by Gary Jahrig

When George Dennison looks out the window of his Main Hall office these days, his view of the University extends much farther than the traditional campus boundaries. What Dennison, UM’s president since 1990, sees is an endless stream of outreach opportunities with the potential to deliver UM’s services to a global community.

“From almost the day I arrived, I’ve been saying the walls of the University ought to be the boundaries of the state and beyond,” Dennison says. “We need to take our educational programs to people, wherever they are located. In the past, we haven’t had the kind of technology to overcome some barriers. We do now.”

Dennison’s vision for outreach, defined as “the ability to extend services to those not usually accommodated by an organization,” is shared by many others at UM.

“It’s one of our fundamental principles — reaching out to students and providing access to education ... is clearly a part of our mission,” says Sharon Alexander, UM’s dean of Continuing Education. In fact, Alexander believes that a “major role” of Continuing Education is to develop and provide access to UM’s courses and programs.

“Our primary focus,” she says, “is moving more and more toward online delivery. We’ve been involved in distance learning for years, from correspondence courses to interactive video. But now we can do much more with online learning.”

Alexander says that was one of the main reasons John Kuglin recently was named UM’s associate dean of Continuing Education. Kuglin, a former Missoula grade-school teacher who has become one of the nation’s leading authorities in technology in education, has been charged with bringing UM up to speed in the increasingly competitive world of online academics.

“We’ve got an awful lot of people in Montana and other places who can’t come to campus for traditional learning,” Alexander says. “And it’s not always good enough for people just to take an ad-hoc course here or there. That’s not to say it will ever replace traditional learning,” she says. “It will not. It’s just for people who can’t get here for regular programs.”

Kuglin, a Montana native who also has served since 1998 as the director of UM’s Earth Observing System Education Project, is quick to point out that UM was in the outreach business long before the arrival of Internet technology.

The UM School of Business has offered a long-distance master’s degree program in business administration for several years with satellite classes in other Montana cities. And for the past three years, UM’s School of Pharmacy and Allied Health Sciences has provided practicing pharmacists with the opportunity to earn a Doctor of Pharmacy degree online, from the comfort of their own homes.

Research grants, a coveted treasure for academicians of all disciplines, also now are becoming more associated with outreach programs at UM and other institutions of higher learning, Kuglin says.

Reaching out
“Most every grant connected with the University community ... has some type of outreach effort associated with it,” he says. The classic outreach research example at UM is the EOS Education Project that Kuglin directs. One project, funded by NASA, is an offshoot of the satellite imagery program pioneered by UM forestry Professor Steve Running and his team of researchers on the Missoula campus. The education arm of EOS is designed to help teachers and other interested citizens understand the earth science imagery and apply it to classroom and real-world studies.

To illustrate the usefulness of the satellite data, UM announced last spring that it would be the home of the National Lewis and Clark Education Center. The center, funded by grant money, gives UM’s EOS researchers a prominent showcase for their satellite technology, which is used to retrace and analyze the famed exploration of the West on the eve of its bicentennial.

“In the past, NASA didn’t worry about outreach. But a few years ago, (the agency) began to have more trouble getting funding,” Kuglin says. “There had been a change among people in Washington who began saying, ‘What are we getting for our money?’”

Such questions of practicality raised by politicians and other power brokers resulted in new efforts by scientists to show how their research could be applied in regular life, Kuglin adds. Universities and colleges, such as UM, became the proving grounds for applied research.

“Even just showing that the long-term benefits for science and technology in education can benefit most peoples’ children in school takes an outreach effort,” Kuglin says.

While the boom of practical science has helped outreach efforts at UM, it is the Internet that really puts a charge into outreach specialists like Kuglin.

“Some people call the Internet ‘disruptive technology’ because it takes the status quo, comfortable feeling of business as usual and turns it upside down,” Kuglin says.

But Kuglin and UM administrators like Dennison and first-year Provost Lois Muir view the Internet more along the lines of productive technology.

“We need to take advantage of the Internet because times have changed,” Kuglin says. “Things used to be somewhat territorial among universities, where you could attract students from your geographic proximity. But now other universities are expanding their outreach efforts by using the Internet. The traditional student base we have enjoyed for years and years is beginning to erode. Montana students can easily access other universities through the Internet.”

UM in cyberspace
That’s why Kuglin has been given the task of developing a program called “Umtonline.” The program, still in the developmental stages, will eventually allow prospective students to access any UM course offering through the Internet.

“We’re trying to put together a plan that develops a very robust outreach component that attracts all elements of the UM population,” Kuglin says. “We want to be so good at what we do that everybody wants to join us.”

Kuglin realizes that not only is it important to convince prospective students of the value of online classes, but it’s also essential to persuade UM faculty and administrators that quality will not be compromised through the long-distance learning process.

“We have to stress to our faculty that they will have the major role in determining class content and delivery,” Kuglin says.

To personalize the Internet outreach program on the Missoula campus, UM recently contracted with Blackboard Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based online company that designs Internet sites for K-12 schools, colleges and universities throughout the world. Blackboard works with some 3,300 schools in 50 states and more than 70 countries. It specializes in customizing Web sites for individual students to the point where they can register for classes, pay fees, consult advisers and access their lessons, all on the Internet.

“Their software allows us to dump our content into their bucket,” Kuglin says. “Then they customize it to The University of Montana.”

This spring, UM has five online courses, all of which are designed and taught by campus faculty. The initial offerings on the UM online site include foreign language, liberal studies and communications classes.

Alexander says the time is ripe for UM to jump headlong into the growing Internet education market. She also says the Internet is exactly the technological tool UM needs to bolster its outreach efforts in the state and throughout the world.

“We are committed to outreach, and we are committed to meeting the needs of students wherever they are,” she says. “We’re just scratching the surface right now.”

For more information about online learning at UM, contact Continuing Education at (406) 243-2900.