"People who want to be promoted in fire departments need to have degrees," says Dr. Larry Collins, chair of the Safety, Security and Emergency Management Department at Eastern Kentucky University. "When they want to promote up into executive administration, you're sitting around the public safety management table with people who have MPAs and MBAs and things like that, so the bachelor's is a minimum step for somebody to move up into executive administration."

Unfortunately, taking the time to go to school can be difficult once firefighters have entered the work force and are raising families.

"It's hard to just pull roots up and say, 'I'm going to go to college for four years,'" says M. Shane Lacount, EKU Fire and Safety Engineering Technology online program director, "so it really makes it difficult for all the firefighters who are currently in full-time career positions to get an education without a community college delivering it or without the four-year university being next to them if they pursue an education in fire and safety."

But what if you could earn a four-year bachelor's degree with a focus on fire protection administration in less than two years? It's possible for the dedicated student with general-education credits who enrolls in EKU's new online program. Students pursuing a bachelor of science in fire and safety engineering technology will study disaster preparedness, emergency scene operations, fire behavior and combustion, hazardous materials, and arson investigation.

Eschewing the traditional semester format, the EKU program delivers classes in eight-week sessions. Students can take two classes during each session, allowing them to complete four courses for 12 credit hours in a semester's time.

"You could start our program five different times throughout the year," Lacount says. "You're not having that downtime if you miss a class registration. You can jump in at any eight-week segment."

Shorter courses don't mean less work, however, because the university is required to deliver the same information online as it does on campus. "You're going to have to work at it hard," Collins says. "It's not one of these things you can take casually." Lacount adds that the average student would need to dedicate eight to 15 hours per week for each class.

Better Interaction
Today's online classes are more than the videotaped talking heads of the early 1990s, thanks to more powerful computers and the Internet. Instead of waiting for prerecorded lectures to arrive in the mail, students now can watch on-demand streaming videos of their instructors and review PowerPoint presentations. Each week's class will have assignments, projects and discussion questions that require a minimum number of responses.

"It all links together and you come out with just a phenomenal discussion," Lacount says. "By the end of the eight weeks you've thoroughly gotten yourself into the subject matter that you're studying — through your instructor, through your peers and through the course material."

Lacount says that the online discussions, conducted through discussion board postings, are the key to a successful educational experience in the online environment. Online discussions allow students to share a wide range of experiences.

"You might have a chief officer in that class, and you may have a rookie firefighter in that class, and you may have a captain in that class," he says. "It's kind of like a wildfire going across the field, it's growing and growing and growing — the discussion — and more things come out.

"I have seen that I have more interaction with the students online than I do in my own classrooms when I teach a traditional class on campus," Lacount continues. "It's an encouraging thing. They learn from the instructor, they learn from the coursework, but they pick up a lot of the discussion from other professionals or other people in the field in the same study as they're in, just like a classroom discussion but sometimes more in-depth."

The discussion board environment also makes it easier for more introspective students to participate, he says: "It provides an opportunity for the individual to actually speak through their typing … where they may not have been the person who would have taken the initiative to speak up in class and actually lead a conversation or a discussion."

Because interaction is so important, classes are limited to 25 students with an instructor before they are moved to a facilitator model. As more people enroll in a course, each group of 25 students is assigned a facilitator, who leads discussion and grades assignments, much like an on-campus teaching assistant. The instructor becomes known as the "master instructor of record," who creates the course's cognitive material and delivers the lectures.

Collins believes that this model takes more support than a traditional classroom. "Unlike in a regular classroom, where some of the people are asleep, some of them are absent, some of them are attentive," he says, "when it's online and you're interacting with the students, you have to interact with all of them all the time."

Available This Fall
Eastern Kentucky University's online classes toward the Bachelor of Science in Fire & Safety Engineering Technology with a concentration in Fire Protection Administration will begin Aug. 20. A certificate program focusing on Fire & Safety Engineering Technology also will be available in the fall. No prior college credits are needed to participate in the certificate program.