No Boob Tubes

PBS and college education

Give me your tired, your poor, your homebound masses yearning for a degree." So might read the motto of higher education in the 1980s. Telecourses have been broadcast before, but never on a national scale. This fall, in conjunction with the Public Broadcasting Service, 500 colleges will be offering up to nine courses for credit via 206 public television stations. They will reach thousands of students--full-time workers, housewives, handicapped adults or people who live as far as 400 miles from the college of their choice--who otherwise would not be able to "go" to college at all. The courses will range from Shakespeare to American history to It's Everybody's Business, an introduction to management.

Most PBS courses consist of 30 half-hour segments aired during a 15-week semester. Modern satellite distribution lets stations schedule programs at times convenient to the students, usually during the lunch hour or late at night and on weekends. Since participating schools pay PBS a $300 licensing fee for each course they offer and a flat $10 to $15 for each student, the courses are economical both for the school and the student. Course requirements vary from campus to campus, but there is a basic procedure. The student pays tuition and enrolls in person, by phone or by mail; the college sends texts and assigns an instructor; the student takes midterm and final exams either at the campus or at a local school. The final grade is entered onto a transcript and most often goes toward a degree.

At Miami-Dade Community College, which helped create the PBS introductory course in psychology, 1,000 students are learning by screen. Faculty members conduct optional review sessions on campus, produce extra exams and evaluate student work by phone or letter. Burlington County College, located on the rim of the pine Barrens in southern New Jersey, has 24 students taking the PBS Shakespeare course. Their assignment includes reading two comedies, two tragedies and two historical dramas and watching six televised performances (from the Shakespeare series co-produced by BBC-TV and Time-Life Television). The midterm and final can be submitted by mail. The University of Iowa has given its 100 telestudents a toll-free number and specific office hours for talking with the course instructor. Says Education Professor Gordon Cantor: "People not only call with questions, they call to argue."

Telecourses are most helpful at community colleges. Yet such large, respected universities as Wisconsin, Indiana, Temple and Ohio State are using various courses, often with hefty supplements. The televised segment, after all, is intended less as a self-contained course than as a lively and visually far-ranging substitute for a droning professor. Quality varies. Says Iowa's Cantor: "At its worst, it is vacuous. But at its best, difficult material is portrayed very graphically." A segment on sensory psychology is literally a cliffhanger: a man uses his tactile sense to claw his way to safety while climbing. Afterward, diagrams with flashing electronic lines show how impulses speed along the nerve path from finger to brain.

The telecourses are often a challenge for part-time students. Celeste Price, 29, a full-time tax clerk for Kentucky Fried Chicken in Louisville, is taking the PBS American government course for three credits at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, 105 miles away. She watches the telecasts on Tuesday and Thursday at 11 p.m., when her four-year-old son is asleep. Though she misses the interaction of a class, she finds college by telecourse exciting. Admits Price: "I didn't think there would be as much homework or that it would be this hard."

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