that issues surrounding selling courses and credit present additional problems.
"We are waiting to see how other institutions [similar to Dartmouth] deal with this. We don't want to make a decision completely in a vacuum," said Berger.
Despite the fact that many of the schools implementing this program compete with each other for students, the administrators are willing to consider previously unprecedented levels of cooperation.
"You're not going to do it all alone -- there's too much going on," said William Durden, president of Dickinson College, in an interview with The Chronicle, an academic newspaper.
Durden noted that colleges are going to want to be able to say to students, "enjoy the distinctly American residential socialization that the liberal-arts college provides, and we will bring in, via technology, not just elements from our own campus, but a globally networked enhancement to your education."
This desire has recently spurred a flurry of conferences and meetings among college administrators about how to best harness technology in order to enhance learning.
These advances may prove especially important for small departments such as classics, where many liberal arts colleges are facing the threats of such departments becoming irrelevant.
""If we offer a more comprehensive and interesting program, more students will be interested in majoring in our programs," said Kenny Morrell, the virtual departments' director.
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