Case Study: Building New Online Programs from Your Existing Courses

June 11, 2010

By: Christopher Hill in Distance Learning Administration

So often, universities hoping to expand their online course offerings think in terms of developing entire online programs from scratch, writing new courses, translating existing ones into the new delivery methods, and generally making a program that is separate from its campus analog. But for Northern Michigan University, expanding online offerings was a function of examining their existing course offerings and finding the opportunities to complete programs with courses already online.

Northern Michigan University is a private university serving about 9,000 students located in the center of Michigan’s upper peninsula near Lake Superior. Located in one of the snowiest areas of the U.S., NMU is quite rural and is always seeking ways to make education more accessible for its students, many of whom work and have family obligations, and all of whom are dealing with the winter travel conditions that can make getting to school difficult.

Judith Puncochar, associate professor in the school of education at Northern Michigan University, explains the process by which the university found new opportunities for online education by looking at their existing offerings.

Driven by goals
In 2007, the university set two goals that affected this process: first, to find an additional 1,000 students who would enroll in online classes over the next three to five years, and second, to document the current state of online teaching and learning at the university.

This fit well with the goals set by AQIP, the Academic Quality Improvement Program for accreditation sponsored by the Higher Learning Commission. AQIP set four goals for the university:

to improve the quality and consistency of the online learning experience for students and faculty
to identify stakeholders in need of support and/or training, which may be inhibiting them from participating
to document the current state of online learning at NMU and create a baseline to measure growth
to identify new opportunities and increase the number of online offerings.

Finding the baseline“The first step was to create a baseline document from which to measure growth,” says Puncochar. This process turned out to be quite labor-intensive, requiring the help of some of Puncochar’s student research assistants.

In short, the baseline document creation process required a manual tally of information gleaned from program web pages, online course offerings, websites, and graduate and undergraduate bulletins. The researchers tallied the number of credits and the number of required courses within each program for each major, minor, associate’s degree, certificate, bachelor’s degree, and master’s degree. The research also looked at course type such as traditional, online, and hybrids.

Identifying new opportunities
Once this raw data had been gathered, Puncochar and her colleagues could begin to find opportunities for expansion of online programs. They did this by analyzing the programs that had courses online and identifying those that were close to having an online certificate or degree available.

For example, the bachelor’s degree in sociology of liberal arts required 124 total credit hours with eight required courses, seven of which were currently offered online. Likewise, the bachelor’s degree in criminal justice also required 124 credit hours but had 11 required courses, nine of which were online. Each of these programs was offering more than 80 percent of its required courses online, meaning that it could likely easily become a program available online with the addition of one or two courses.

Puncochar then began working the phones, asking these departments what it would take to put those last couple of courses online and what barriers the departments were encountering. With some departments, these conversations brought expressions of resistance, as the chairs and faculty members reminded Puncochar that they have academic freedom and can teach the courses they like in the methods they see as most effective.

This is true, Puncochar allows. “Faculty don’t have to teach online,” she says. “How do you sell this?” Sometimes, the conversation addressed the kind of experience a faculty member could expect; for example, Puncochar finds that her online students are more engaged than her traditional classroom sections, where students can sometimes hide in the crowd.

Overall, some programs were easier to complete than others. At the baseline measurement, the percent of required courses offered online ranged from nearly 50 percent for master’s degree required courses to nearly 15 percent for bachelor’s degree courses to a low of about 7.5 percent for certificate program requirements. Just one year later, these numbers had jumped to nearly 78 percent for master’s degree programs, 18 percent for bachelor’s degree programs, and 22 percent for certificate programs.

Additionally, there are some programs that will likely never be offered entirely online. For example, Puncochar says the university has a goal of having programs in all six liberal studies divisions available online, since the school is a liberal arts school. However, some science departments, notably chemistry, are uncertain about having lab courses offered online, since this implies that students would be conducting potentially-dangerous experiments in their kitchens. However, geology and astronomy were both able to find lab course options that were safe to deliver online, so students can indeed fulfill their lab science requirement online.

Excerpted from Building New Programs with Existing Courses, April 15, 2009, Distance Education Report.