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President's Message |
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Meuter was there from the beginning, having served twenty-eight years as dean of Regional and Continuing Education before retiring this spring. RCE coordinates all the distance education activities on campus. Meuter credits the enormous success of the program to Chico’s location in rural northeastern California, the optimism of the era, and the spirit of the people drawn to Chico.
“More than a thousand visitors from Europe and Asia have come to Chico to study our distance education program over the last twenty years, and they always ask us, “How do you do this?’” says Meuter. “How do you describe the opportunity, the enthusiasm, and the cooperation that were all a part of how distance education started at Chico?” In 1972, Royd Weintraub of the Instructional Media Center told Meuter he was excited about the possibilities of microwave technology for distance classes. Meuter wasn’t. He wanted the distance program to be academically rigorous, and imagined that a course by television would be lightweight.
Distance education at CSU, Chico thus entered the electronic age in 1975 when the university first broadcast computer science courses to UC Davis. With this initial link, CSU, Chico developed an extensive Instructional Television for Students (ITFS) microwave network linking education, government, and military facilities throughout Northern California. The system eventually expanded to sixteen sites throughout Northern California, delivering a variety of bachelor’s degrees, program minors, and certificate programs. Each academic year, fifty upper-division courses generate about 1,200 enrollments. A connection with Hewlett-Packard was established in the late 1970s to provide master’s degrees at their new Roseville, California, area plant. CSU, Chico offered the first M.S. in computer science in 1984 to Hewlett-Packard Santa Rosa and Roseville via its microwave system. That same year, at the urging of Hewlett-Packard, CSU, Chico launched the Satellite Education Network. Courses were beamed to their plants in Roseville, Palo Alto, Santa Rosa, Cupertino, and Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado. CSU, Chico was the first university in the world to have a complete degree package at the graduate level live via satellite. “We were so successful,” recalls Meuter. “We were selling our core product, which was solid academic programs. We had the first partnership with a major corporation. Now, that is the way things are done. Then it was groundbreaking.” In 1996, CSU, Chico’s education network expanded beyond the United States when it began broadcasting live courses via two-way video to students in Tokyo. Satellite technology for distance learning may have peaked for CSU, Chico. The university has shifted resources into Web-enhanced and on-line courses and programs, offering its first on-line course in 1995. (For more about on-line courses, see “E-Education”) In 1999, the campus was recognized as a New Media Center for its advanced educational production and transmission capabilities. While RCE administers the program, distance education is supported by staff from all over campus. With this continued help, CSU, Chico should be able to maintain its leading edge in distance education while it forges ahead with new technology and takes on new challenges.
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he
two large satellite dishes near the center of the CSU, Chico campus stand
as beacons to students as far away as Japan. They are visual reminders
of the many invisible links that the university has forged with students
in remote locations.
At
the time, “distance education” consisted of professors driving
to Redding and Susanville. It was a taxing and sometimes dangerous endeavor,
and professors were reluctant to participate. After two years of listening
to Weintraub’s vision and personally conducting a class on the television
system, Meuter saw the light. “And, like a lot of converts, once
I got religion, I was a zealot,” he says.
