A student in my Mass Communications & Society class last spring, a woman from Mexico now living in the U.S., told me, "I think this is one great opportunity for me because I can look after my children and attend school at the same time."
It was the first time I'd taught an "Anytime, Anyplace" fully Web-based class; moreover, I taught it in Spanish, which represented a double challenge. The school of Mass Communications at the University of South Florida offers a few English sections of this course, and more than 800 students enroll in them every semester. This year, given the chance to combine my technology expertise and my language skills, I jumped on it. I'd been a Latino student -- and thought that using our primary language would be an incentive for other Latinos to continue their studies.
When I developed the course, I knew from the beginning that the experiment could work, and even without much advertising, my class started out on the right foot with about 11 Spanish-speaking students and one Anglo-Saxon.
In a recent survey, I found that nine out of 10 Latino students have computers at home, so they are able to complete their assignments and to find the information they need.
Technology is helping minorities get ahead in higher education. Higher education institutions around this country and the world are creating more distance-learning programs and offering their faculty incentives and technological support to do so. They are not even aware that they might be helping minorities achieve success. They are doing it because distance learning is a tool to reach students outside their domains. The demand has increased for this type of instruction, especially with nontraditional students, who might be mothers, fathers, and older students re-training to sharpen their professional skills. And the retention rate has proved to be higher than that of traditional learning, in part because most of the students are responsible adults determined to pursue higher education on their own terms or at their own times and pace.
Many believe that distance education is now here to replace traditional classrooms and perhaps even the personal teacher-student interaction. But this misunderstanding doesn't disturb those who are determined to continue with their education. A piece in The New York Times some time ago said, "The idea of one professor for one classroom is ancient.... [N]ew technology is going to give every student access to the best professors in the world."
Higher education institutions are working on positive engagement with their communities. By diversifying their methods of distributing education and not showing limited flexibility, they contribute to the growth of young Latino students, as well as those new immigrants coming to the U.S. who are intellectually eager and ready to contribute to this society -- like the student in my class who happens to be a mother and calmly studies at home, away from problems of traffic, time, parking, and other hassles facing a conventional commuter student. Many more like her are out there, willing to seize distance-learning opportunities.
This technology that has exploded dramatically in our lives, providing us with easy access to information, is changing the way we think and the way we behave every day. In the case of Latinos especially, and other minorities who have to work hard every day, technology has opened one more door to opportunity through education.
According to a report from the NPR news magazine Latino USA, Latino and African American use of the Internet is jumping at twice the rate of the overall population. Their main interests are career advancement and professional development. Specifically, Latinos look for sources of domestic news, international news, and information about education scholarships and other financial aid possibilities. African Americans use the Internet largely to seek financial and technological information.
The trend of education at a distance is taking off in huge proportions. More and more universities across the U.S. are developing new programs and offering certificate programs to full online degrees. And with the new wave of the Internet over the last 10 years, higher education institutions are expanding their methods of teaching that cross borders, making them more appealing to students in remote locations, especially to Latinos, nontraditional students, and other minorities, in their quest to get ahead.
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