A pilot program to offer as many as 25 online or partially online courses for credit will be launched for University of California undergraduates in January 2012.
Online classes could help ease some of the competition for space in core classes and provide students more opportunity to interact with their instructors, says Keith Williams, a senior lecturer at UC Davis who is working on the program.
“It’s not going to be just looking at videos of professors giving lectures,” says Williams, an immediate past chair of the Academic Senate’s committee on educational policy.
Williams, from the Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, said that a faculty member might work with an instructional designer to put together tutorial-like material for a new or existing course. “The student might be led through a set of examples and information, get quizzed on that, and once they show they are able to understand the material, move on to the next section of information,” he said.
This month, a UC faculty-appointed committee will review 71 letters of intent from professors interested in developing and teaching online classes, with the idea that the UC Academic Senate agree on 25 courses in time to begin developing them in April.
“The faculty overall put a lot of effort into the process, and there appear to be a good number of very promising proposals,” Williams said.
Academic standards
Crucial to the pilot program will be the creation of evaluation criteria that twill enable the Academic Senate to ensure online courses adhere to UC’s academic standards. “If the result is inferior, I am sure we will say, ‘Let’s go back to doing what we do best,’” Williams said.
But the perception of what universities like UC Davis can do best may be changing over time. An introduction to the pilot project’s website notes that modern students “with the ever-increasing presence of technology in their lives” learn and research differently than their parents. The university, it states, “must respond to this transformation.”
Course demand
In examining potential classes for the online pilot, the faculty-appointed committee will look at a number of factors, including the expertise of faculty interested in teaching online courses and the demand for particular courses.
“It’s targeting larger enrollment courses that are often where students have difficulty getting into at a time [slot] that they want,” Williams said.
Courses with the highest enrollment throughout the UC system in 2006-07 and 2007-08 included beginning courses in calculus, chemistry, organic chemistry, statistics, Spanish, biology, world history, physics, macro and micro economics, psychology, and freshman composition.
Williams said that if the pilot program proves successful, UC might one day partner with community colleges and high schools so that students could take UC online courses for transfer credit.
UC Davis currently offers five undergraduate courses with at least some online components. UC Davis Extension offers approximately 100 online courses and another 100 hybrid classes.
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