The University of Arkansas System will encourage its campuses to offer a free, online, credit-bearing course in cooperation with a private company as a way to recruit students to a new menu of online degree programs, President Donald Bobbitt said.
“My hope is that a large number of students who do this will stay on for a degreeprogram at the same institution,” he said.
The system is finalizing an agreement with Dallas-based AcademicPartnerships, a company that will allow campuses to market existing online degree programs to broader and more specialized audiences and to grow enrollment as they develop new online degrees, Bobbitt said. As part of the agreement, some UA campuses will join a free course initiative called MOOC2Degree, which the company is billing as “a major innovation” in online education.
“What we hope and believe will happen is that it will be just the encouragement that the average working adult will need to get started in a degree,” said Randy Best, founder of Academic Partnerships.
The company markets online degree programs for 44 public universities, he said. Early participants in MOOC2Degree include Arizona State University, Cleveland State University, Florida International University and Lamar University.
MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, are free courses taught online, often to large groups of students. Early MOOCs were developed by high-profile researchers at Ivy League universities, who taught the classes without offering credit. Stanford University once offered a MOOC in artificial intelligence that drew 160,000 students.
To accomodate suchlarge classes, teachers of early MOOCs used automated course content, such as online multiple-choice tests that require no extra effort to grade, Best said.
MOOCs offered through the Academic Partnerships initiative will likely be three to five times larger than a typical class, he said. Academic Partnerships encourages the use of learning coaches, university employees who have at least a master’s degree in the course subject and who assist in instruction and field questions from students.
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock started offering degree programs through Academic Partnerships this semester, but it does not yet offer a MOOC. UALR plans to employ one learning coach for every 25 to 30 students in an online course, leaders have said.
UA campuses could offer MOOCs by simply expanding an existing, introductory online course and adding additional learning coaches, Bobbitt said. Those courses could enroll as many as 1,000 students. The rest of the courses in an online degree program would be taught at a smaller scale.
“These are introductory level courses,” he said. “We already teach so many of them in a large format.”
No UA campus has committed to offering a MOOC, Bobbitt said, though many have expressed interest in working with Academic Partnerships to develop online degree programs. System leaders plan to create an innovation fund, using grant funding or some operational reserves to provide funds to campuses that will help them develop and teach the first large-scale online courses, he said.
ONLINE GROWTH
Bobbitt first began working with Academic Partnerships as provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington, using the company to help expand the university’s online enrollment from a few hundred students to about 5,000 ina few years. That campus, which has also signed on to the MOOC2Degree initiative, attracted students by offering a degree completion program that allows registered nurses with two-year associate degrees to complete a bachelor’s degree in nursing entirely online.
UALR plans to eventually develop a similar program. It has also committed to offering a master’s degree in criminal justice and a bachelor’s in business administration online.
Unlike UALR’s other online courses, degrees offered through Academic Partnerships are delivered to cohorts - or groups of students who are pursuing the same degree - in pre-designed, prescribed course plans centered on eight-week terms, rather than full semesters. UALR professors receive a $5,000 stipend to develop a new online course.
Bobbitt said the UA System is finalizing a similar agreement with Academic Partnerships, which also works with Arkansas State University at Jonesboro, that will allow each UA campus to participate and design its own programs on a voluntary basis.
The move comes as the state’s online enrollment grows. In the fall 2012 semester, 48,721 students enrolled in online courses at Arkansas’ public colleges and universities, an online enrollment growth of 4.9 percent over the previous fall semester, according to a report released last week by the Arkansas Department of Higher Education.
In fall 2012, 30.7 percent of students enrolled in the state’s public institutions took at least one online course, the report said.
While many campuses have a limited catalog of courses online, more institutions are exploring offering entire degree programs through the Internet, posting video lectures, class discussions and reading materials online.
The state’s largest university, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, does not offer any start-to-finish degree programs online, said Vice Provost for Distance Education Javier Reyes, butfaculty members are working to develop an online general education degree.
FACULTY CONCERNS
Even before MOOCs became part of the conversation, online degree expansion drew concern from some faculty members.
Some UALR faculty members have said they fear larger enrollment and computer delivery might diminish quality in time-intensive subjects, such as writing.
In December, UA-Fayetteville Faculty Senate Chairman Tim Kral and Chair of Campus Faculty Janine Parry wrote a letter to Bobbitt and trustees, detailing concerns that some online courses could threaten enrollment at smaller institutions around the state, in which the state has made “a substantial investment,” and that online courses could bring with them “brand confusion” and diminished quality. They urged UA leaders to rely on established faculty members to develop and maintain online courses.
The professors, who plan to host Bobbitt for a forum to discuss the issues in the spring, wrote that they “fully understand that on-line approaches are no longer experiments, but rather enduring new tools of our profession. Our reservations therefore revolve around how, and not if, the UA expands its on-line offerings.”
Bobbitt said he understands concerns about new teaching methods, and he emphasized that participation is voluntary.
“We tend to project our fears onto things we haven’t tried,” he said.
MOMENTUM
The push for online education has been building momentum in the UA System since Bobbitt became president in 2011. He recently hired Michael Moore, senior vice provost and dean of undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, an award-winning developer of online classes and a colleague from Arlington, as the UA System’s vice president for academic affairs.
In November, the UA board of trustees approved a resolution encouraging the system’s campuses to develop the programs as a way of meeting Gov. Mike Beebe’s goal of doubling the number of the state’s degree-holders by 2025.
“And while this is a daunting goal, it is made even more difficult because revenues to support this expansion are not available from traditional state resources, and a significant number of students are unable to access a traditional education because of family, job and personal circumstances,” the resolution reads.
Bobbitt sees MOOCs as “another tool” campuses can use to build interest in their programs and to test students’ academic capabilities before enrolling them in complete degree programs.
Online programs will be increasingly important to the UA System “but I don’t see the in-the-seat experience going away,” he said.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 15 on 02/03/2013