ALTHOUGH THERE ARE GLIMMERS THE recession could be ending, the unemployment rate is expected to stay high for some time to come. College enrollments will probably keep pace, especially at community colleges, where older adults looking to brush up their job skills are joined by traditional students looking to avoid high tuition for a few years.
While a flood of new students is good to have, new classrooms to accommodate them can’t be built and opened overnight. But new distance learning sections can be created. “If you offer a class virtually, you save a classroom. There is no question it has an impact on capacity,” says Tony Felicetti, associate vice president of Academic Services and Enrollment Management at Monroe Community College (N.Y.).
Felicetti says distance learning has been growing for years, not just the past few months. This growth has allowed him and other leaders to realize that adding a new online section isn’t as easy as flipping a switch.
Man vs. Machine
Room for More
There is no silver bullet for accommodating extra students. Here are some off-line solutions institutions have implemented:
Monroe Community College (N.Y.) is offering Friday night and Saturday morning classes. They've also expanded offerings at extension sites.
Ocean County College (N.J.) is also offering Saturday classes. Officials decided as well to build a new facility, which opened in time for the October term.
Bunker Hill Community College (Mass.) and Clackamas Community College (Ore.) are maximizing physical space by offering classes from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.
Wayne County Community College District (Mich.) has classes that start at 6 a.m. and others that run until midnight. Classes also run Friday evenings, and Saturday and Sunday mornings and afternoons.
“Community colleges have been at the forefront of online learning for a long time,” says Jan Baltzer, senior vice president with SunGard Higher Education, who adds that the technology infrastructure is the easy part.
Indeed, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, 90 percent of community colleges offer distance learning classes, so the infrastructure is in place. Having enough people to teach the classes is the “capacity limiter,” says Jim McGlothlin, vice president of Oracle Higher Education.
Knowing your pain point is important when addressing surging enrollment. If physical space is the issue, more online sessions might help. If budget cuts have placed the institution in a yearlong hiring freeze, like at Miami Dade College, offering more courses online might not be possible. “You still need a professor to teach the class,” points out Registrar Dulce Beltran.
Load Balancing
Once your faculty roster is full, you can’t just throw instructors into teaching online, says Felicetti. Faculty at Monroe complete a 15-hour training module to become qualified to teach online.
Faculty are not required to teach online, but when they do, the online class is weighted the same as a face-to-face class in terms of workload. They are aware that distance ed classes require a major commitment of time online in order to interact with students.
In a recent survey by the APLU-Sloan National Commission on Online Learning, 64 percent of faculty at land-grant institutions said it takes “somewhat more” or “a lot more” effort to teach online compared to teaching a face-to-face course.
“The best way to fail is to assume it isn’t different,” cautions Baltzer. Faculty members teaching online require extra support, because “they aren’t used to teaching in this manner, and they didn’t learn in this manner,” she says.
A new multimedia studio, including rooms for podcasting and recording, allows the faculty at Mid Michigan Community College to produce high-quality content for their online learning classes.
Online classes are also counted as part of the traditional workload at Ocean County College (N.J.), where training and mentoring programs help prepare faculty for teaching online, explains Colleen Manzetti, assistant dean of Social Science and Human Services. The institution also participates in the Quality Matters (www.qualitymatters.org) peer review process to help validate the structure of the community college’s online offerings.
It is important to have a system in place to track which faculty members have been certified to teach online and whether they have refreshed those skills, says McGlothlin.
“[Hybrid classes] won’t reduce your costs in providing quality education,” says Richard Strada, interim vice president of academic affairs at OCC. Instead, the classes give access to a wider variety of students.
OCC officials have actually added faculty since launching the OnSite/OnLine nursing program in 2005. The program cohort has grown from 20 students the first year to 90 students this year, some of whom are admitted from other community colleges in New Jersey. Highly motivated students and responsive faculty members are important for a successful program.
Faculty and staff outside of the nursing program offered general guidance when the program launched. Administrators also contracted with SunGard for instructional design.
