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Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Online Courses Solve Two Hi-Ed Problems

There is still a lot of debate and conflicting research on whether online higher education is as effective academically as in-classroom instruction. For some institutions, however, online courses are filling a two-part void.

A report on Education Dive noted a growing number of colleges are offering more online courses aimed specifically at nontraditional students. Those courses also are available to the colleges’ traditional-aged students, but the pool of new high school graduates has started to dwindle in line with the lower birthrate two decades ago.

The online courses not only help to bolster enrollment numbers (and revenue) for the schools, especially community colleges, they also open up educational opportunities for adults with full-time jobs and family responsibilities. These older students are often unable to fit classroom courses into their schedules.

The nature of online instruction also better enables colleges to adapt coursework to working adults’ needs, such as condensing courses so students can attain an associate degree sooner. For example, Riverland Community College in Minnesota created the FlexPace program to offer accelerated business courses, squeezing a semester’s worth of work into six weeks.

At Indiana Wesleyan University, the 12,000 online students outnumber the 2,700 who go to classes on campus. “What students like most is the flexibility,” said Lorne Oke, IWU’s executive director of the Center for Learning and Innovation. “There’s a significant change in the way students interact with learning and their expectations from a college.”