Degrees for Video Watchers

Seven U.S. colleges launch a British-style "open university"

Ever since New York City's WNBT ushered in the television era by broadcasting a scheduled variety show in 1946, visionaries have dreamed of a video "college of the air" that would bring higher education to all. Just last November, Philadelphia Publishing Mogul Walter Annenberg (TV Guide, Seventeen magazine) offered to donate $ 150 million to develop a nationwide college curriculum for public television. A coalition of eleven Midwestern schools, including the universities of Nebraska, Missouri and Iowa, has started the University of Mid-America, based in Lincoln, Neb., which offers a handful of college credit courses on public "television, and seeks public support for a full-fledged degree program.

But the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting and the University of Maryland have beaten everyone to the punch: this week they are quietly launching the nation's first national degree-granting TV college, with ten public television systems and seven collaborating colleges across the nation: California State University-Dominguez Hills, lona College, Linfield College, the universities of Maryland and Pennsylvania, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and Southern Vermont University.

The group is known as the National University Consortium, and so far it has enrolled an experimental group of approximately 200 students, many of them working adults with some previous college credits. N.U.C.'s pilot semester offers only three courses: an introduction to college-level math, the culture, politics and religion of the early Roman Empire, and a survey of systems management. Degrees are offered in humanities, technology and management, behavioral and social sciences. Students with no previous college credits will need a minimum of six years to earn a B.A. or B.S. degree.

N.U.C. students register in one of the consortium's cooperating local colleges. The TV programs are beamed from Maryland to local stations or cable systems serving Los Angeles, Sacramento, Portland, Chattanooga, Indianapolis, New York City, Pullman, Wash., State College, Pa., Moscow, Idaho, as well as Maryland, Oregon and Vermont. TV-viewing students will get credits and degrees from the college nearest them; those enrollees not served by a local college have to register with the extension division of the University of Maryland.

Each college sets its own fees, and they are fairly steep. New York students will pay lona $92 per credit hour (or $828 for the nine-credit course on the Roman Empire), as against $30 at the University of Tennessee. Local colleges also assign each student to tutors who grade student essays and exams.

Most consortium courses use TV tapes and textbooks prepared in England for the U.K.'s respected and successful Open University, an off-campus program that has enrolled some 200,000 students since it began a decade ago. A joint undertaking with the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Open University has inspired counterparts in 16 countries, including West Germany, Costa Rica, Spain and Sri Lanka.

As in Britain, American N.U.C. courses rely more on assigned reading than on their half-hour TV programs, which are designed to maintain a high level of interest among stay-at-home students. Chatty, first-person handbooks, specially written for the course by such noted teachers as Oxford Historian J.P.V.D. Balsdon and Archaeologist Peter Salway, a regional director of the Open University, guide students in their reading of original source material. On page 44 of one handbook, for instance, Balsdon notes briskly, "I cannot imagine your having the time" to read all 77 pages on the Emperor Augustus, but he adds: "One document, however, you must read, the Res Gestae of Augustus." The teaching texts frequently direct students to consult particular portions of their main source books, or to jot down answers to questions. Maryland University and Broadcasting Center officials, who jointly direct the nonprofit N.U.C., say that many adults prefer such guided study at home to night-school classes. Observes Frederick Breitenfeld Jr., executive director of the Broadcasting Center: "N.U.C. courses look better and better compared with three nights a week of rushing through dinner, getting a babysitter, finding a campus parking place, and dozing off in class."

Some proponents see vast possibilities for the program. Says the Broadcasting Center's director of development, Richard Smith: "If several hundred students enroll now through seven colleges and succeed, it would be logical for 100 colleges to be enrolling some thousands of students by 1990."

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