NSU ahead of the curve on distance learning

In early 1972, a tiny university in Davie ran a full-page ad in The New York Times showing a person seated on a couch, as one professor remembers it.

The headline read ''How to get your doctorate without giving up living,'' and the response marked a turning point for the upstart school, then called Nova University.

'

'They were dragging sacks of mail down the hall,'' said Nova Southeastern University professor John Scigliano, a driving force behind the university's effort to lure students whose jobs, schedules or family commitments made grad school seem impossible.

Since then, the university has grown and grown and grown, largely through its willingness to say: ``Can't make it to campus? Not to worry -- we'll come to you.''

And earlier this year, following a decade that saw enrollment soar more than 75 percent, NSU was ranked by the National Center for Education Statistics as the nation's 10th-largest independent, not-for-profit university. The top-10 list includes the likes of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University.

Nova's effort to provide degrees at times and places of students' choosing -- at first with traveling professors, later through the Internet -- was controversial in the early years, leading some to call Nova a diploma mill. But today, distance learning programs like Nova's have been embraced by colleges and universities across the country, including some in the Ivy League.

Nova Southeastern University, a school that taught its first students in 1967 with an enrollment of 17, has become a sprawling educational network

serving more than 21,600 students through sites in 23 states, Puerto Rico, 10 foreign countries, and, via the Internet, thousands of homes and offices.

NSU -- known as Nova University before its 1994 merger with Southeastern University of the Health Sciences -- is home to the state's largest library and its only school of optometry, to South Florida's only colleges of pharmacy and dentistry, and to one of the nation's largest graduate schools of education.

''It's a milestone,'' NSU president Ray Ferrero Jr. said of the top-10 designation. ``It is recognition that we are doing something right.''

The school's academic reputation has not always matched its reputation for aggressive expansion, however. In the early 1970s, as NSU flew professors to teach weekend programs in lecture halls, hotel conference rooms and other remote sites, criticism of its ''distance learning'' initiatives was fierce, particularly within the educational establishment.

Efforts to branch into other states met resistance from accrediting boards and licensing agencies, which questioned Nova's standards.

''University of North Carolina Board of Governors to Nova University: Get out of our state,'' read one headline in a 1979 issue of the education journal Phi Delta Kappan.

Criticism continued in the 1980s, as the school became the first to create online graduate programs and among the first to provide electronic classrooms, expanding its reach still farther.

We all just kind of said, `It's not a real university,' '' said Gary Galluzzo, an education professor and former dean of education at George Mason University in Virginia. ``Well, it turns out they were ahead of the curve.''

Today, universities across the country offer programs at remote sites and many, including Ivy League universities, have begun to offer online courses, Galluzzo said.

This year, NSU will offer more than 2,700 online courses and 28 online degree programs.

Students check in with their professors via e-mail, participate in lectures through video-conferencing, and visit the school for weeklong, face-to-face ``Institutes.''

Like many universities, NSU points to the successful employment of its graduates as a leading indicator of the quality of its programs -- a measure Galluzzo said is inadequate.

''In the new accountability era for education, we will need more convincing metrics to prove the worth of our programs,'' he said. ``Right now, we just don't have them, and Nova has been no better at that than the rest of us.''

Ferrero said the distance education programs are rigorous. And they provide a valuable service to society, he said, as they reach people who might otherwise be shut out -- particularly older, working adults, many of them minorities.

Nova awards more doctoral degrees to African Americans than any other institution in the country.

The success of its distance learning initiatives has allowed NSU to direct resources to more traditional classroom programs. 

Over the past decade, the university has invested heavily in development of its 300-acre campus in Davie, where some 7,000 students study each day. A family center opened this year; a 250,000-square-foot home for the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship is under construction; plans for a 140,000-square-foot recreation and athletic complex are in the works.

.

''Today, people who look at this in a clear light would say it was very innovative,'' said Scigliano, a professor in the school of computer and information sciences. ``Probably one of the most innovative things that has happened in higher education.''