Biology teacher Nina Rooks-Cast works with senior Evelyn Hipolito as she uses online technology provided through the URI College of Environment and Life Sciences, at The William B. Cooley Health and Science Technical High School in Providence.

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

Nina Rooks-Cast teaches biology at The William B. Cooley Health and Science Technical High School in Providence.

As part of the curriculum, Rooks-Cast uses a Web-based biotechnology course provided through the University of Rhode Island’s College of Environment and Life Sciences called The Way We Work With Life.

The course gives high school students access to pre-recorded university lectures, as well as university-level course work, the same materials used by URI undergraduates. For a fee of $195, high school students who take biology using this online course can get college credit.

Though Rooks-Cast said she could probably teach the course without the program, the technology gives her students access to a level of education and means of learning that many would not otherwise have.

“It’s a nice segue into preparing them for college,” she said. “I could try to convince them of the importance of college, but I think it makes it much easier if they can actually visualize the reality of college. Actually being able to see what a college class is like, you can’t even count the benefits. It might make a difference of a kid blowing it off, thinking they don’t need college, to having a kid say, ‘Hey I can do this, this is kind of cool.’ ”

For the last year, the course has been tested as an online-for-credit course at high schools around the state, and last month the university opened the program to the general public, allowing anyone around the world to enroll in a course and get credit.

For a state that has generally stayed away from online degrees or having its public universities offer courses online, this new biology course is a step in a new direction. But that doesn’t mean online learning is new to Rhode Island or New England.

Over the last decade, online degrees have increased rapidly not only in availability, but also in popularity. For-profit educational institutions such as the University of Phoenix, which offer a wide variety of degrees online, have been growing at a breakneck pace. Locally, schools such as Roger Williams University have been developing Web-based programs to improve the accessibility of their courses to students who might not have time to go to campus for every class.

While it’s clear that courses taught over the Web can offer students access to higher education more easily than ever before, what’s unclear is how well these degrees translate into the work force. Encouraging students to take an online course is one thing, but offering nearly a complete college degree through courses that can be taken online is very different, not only in terms of how a university defines itself, but also in how employers view the university experience.

“Instructors using technology to supplement what they are offering in the classroom, that reinforces learning in a lot of ways,” Jack Warner, Rhode Island’s commissioner of higher education, said. “But anytime you substitute time in a seat in front of a professor with a computer that puts more pressure to do thorough assessments of whether students are learning.… If you take away in-class instruction you need a good mechanism to make sure students learn what they are supposed to.”

Warner explained that Rhode Island’s small size gives state residents relatively easy access to state universities and colleges. As a consequence, Rhode Island has not pursued the possibilities offered by online courses and degrees to the extant that larger states such as Wyoming, Colorado or Maine have. The traditional conventions of higher education have assumed, he said, that placing students in front of a lecturer forces them to absorb information. Schools that do the majority of their teaching online are forced to figure out ways of evaluation that make up for the fact that professors can’t see who is showing up for class.

Moreover, Warner said, given the novelty, he is not sure how employers would evaluate degrees that are the products of non-traditional off-campus learning.

“I think traditional degrees, because they have been around for so much longer and associated with universities that have name recognition, are more valuable in the short term,” Warner said. “What remains to be seen is will online degrees offered by traditional universities have the same impact as regular degrees from these schools. What employers want is that the students who have earned a degree have the skills and knowledge necessary to work in a given industry. It’s not just about the credentials but about what they actually learn.”

Uncertainty about how employers will evaluate online degrees or course work has led Jonathan Adams, an associate professor of communications at Florida State University, to research the question. What he found did not bode well for online degree recipients.

In a survey of hundreds of human-resource executives from around the country, of those asked to pick a candidate from among applicants with online versus traditional degrees, 96 percent chose the traditional degree holder.

Those asked to pick between a traditional degree holder and a candidate who had completed half his coursework online, about 75 percent chose the traditional degree holder.

“The percentages are pretty gruesome,” Adams said. “When explaining why they picked the traditional degree-holding students, employers suggested that the face-to-face communication and instruction students received in a traditional classroom setting was extremely important to them…. The big surprise is that there was no correlation between age and how people selected a candidate. All the employers based their decision on what they think an online degree is. The perception, generally speaking, is that you can’t have a complete education without face-to-face learning.”

Adams is quick to add that he sees a lot of potential in online education. But, he said, despite the claims made by some advocates of online education, he thinks there is a long way to go in not only developing the curriculum but also in changing the perception by the public.

“People do need to be careful and be aware,” Adams said, “of how these things are perceived by the public and be careful to get on campus when they can, because right now they are not perceived as the same thing.”

Despite Adams’ findings online universities have had no trouble finding students. The University of Phoenix, which offers a wide variety of courses online, now bills itself as America’s largest university. With more than 290,000 students all over the world and having awarded more than 243,000 degrees, including 3,800 doctorate degrees, the University of Phoenix has proven that there is a major demand for accessible online education.

Bill Pepicello, president of the university, said he doesn’t agree with the idea that employers look down at online degrees. If they did, he said, the university wouldn’t be doing so well and 40 percent of students wouldn’t be having their education subsidized by employers.

“If we were simply giving people diplomas for writing checks, if employers were not seeing a return on the investment they were making in their employees,” Pepicello said, “then we would not have students keep coming back to us.”

The fact is, Pepicello explained, major employers from around the country depend on institutions like the University of Phoenix to help train their employees, which are busier and on the move to a greater extent than ever before. One great example of a University of Phoenix success story is that of Alexandra Koffman, a nurse at Faulkner Hospital in Boston who was told she would need a master’s degree in nursing before she could be promoted.

“Any of the teaching positions that I wanted told me I would need it,” Koffman explained. “My husband told me if you don’t do it now you’ll never do it, and I didn’t have time to be driving back and forth from campuses, so I enrolled.”

Koffman said the best part about the two-year master’s program was the convenience and the fact that she was learning with a community from all around the country. “I could do it when I felt like,” she said. “I could wake up early on Saturday morning and take the course until two in the afternoon. I could take two or three weeks off when I needed to. It was up to me…. I learned things that I never thought about. I got to know people who are working on Indian reservations with issues that are different than our issues…. That’s what graduate school is all about.”

Asked if she was worried if her employer would accept an online degree, Koffman laughed. “Accept it?” she said. “They helped pay for it.”

Since completing her degree, Koffman has landed a teaching position as an adjunct faculty member in Quincy College in addition to being promoted to surgical quality coordinator at her full-time job with Faulkner Hospital.

Mark P. Rice, dean of the Graduate School of Business at Babson College in Massachusetts, said the way in which a student completes his or her coursework determines what the student can put on a resume. Babson College has been a leader among business schools in making its courses available to online students.

“The employer looks at a Babson MBA regardless of the program the student went through,” Rice said. “Students can take up to 60 percent of their courses online and they should explain that choice as part of their story when applying to positions and explaining why they decided to pursue an MBA degree. Our view is that the programs are of comparable quality and we don’t ask them to differentiate.”

For some employers, such as GTECH, an online degree can mean experience that a traditional degree holder doesn’t have.

“We have found that online degrees offer a great education, and in some cases that education is richer than a traditional degree,” said Jean Pelletier, vice president of human-resource systems and services at GTECH. “Being a global company, we are by nature a virtual company. For many online degree holders, their school experience could be no different than work. If we know you have received a degree from that environment we know you will make a good fit here.”