Associate Vice Chancellor of the Board Robbie Melton explains that a statewide study revealed a need to provide more options to students seeking to earn their degrees.

"We felt that if we offer another avenue, such as online degree programs, we could help bring Tennesseans up to the national norm, in which we are far below at this time in terms of people with bachelor degrees."

The task was to bring together 19 culturally and administratively different two-year and four-year institutions. The Board needed an outside consultant, says Melton. After evaluating seven companies, CE won a three-year contract to help.

Eight committees were formed with representatives from all the campuses, the governor’s office, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission and local businesses. "They (CE) helped to facilitate all the committee meetings; they helped to outline the strategic and implementation plans and identify timelines and goals," says Melton. "They also helped us set up our students services."

"We had willing and skilled faculty members develop the courses," says Melton. At the time, faculty were using a wide variety of course management platforms. "We had to collapse all that into one courseware product," which turned out to be WebCT.

CE also developed a marketing plan that Melton says was so successful that "we had to stop it." The Board projected 300 enrollments for the first fall 2001 semester, but the five degree programs garnered a whopping 1,954 enrollments. "We had to cap the courses because we did not have enough faculty members available," Melton explains. This spring 2002 semester has seen 3,663 enrollments.

CE is hosting the server running the online programs as well as providing 24x7 student help-desk services. Additionally, CE "has created an assessment form that is really outstanding to evaluate every component of our program," Melton says.

What’s been learned thus far? With a course completion success rate during the fall 2001 semester at 49 percent, which includes drop-outs and withdrawals (the success rate was 65 percent, excluding drop-outs and withdrawals), some changes have been made. "We’ve implemented some new procedures to address course retention rates," says Melton.

"We found a correlation between the number of contacts a professor has with his students and retention. When we looked at the number of emails and discussion postings, we found a significant number of those classes that had low numbers, and these classes also had low retention and high student complaints. On the opposite end, for those students who were successful and completed their courses, there were high levels of email contact and discussion board postings with the instructor."

Such data has resulted in a mandate requiring instructors to interact more extensively and in a more timely manner with students via direct email contact and through the threaded discussion boards. Faculty are also being encouraged to call students by phone.

Another area of concern entails enhancing the program’s virtual library, which is a funding issue, says Melton. "We have it online, and we have all the colleges participating, but we really need more funding for more databases."

Also, they’d like to beef up their help-desk services. "We found that even with Eduprise’s 24x7 help, they only help when it comes to WebCT or general computing problems, not general problems. So that’s an area where we have to go back to the board and ask for a full-time staff member."

For the fall 2002 semester, the Board will add 26 postsecondary technology centers to the group of participating schools, and two certificate programs will go online, one called "Computer Operator" and another titled "Information Processing Technician." The Board also wants to add online school of education programs to possibly help alleviate a teacher shortage in Tennessee.

The Board will continue to utilize CE because, Melton says, the CE staff has been "willing to listen, willing to get into the heated issues of higher education," has been "proactive in resolving problems in a timely manner," keeps the program "on the cutting edge" and "because we have developed a relationship of trust."