For years, students looking to avoid the campus commute have taken advantage of the U’s growing online course network. But for some faculty members, online courses give them the option to work from home, or in Arthur Hampson’s case, a boat.
“I built a boat and started on a long trip from Wyoming to Buenos Aires,” said Hampson, a geography professor. “I wanted to be away from campus and online teaching was the only way that would be possible.”
Online courses are some of the only courses at the U with increasing enrollment rates. Despite budget cuts, departments might have to spend the extra money for additional online classes, or face stagnant enrollment and additional cuts.
Online course enrollment this fall is up to 5,602 students, 1,300 more students than last fall. Projections for UOnline, the school’s online class department, estimated that this spring will have about 6,300 students compared to last spring’s 5,300.
“(Nationwide, the online course is) the fastest growing segment of the types of classes that universities offer,” said Chuck Wight, the associate vice president for the chemistry department.
The U first began offering online courses during the Fall Semester of 2000.
“For a long time we’ve had more demand from students for online courses than we’ve had available,” Wight said.
Student enrollment for UOnline has been increasing by 20 percent increase since 2005. This year the U expects to see more than a 30 percent increase.
The majority of students who take online courses also take on-campus courses, according to UOnline administrators.
Stephen Hess, chief information officer for the Office of Information Technology, said there are three reasons why university students, both locally and nationally, flock to online courses.
First, the majority of U students have jobs and online courses can help these students who cannot leave their jobs regularly to take classes on campus.
Second, when student budgets are tight, online courses can save gas money and transportation time.
The third reason is one that several professors and administrators confirmed.
“We’re seeing a new generation of students who grew up using the Web and who want (things) anywhere at any place at time,” Hess said. “That’s something that higher education needs to respond to.”
A growing number of faculty members have decided to design and provide online courses in response to student demand.
“I designed online classes to fill a niche,” said Elizabeth Dudley-Murphy, a professor with the U’s Energy and Geoscience Institute.
Online courses are not cheap, though. The materials needed for online courses, such as servers, Web site links and images, are more expensive to maintain than the traditional handwritten lecture notes and paper handouts. Most students face Web maintenance fees between $30 and $40 for each online course.
“When we first started creating online courses, it was definitely more expensive,” Wight said. “In many fields that is still the case (because faculty are still developing courses). In some areas (such as courses that have run for several years) we are still able to recover some of those costs. It’s still more expensive to run a course online.”
Across campus, course enrollment has been relatively stagnant over the last three years. Online enrollment, however, has outpaced traditional enrollment and shows no signs of slowing down.
Wight said he sees online courses as means to help lift departments’ enrollment rates.
“As department chairs, we know that overall enrollments are pretty much flat this year and budgets are tight,” he said. “The more enrollments that a department can get the better. Online education and tools are really quite inevitable.”