Page 6

FW: Yes. We maintain the Academy for Lifelong Learning which is within our continuing education area. We offer a whole range of programs for that demographic.

IMS Global: Based on your experience at Ocean County College, what do you predict is the future for online learning?

FW: I think any college, and any community college in the US certainly, we have to be flexible, we have to offer a repertoire of approaches to learning. There always will be students who want the traditional form of learning in the classroom with the instructor face to face. But we also have the hybrid courses or what we are calling "on-site, on-line." The nursing program is like that, but we do similar courses as well. What we found was that with the one-day-a-week approach, if you had traditional Monday-Wednesday-Friday, you could now offer three courses in that time period. Beginning in 2007, we're looking at all of our courses being offered on a two-day-a-week basis. Many of the other schools in New Jersey are taking that approach as well. We've designed it so they can take the same amount of credits and not have to come to campus as often. That model would be augmented by an online component as well.

So in the future we're going to have the true online courses, the hybrid courses, and the traditional courses. You have to be flexible and offer an array of approaches. I don't think you'd ever want a one-size-fits-all approach to education. But I also think that any community college that doesn't embrace distance education will almost be obsolete.

IMS Global: Do you find the expectations of online students different from the traditional students?

FW: Students want good communication with the instructor. They want timely responses to their e-mails and easy access to the system. I think the key to effective online instruction is effective communication. It can't be a "back of the match book correspondence course." That was the big criticism or suspicion about distance learning when it first appeared. And we know at the beginning some of it was nothing more than "e-reading"-lecture notes posted to a website. Student success and satisfaction demand that distance learning courses be truly innovative, interesting, user friendly, and interactive.