Cyberclasses short of seats

By Christina Littlefield

Monday, March 6, 2006 | 7:29 a.m.

The Community College of Southern Nevada last fall turned away more than 20,000 students who tried to enroll in an online course but could not.

That's unacceptable, President Richard Carpenter said, and he's enlisting faculty and the college's new outside information technology company to better meet student demand.

Carpenter launched a plan this semester to increase online class offerings and to offer nine full degree programs on the Internet within the next 36 months. Faculty will develop the course content and SunGard Collegis will provide the technical expertise to get the classes on the Web.

The ambitious plan has some CCSN professors borderline giddy, calling online education the "dream of the future." Other faculty members, however, worry that Carpenter's hard-charging approach will bulldoze faculty concerns and dumb down classes.

Some professors fear that if Carpenter cannot find enough faculty within the college's departments to teach the online classes, he'll find a way to outsource "distance education" the same way he recently outsourced information technology, said Stephen Konowalow, president of CCSN's chapter of the Nevada Faculty Alliance

Collegis, a national company that specializes in running college IT departments, took over CCSN's IT division in January.

Most professors want to make sure that they'll maintain control over course content, and the Faculty Senate is developing a new policy on the subject, faculty leaders said.

"I'm confident we will come up with a way of doing this to keep the faculty satisfied with their ability to control the instruction and getting these programs out where people can use them," said Dale Everidge, director of CCSN's Planetarium.

Carpenter said he understands faculty concerns and said he is in no way trying to outsource them. Collegis is working hand in hand with the departments to develop online courses "from the ground up," Carpenter said, and departments will retain control over who teaches the classes.

That said, professors have to recognize that the market is demanding more online classes, Carpenter said. Private, for-profit colleges such as University of Phoenix are leading that charge. CCSN's students are now clamoring for more online options.

If CCSN continues to have to turn online students away, Carpenter fears they will give up on higher education all together.

"The real driver to me is not that University of Phoenix does it but that (many) of our students asked us for something we couldn't deliver," Carpenter said.

CCSN already has increased its online course sections 40 percent since Carpenter became president in August 2004, from 430 sections to 602 this spring. More than 14,000 students currently are enrolled in distance education, according to data provided by the college.

The Nevada System of Higher Education has seen a similar spike in demand, according to a January report. Total head count at the state's universities and colleges has increased 20 percent between Fall 2001 and Spring 2005, but total enrollment in online courses has increased 155 percent over the same period.

Most general education classes are already available online, Terry Norris, director of CCSN's Distance Education, said. But those courses have never been packaged together or marketed as an online degree program before. Part of the problem is that there are not enough sections to meet the student need.

The first programs expected to come fully online will be in Resorts and Tourism, Norris said. The college will be offering online certificate programs in gaming management, hotel management and travel and tourism by this summer.

Those courses are being offered to students in Singapore through a partnership with the League for Innovation in the Community College and Factor Learning, Norris said, which works with community colleges to offer specialty degree certificates.

Online degrees in business, accounting, criminal justice and elementary education will be targeted next, Norris said, because those programs already have a significant amount of classes online.

Most professors understand the need for online classes, Faculty Senate Chairman Darren Divine said. They just want to make sure the demand does not override academic quality, he said.

Some professors fear that if they resist putting a course online, CCSN's administration will find a way to do it without them, history professor Michael Green said.

"When you design a program without proper academic credentials and rigor, what you have is a diploma mill," Green said.

Green teaches an online course, but he wants to make sure that distance education isn't stressed over the classroom experience.

Professors stress that current online courses are as demanding if not more so than those in the classroom. Students have to demonstrate their participation by posting responses online, and the result is that they typically have much more one-on-one contact with the professor than those who meet face-to-face.