California
State University is opening the system’s entire catalog of 3,000-plus online
courses to its residential students. Full-time students who live on one of the
23 CSU campuses can take one online class per term at no charge, regardless of
which CSU branch is offering the class.
Many
schools allow on-campus students to enroll in online courses, but most don’t
make all courses available to those students. CSU used to limit access, too,
but opted to drop most of the barriers. One remaining hurdle is that students
can only take online classes from campuses that have the same semester or
quarter term as their residential campus. That means the two quarter schools
(in San Luis Obispo and San Bernardino) can only offer courses to each other.
One
of the objectives of the program is to help students finish their degrees on
time by making available online options if they can’t get into a required
course at their home campus or the class is scheduled at an inconvenient time.
Students will also be able to take advantage of courses not offered on their
own campus.
To
help residential students determine whether they’ll be able to succeed in an
online class, CSU offers a self-test to assess students’ learning styles before
they enroll.