COASTLINE Community College was a higher-education pioneer in the late 1970s when it started developing television-based courses that students could take from anywhere as long as they had another innovation of the time, a video player.
Today the Fountain Valley-based school remains a trendsetter, producing college classes whose lectures and study materials can be viewed on iPods, personal digital assistants and cellphones.
But these days Coastline has plenty of company. Though long known for their adherence to tradition, colleges in California and elsewhere increasingly are embracing a variety of higher-tech approaches to teaching and learning.
And new gizmos, including gear with cutting-edge videogame or artificial intelligence technology, are on the way to provide more individualized instruction. Some of the most futuristic devices -- if colleges are adventurous enough to try them -- could even monitor students' brainwaves to keep track of how they're learning.
The trend toward electronic technology could be particularly dramatic in California, where demographic and economic forces are likely to promote ways to stretch the state's educational resources.
Employers are expected to need many more college graduates, yet the rising number of young adults who want to attend college sometimes strains the capacity of the state's two-year and four-year schools.
What's more, many of the prospective students come from low-income and immigrant families, factors that could raise the demand for low-cost, technology-assisted education.
In California, "something's got to give," said Marshall S. Smith, the education program director for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park. "You've got to begin to think more creatively about how you're going to get enough students into the system."
One sign of the times is the current boom in distance learning. According to a survey released last November funded by the Sloan Foundation, 2.35 million American college students took at least one online course in fall 2004, up from 1.6 million two years earlier.
Coastline is emblematic of the online trend. Its enrollment last fall was just over 16,500, with nearly 9,300 students taking online or other distance-learning courses exclusively, including many in the Army, Navy and Coast Guard.
