Class During Wartime
Written by Michael Burnett
But some universities have realized the difficulties that military servicemembers might face in their everyday jobs, and so they have adapted their offerings to make it easier, not harder, for soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to complete courses online or on-base.
Mike Bibbee, vice president and director of the military division at the University of Phoenix, headquartered in Phoenix, Ariz., served 29 years in the U.S. Air Force himself. Bibbee worked his way through college while in the military and then discovered the online offerings at the University of Phoenix afterward.
“I thought, wow, what a marriage. It makes a lot of sense that this would make it very easy for military students to go to school in an online environment and continue with their school no matter where they were and to make that much easier than it was with some of the traditional programs that existed at that time on the installations. So we have married online education to military deployment,” Bibbee told Military Advanced Education.
The University of Phoenix has taken care to go the extra mile for its military students, recruiting enrollment counselors that have prior military backgrounds themselves to work with military servicemembers.
“So the counselors already know the challenges for a military student going to school to begin with,” Bibbee noted. “They can help them over some of those things and make sure that they are getting all of the credits they deserve for the training they have gone through and any previous schooling they have done and so forth, which allows the military student to maximize their ability to finish their degree more quickly.”
The University of Phoenix offers a large number of degrees online, ranging from business, technology, health care, education, and social and behavioral sciences. The diversity of degrees permits military servicemembers to choose from many different educational programs.
“The military is pretty much a reflection of society, so you are going to get a lot of people that want traditional programs that any other student would want,” Bibbee said. “We do probably do get a heavier concentration in some programs like the criminal justice program because they are able to leverage some of the skills that they have gained in the military in that program better than some of the others. But it’s probably a mistake that some people make to think they all want to be in those kinds of programs.”
The university also tries to be as flexible as possible with military students. Should the military send a student someplace where they cannot maintain their class schedule, the university will work with them to schedule the courses they require upon their return. The online campus, however, usually provides all of the flexibilities students require to keep working right through a deployment.
The University of Phoenix also has support staff in academics and finances working around the clock to support students around the world. A Pacific group works the waking hours that students deployed to Asia would be online taking classes; a European group does the same for those in Europe.
ONLINE AND ON-BASE
Some universities work to make their offerings as accessible as possible to military students by sending professors overseas to teach classes at military installations. The Advanced Programs Division at the University of Oklahoma has sent professors to military bases for more than 40 years, Jim Vidmar, director of marketing and communications at the University of Oklahoma Outreach program, told MAE. Currently, University of Oklahoma professors fly to 35 different locations around the world for military students.
“Our reach is a little unique in that for some time we fly our university professors to these sites at bases around the world to teach classes in person. We have found that servicemembers have really enjoyed that experience to work with faculty members in person right from the university,” Vidmar commented. The University of Oklahoma often does not maintain its own physical facilities at the military locations. Rather, military bases accommodate the university’s students by setting up classrooms in available spaces.
“We employ site managers that are on-base at those locations. So we don’t necessarily have brick-and-mortar facilities around the world, but those site managers work with the different military Education Service Offices,” Vidmar noted.
To date, the university has not experienced any problems with one of its classroom locations worldwide coming under any kind of attack. However, sometime students have been called away from the base before the class actually starts.
“A number of professors have traveled significant distances to get to their destination only to learn that threefourths of the class has been deployed,” Vidmar acknowledged. “We always work with those students that are there, even if it’s only a handful of people. We always try to accommodate those situations as much as possible.”
In addition, the University of Oklahoma has expanded its online offerings in the past several years to include the degree programs from its College of Liberal Studies. The university found that this boosted the popularity of its liberal studies degrees quite a bit as students around the world flocked to the programs, drawn to liberal arts degrees from an established and accredited university.
“Through various memorandums of understanding with branches of the military, our College of Liberal Studies, which is also embedded in our university outreach, has offered undergraduate and graduate programs that can be completed 100 percent online,” Vidmar said. “That has been another way for us to help servicemembers complement their education. When they are deployed and they don’t have the opportunity to participate in classes on base, they can continue their work online when they are deployed.”
The University of Oklahoma, which has its main campus in Oklahoma City, Okla., also offers courses for the College of Liberal Studies programs through the Navy College Program for Afloat College Education (NCPACE) program. Through NCPACE, Navy students onboard ships or submarines can complete courses in a CD-format and receive credit toward their degrees.
