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KEY DECISIONS HELPED MAKE UMUC LEADING PROVIDER
OF ONLINE ED
It is safe to say
that the University of Maryland University
College (UMUC) is the largest
single-institution, non-profit provider of
online higher education programs based in the
U.S., with more than 87,000 worldwide online
enrollments and more than 32,700 unique online
student head counts during FY2002.
It’s also safe to
say that UMUC’s online programs are growing at a
tremendous rate. Enrollment figures support
this, with 40,000 online enrollments recorded in
FY2000, 63,000 online enrollments recorded in
FY2001, and over 100,000 online enrollments
anticipated in FY2003.
"Managing that
kind of scale is our biggest challenge," said
President Gerald Heeger in an interview with
Educational Pathways back in March of this
year. "We are doing well, but we constantly have
to adjust our infrastructure, adjust our
technology, manage our marketing, manage our
24/7 capability - so that we make sure that
scale does not overwhelm us."
Recently,
Educational Pathways took a look under the
hood of what can be considered one of today’s
"mega" online universities, revealing a
constantly changing and challenging online
teaching, learning and student-services
environment that other online education
providers can observe from a distance and
perhaps emulate.
We begin with the
question - put forth to Nicholas Allen, UMUC
provost and chief academic officer - How did you
get to where you are today? "Either through true
strategic planning, or good luck, or necessity,
we made some key decisions which have helped us
get to where we are at today," comes Allen’s
reply. In particular, he outlines six key
decisions:
1.
All online courses have the same quality as
face-to-face courses.
- Online faculty
have the same credentials as face-to-face
faculty.
- Online learning
outcomes are the same as face-to-face learning
outcomes.
- Curriculum is
the same regardless of delivery modality.
- Interaction,
although different in an online environment, is
of high quality, and students are actively
engaged.
- Students
develop technology-use skills.
- Proper
assessment techniques are applied.
2. The level of academic support and
student services is as rich as in the
face-to-face environment.
"We supply a full
package of services online or through some
comparable form of distance medium that a
student would also have access to if they came
on campus," says Allen.
3. Offered complete programs.
Having only part of a degree program online,
and thus forcing students to come to campus to
ultimately earn a degree, does not help boost
enrollments. However, Allen adds that in the
beginning years of UMUC’s online programs they
were surprised to see their first wave of
enrollments come from geographically close areas
where students could easily choose between
coming to campus or going online. "It was very
convenient for them to do both."
4.
Used both team-approach and craft-approach
models for courses developed strictly by UMUC
faculty.
"We felt our faculty had the skills and
better understanding of what our students’ needs
were, and so in developing courses inside or
outsourcing them, we chose to do it with our own
faculty," says Allen, adding that UMUC uses both
a team-approach and craft-approach for course
development. The team approach entails using a
faculty member, a technologist, media experts,
peer reviewers and a content expert working
closely together to build a course. The craft
approach is where you have a faculty member,
with the aid of a technologist, develop the
course pretty much single-handedly. The team
approach is used primarily in undergraduate
courses, and the craft approach is used
primarily in graduate-level courses. However,
"there is a merging of both, and it is
situational," says Allen. For instance, "if you
have a course with a high number of sections,
then I think economically the team approach will
lend itself very well because you will be able
to afford to invest in more multi-media and
other tools than if the course is only going to
be offered once a year."
5.
Built asynchronous, highly interactive learning
environments.
"We want the faculty to give their value
added," primarily in the form of facilitating
and inducing online interaction, and moving
through a course over a set period of time like
they would in a face-to-face course. "But the
interaction is largely asynchronous, and it is
still a very rich interaction," says Allen.
6.
Built an effective home-grown course
management/learning management delivery
platform.
WebTycho, UMUC’s proprietary software course
delivery platform started out as a DOS program
in 1992-93 and migrated to Windows and then to
the Web. Approximately every 18 months, UMUC has
assessed whether or not to switch to a
commercial vendor, and each time "we have come
back with the answer that what we have is as
good as and usually better than what is out
there; and the financials have not looked very
encouraging for going outside," says Allen.
Has it been truly cost effective to do it on
their own? "Given the choices we had, yes," says
Allen. "It was not cheap, though, and it is
still not cheap."
http://www.umuc.edu/online_ed.shtml
Editor’s Note: The impetus for putting
together this issue of Educational Pathways came
from an in-press paper titled "Access Issues and
the Current State of Practice at the University
of Maryland University College," written by
Merrily Stover, former assistant dean, UMUC
School of Undergraduate Studies. Stover’s
complete paper will be available inside
"Elements of Quality Online Education," Volume 4
in the Sloan-Consortium Series, to be published
during the Spring of 2003. For more information,
visit
www.sloan-c.org |
