Contact: Monty Jones, (512) 499-4363

Date: March 24, 2000

UT System News Release

U.T. System Offers Seven Online Master’s Degrees for Fall 2000

For hundreds of graduate students across Texas, the commute to campus this fall may be as short as a quick shuffle across the living room rug. Their graduate studies will be as demanding as traditional coursework, but for these students access to class is now just a click away. Students can focus on the content, rather than the commute, as they work toward their master’s degrees online.

From coaches wanting master’s degrees but unable to attend night school, to engineers in the TeleCom corridor of Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington needing to retool for their trade, students will find access to quality higher education is as close as their desktops. In fact, when registration opens this fall, University of Texas campuses will offer seven master’s degrees entirely online.

U.T. System faculty have developed and launched these accredited online master’s degrees with support and facilitation from the university system’s central distance education support center, the UT TeleCampus.

The TeleCampus was developed to help meet the changing needs of students in Texas and beyond and to provide students, faculty, and staff, as well as the general public, a central portal for distance education within the 15-campus system. A growing trend nationwide finds more and more students engaging in distance education for a variety of reasons. These typically include the need to balance studies with work; parenting responsibilities; travel requirements within a student’s profession; the need to continually retool within certain careers; a career shift; physical challenges or disabilities, and geographic isolation from a traditional campus.

The UT TeleCampus website provides links to all U.T. campuses, administrative offices, extensive digital libraries, and online bookstores. It also provides hundreds of links to learning resources as well as Web-based classrooms for these programs. In fall 1999, the U.T. System offered an M.B.A. online from eight of its academic universities and an M.Ed. in Educational Technology from U.T. Brownsville, with U.T. Austin and U.T. El Paso also contributing courses. The programs can be completed entirely online.

This fall the menu of offerings expands beyond the M.B.A. and M.Ed. to include collaborative master’s degrees in kinesiology, electrical engineering, computer science, computer science and engineering, and reading. Students will also find a full English as a second language endorsement program and a growing offering of choices to fulfill core curriculum requirements for bachelor’s degrees in Texas, all online.

 In these collaborative degree plans, students apply to the campus from which they will ultimately receive their degree. Over the course of their study, they take courses from all partner universities in their degree program. The online degrees involve as few as one or as many as eight partner universities, giving students greater access to a diverse faculty base and a larger pool of resources.

The TeleCampus was conceived and launched in 1998, after extensive planning and creation of Web-based student services to support the distance learner. The UT TeleCampus does not confer degrees, but supports the universities that do. The same faculty teach TeleCampus students that teach onsite at U.T. campuses. Online courses provide interaction with professors and fellow students via a variety of methods including e-mail and Web conferencing. Courses run semester-to-semester to allow for student group projects, but provide flexibility by allowing students to choose when and where they study during any given week.

From designated contacts at each campus’ Registrar and Admissions office to support staff taking individual phone calls from students, a student in Paris, France or Paris, Texas is afforded the same opportunity to advance their education and their career via the online degrees.

As an additional service to students, the UT TeleCampus also contains a database of other distance education courses that are not entirely Web-based but do offer distance education or correspondence study. The database is searchable by subject, school, or delivery method.

The website is open to the public excluding actual courses and a few library services reserved for enrolled students. Go to http://www.telecampus.utsystem.edu, or call toll-free at 1-888-TEXAS-16 (499-4323 in Austin) for more information.

For more information or to schedule faculty interviews please contact Jennifer Rees, UT TeleCampus, at 512-499-4409.

Please see attached fact sheet with brief program overviews.