FLEXIBLE TIMING
Recognizing that many students cannot take course offerings at traditional semester intervals, some universities have offered shortened or untraditional semesters. The University of Maryland University College (UMUC), for example, has traditional semesters, but also minisemesters and mid-semesters, Marky Campbell, UMUC assistant vice president of Maryland Operations, told MAE. “We deliver classes in a semester format. Then we offer a shortened term of 12 weeks that we call a mini-semester. Then we also have what we call a midsemester, which bridges the two semesters. One starts in October and ends in February and then another starts in February and ends in July,” Campbell explained.
“We know that people are deployed and have different times when they can re-enter classes, so this provides an opportunity for everybody to return in a timely manner,” she added.
UMUC, based in Adelphi, Md., offers classes at many military installations in its immediate area. The university has programs at all military bases in Maryland and many others in Virginia and the District of Columbia. UMUC has become famous for its robust online offerings, however, as the university has expanded to offer almost all of its degrees completely online.
UMUC was founded in 1947 to accommodate working adults who sought advanced education. UMUC reached out to military servicemembers early in its existence by offering classes at military bases in Maryland. However, the expansion of education resources on the Internet has boosted UMUC into a global presence, able to reach military servicemembers around the globe through its online courses.
Many degrees at UMUC are popular with military servicemembers, but many warfighters do choose fields of study at UMUC that fit well with their military backgrounds.
“We find more frequently that military members choose a degree that often relates to their career field. What happens is a student in the military who is a firefighter may very well look at our fire science degree,” Campbell observed.
The flexibilities of taking courses online permit warfighters to continue their studies under most operating conditions these days, Campbell said. UMUC works with students who encounter serious problems maintaining an Internet connection to make whatever accommodations might be possible without sacrificing the quality of the institution’s educational offerings.
“We go wherever we think we can provide service to military members and we offer information that is easy to access for military members,” Campbell declared. “We also have partnerships where we take credit from some of the military service schools. We work with servicemembers every day. We constantly evolve in terms of what their needs are. They tell us what their needs are and we try to ensure that we can build programs around them.”
DEGREE SPECIALIZATION
Many warfighters are indeed attracted to specific careers that mirror or make use of their military service skills. The staff at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University knows this well as their university offers degrees in the “science, practice and business of aviation, aerospace and selected related technologies,” according to its Website.
The university offers only three associate degrees, five bachelor’s degrees and two graduate degree programs online, but those are very popular with military students that want to specialize in those programs, Linda Dammer, associate dean for Worldwide Online-Administration at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Worldwide, told MAE.
“All of these can be completed online. There is no time they have to come physically to the university,” Dammer confirmed. “At the undergraduate level, we offer 11 terms a year. The only month we don’t start a new term is December is because of the holiday. We don’t want the students to start a new term and face a university that has closed up for a week! At the graduate level, we offer six terms a year.”
Those term periods enable a great deal of flexibility to military students, who may only have a few months to wrap up some coursework before they go to a new location. Military students who might have problems with a specific course because of a deployment can make arrangements with the course professor one-on-one to work out a solution.
“We have students who will notify us they are going to be deployed and we might suggest sometimes that they might want to wait until they get there before we enroll them in the upcoming term because we have another one starting the following month—especially if they haven’t been there before and they don’t know what to expect,” Dammer reflected. “We may advise them to wait until they get there and see the conditions and how much Internet access they have. Ordinarily, we try to be as flexible as possible. A lot of our faculty members are ex-military so they are familiar with that type of lifestyle.”
Many of the university’s students are deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world. Just as with the other universities in this article, deployed students are able to work toward their degrees through the university’s online offerings.
Embry-Riddle’s Bachelor of Science in Professional Aeronautics is perhaps most popular with military students, Dammer observed, as it has a lot of flexibility for transferring military credit for students working toward that degree. Other Bachelors of Science degrees offered online at Embry- Riddle include specialties in technical management and aviation maintenance management. The university’s graduate degrees include specializations in a Master of Aeronautical Science and a Master of Science in Management.
“At Embry-Riddle, we have a niche. We offer a lot of degree programs where students that are in the military can have some of their military or prior educational experience transferred in,” Dammer said. ♦