Pioneers of distance education to retire

 

 

Janet Kendall: 23 years  building distance education   By Richard H. Miller/Center for Distance and Professional Education   A pioneer in distance education is retiring after 23 years at WSU.   “I’ve never come to work not being excited about what the day is going to bring,” said Janet Ross Kendall, director of academic programs at WSU Online. “It’s been so fun to do all we’ve done.”   She and retiring Center for Distance and Professional Education Dean Muriel Oaks worked together to create WSU’s distance education program, which evolved into WSU Online.   “Janet’s area has been student services,” Oaks said, “and she’s done a terrific job. She’s the go-to person for our professional organizations.”   Kendall also initiated the Northwest eTutoring Consortium and built partnerships with academic and administrative units across WSU and with partner institutions. Among her many honors is the 2009 Professional Contributions to Continuing Education award from the University Continuing Education Association Region West.   “I view Janet as the continuing education ‘Boy Scout’ for the West region,” said Laird M. Hartman, dean of Continuing Education of Weber State University, in a letter supporting Kendall’s nomination for the UCEA award. “She is so courteous, kind, trustworthy, punctual, informative, thoughtful, insightful and energetic.”   Kendall is the author of numerous publications, and previously received the UCEA Elizabeth Powell Award for contributions to research in distance education. She has also been the chair of UCEA Region West, and led various committees and task forces for the organization.   “I think it’s time for other people to have the opportunity to have as much fun as I have,” she said. Kendall’s post-retirement plans include a lot of travel, including trips to Hawaii, England and New Zealand.

In her purple earmuffs and pumpkin-orange snow pants, Muriel Oaks stood bright against the snowy mountaintop. She had ridden a snowcat up Mission Ridge near Wenatchee to look at the communications tower that connected Washington State University’s campuses. But the tower vanished into the winter fog.

 

Distance education was a lonely place in 1990. “Very few institutions were doing it,” said Oaks, then director of WSU’s Washington Higher Education Telecommunications System. “It was a huge leap of faith for us — and for the university.”

 

Oaks is retiring this month as dean of the Center for Distance and Professional Education, which includes WSU Online.

 

 

“If you look at the past 20 years, there’s probably a half dozen people who have changed the way universities deliver education in this country,” said Samuel H. Smith, president of WSU from 1985 to 2000. “Muriel is clearly one of the leaders of that group.”

 

Oaks earned her 1972 master’s degree and 1978 doctoral degree in education from WSU, and began working with distance education in 1983.

 

A retirement party will be held 3-5 p.m. Tuesday at the Lewis Alumni Center for Oaks and her colleague of 23 years, Janet Kendall, WSU Online’s director of academic programs.

 

“The thing I learned about Muriel and Janet is they don’t fear change,” Smith said.  “They use it.”

 

 

In 1985, Smith enlisted Oaks and Kendall to find ways to deliver Pullman courses to the newly established Spokane, Tri-Cities and Vancouver campuses. “At first, we didn’t have faculty or staff,” Smith said, and the new campuses consisted of little more than a spare room in a high school or bank building. “I went to Muriel and others and asked, ‘How do we get classes delivered?’”

 

The answer involved WHETS, and two-way video conferencing using microwave transmissions. “We wouldn’t have got those classes out without Muriel and Janet,” Smith said.

 

When the urban campuses were in place, Don Hanna, associate vice provost for Extended University Services, suggested an asynchronous degree program for rural areas. The university was beginning a process that brought “new campuses, major uses of emerging electronic technologies, and increased access to WSU for people within Washington and around the world,” said Hanna, who now teaches at the University of Wisconsin.

 

 

In 1993, Oaks became director of EUS, which became the CDPE.

 

“The biggest hurdle was getting faculty to understand how we could do a quality delivery of a WSU degree,” Oaks said. “But that was our commitment: It has to be the same quality that students get on campus.”

 

 

Then came two surprises. First the Internet brought worldwide popularity and new pedagogies to distance education. WSU Online now offers seven undergraduate majors, four graduate degrees, 11 credit and noncredit certificates, and professional endorsements. This semester it has a headcount of 3,030.

“WSU Online has more students than any branch campus,” Smith said. In the past 25 years, he noted, Pullman has added about 1,000 students, while the other three campuses and distance education account for nearly 9,000 new students.
“We couldn’t have done it without the help of these two gals,” he said of Oaks and Kendall.

 

See video of NUTN award comments

In 2009, the National University Telecommunication Network awarded WSU Online its first Institution Achievement Award.

 

The second surprise involved the term “distance student.”

“We were focusing on rural Washington, because branch campuses served the urban areas,” Oaks said. “We never imagined that our audience would be mainly urban. Because of the flexibility of distance learning, that’s where the demand is.”

 

 

Even the word distance is becoming archaic, Oaks said, as on-campus students embrace online options: “You put these courses online, and everybody wants them.” Oaks cited WSU’s new online winter session, which lets students earn three credits in three weeks.

 

 

Oaks’ last day is Nov. 30. She plans to spend more time with her husband, Merrill, who retired from the WSU faculty eight years ago. “We have a second home in North Idaho,” she said, “and we’re tired of living apart.”

 

She’ll remain involved with the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, and do some consulting. And she’s confident WSU Online is in good hands as CDPE Associate Dean David Cillay takes the helm: “We’ve got a great team here,” she said, “and the right people to bring a new vision.”

 

In retrospect, the path from WHETS to WSU Online looks clear. But, as Oaks and Kendall worked to reinvent distance education, the future was shrouded in fog. “We made a lot of it up as we went along,” Oaks said.

Smith took a broader view: “People who change the world don’t always realize it at the time. That’s what these two did.”