Some courses are beginning to provide tailor made Web pages for the existing `online'
courses. The web site offers easy ordering and paying for set books, through an associated
book store. Interestingly, the web site also has a place for perspective online teachers to
register interest in tutoring for NYIT.
Students are assigned a tutor who interacts and marks assignments. Most courses are available
for credit and it is possible to obtain an undergraduate degree through NYIT Online Campus.
Graduate degrees are also being added to the offerings: M.Sc. and M.BA. for example.
The cost of courses is as follows:
$50
application
fee
$345 per credit for undergraduate courses
$413 per credit for graduate courses
Start and finish dates are fixed, but some courses have several starts each year.
Number of Online Students Per Institution
There were 49 (37.7%) institutions that not reported their student numbers. Some answered
that the number was not applicable as the courses are on an open web site. Others were in the
process of recruiting students for the courses. As shown in Table 6, 38 (29.3%) of the
institutions report that they have 100 or fewer students. As discussed in the paragraph about
the number of courses the institutions offer, the relatively low enrolment numbers also
indicate that web based instruction is not pivotal to these institutions.
Table 6. Distribution of institutions per number of students
Number of students Number of
Percent
institutions
1 30 21
16.2
31 100 17
13.1
101 999 26
20.0
1000 17
13.1
No answer
49
37.7
Sum 130
100.1
The four institutions that reported to have more than 5000 students were the University of
South Australia [5] with 8000 individual subject enrolments, the Edith Cowan University [12]
with an enrolment of 8000 students, The UK Open University [108] with 7000 students in
three courses, and the Lund Virtual University [89] that claims to have 6000 students.
The UK Open University [108] (
http://www.open.ac.uk
) reports to have 7000 students in three
courses. The Open University is a dedicated distance teaching institution with students across
Europe and in some cases even worldwide. It uses the Internet in a range of ways depending
on the nature and level of the course. Nearly 40,000 students use computer conferencing on
courses across most disciplines in the University for tutorial support, self help groups, and
general networking. Rather fewer courses use the web and those which do (e.g. a large
introductory computing course, another introductory Information Technology course, and
several courses in the Open Business School) use it as an additional course resource, rather
than the primary content delivery medium. One course the second year of the Masters in
53