SPOKANE — A 16-year-old college student will become one of Washington State University’s youngest graduates this week, but education officials say her case is even more unusual given that she took all of her classes online.
Kayla Heard is graduating Saturday with a bachelor’s degree in socia
l sciences. She said her parents decided not to send her to campus because of her young age, a decision she appreciates because “online studying has given me quite a bit of flexibility in my study schedule.”
Randy Spaulding, the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board’s director of academic affairs, called Kayla’s age and circumstances of study “rare,” and added: “I think the fact that she never had to step foot on campus is a little unusual, but we will see more and more of that.”
Online classes are making college educations attainable to a larger population, and also reflect changes in the way people now interact, higher-education officials told The Spokesman-Review in a story published Friday.
“If you think about the way communication has evolved. it’s not as much face-to-face. It’s a mirror of the way our society is moving,” said Dave Cillay, WSU’s executive director of The Center for Distance and Professional Education Online.
Kayla, who lives in the Mason County town of Union, started reading before age 2, graduated from high school at 10, and earned her associate of arts degree at 13. She has taken the admissions test for law school, and plans to earn a law degree online.
WSU offers eight online bachelor’s degrees, and undergraduate and graduate certificates are available through online courses. School officials say they attempt to make the online class experience as close as possible to its counterparts on campus.
“You interact with the instructors online,” Cillay said. “You interact with the class online. There’s a discussion board where students are required to participate and the nice thing is they have to, they can’t just sit in the back of a class.”
If a class, such as environmental science, requires lab work, the equipment is sent to the student, who can perform the experiments at home. Cillay said, however, some class labs don’t allow for such at-home coursework.
Final exams and some midterms may need to be proctored, but in those cases the students can go to a nearby location where a qualified observer watches them take the tests. WSU is trying a virtual proctoring program where students can take tests at their computer.
“I think the thing we worry the most about with online is the student’s ability to engage with another, but that’s getting better . . . You lose some of that interpersonal interaction that can occur. Many would argue that there are some things that happen in the classroom or on campus that doesn’t happen online,” Spaulding said.
But he admitted that online courses can make college educations possible to those limited by geography. It’s “available basically anywhere, anytime as long as you have Internet,” he said.
“Never stepping foot on campus isn’t really what educators had in mind when they came up with online courses, but that’s what’s happening,” Spaulding added.
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