James Madison University’s (JMU) Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) developed a "novel approach" that increased online course enrollments and revenues: They created fully online undergraduate and graduate summer-semester courses.

Plus, these summer online courses have addressed a burgeoning need to provide more required course offerings to JMU’s growing student population.

The summer online courses began in 2002 through the creation of a Faculty Summer Institute for Online Course Development project that trained two faculty how to teach two fully online writing courses. The Summer Institute added 10 faculty in 2003, and another 12 faculty were trained in 2004. Since the program began in 2002, a total of 39 fully online summer courses have been taught. The 2005 Summer Institute has 12 more faculty coming on board, bringing the total up to 36 faculty participating in the program. As courses carry over to successive summer sessions, the number of courses being offered increases substantially. So, in summer 2005, it’s estimated that more than 50 fully online courses will be offered to JMU students (a few courses have multiple sections).

All Summer Institute faculty participants receive a $2,000 stipend and agree to attend a week-long workshop held in May. Faculty members are also required to develop their courses themselves, with the help of CIT staff; teach two successive summer sessions; participate in an evaluation of their courses; write a final report of their experiences; and showcase the results of their work.

The courses created to date cover a wide range and are mostly 100 to 400 undergraduate-level courses, along with a few graduate-level courses. Course titles include Introduction to Philosophy, Critical Thinking, Life Span Human Development, Introduction to Public Relations, Lifetime Fitness and Wellness, Critical Reading and Writing, Elementary Statistics, Accounting Technology, Bioinformatics, and much more.

The Summer Institute is promoted through an invitation to all full-time and part-time JMU faculty to apply and complete an application and RFP process that asks interested faculty to receive approval from their academic unit and college to teach during the summer. Interested faculty must describe their reasons for wanting to develop and teach an online course and how their project would have a positive impact on students. They are also asked to comment on how their participation would benefit faculty and students in their department and to estimate average number of enrollments in their prospective summer course.

Some of the criteria on which the evaluation and selection of proposals are based include:

• Quality of the proposal.
• Impact of the proposal on meeting student curricular needs.
• Applicant’s interest in and commitment to online teaching.
• Potential to benefit the quality of teaching and learning in the applicant’s department.
• Support from the applicant’s department and college.

The application/RFP process starts in December with an end-of-January deadline. In early February, accepted applicants are notified and given an orientation to the Summer Institute. "We begin to have a discussion and start talking about their objectives," says James Mazoue, distributed and distance learning coordinator. "We give them a checklist of things to think about."

During the second week of May, after faculty have been informally working on the development of their online course on their own and with CIT support, they attend the week-long live workshop, which is tailored to meet their specific project needs and instructional goals. Workshop topics revolve around seven modules:

• How to prepare and plan for teaching an online course
• Online course management
• Learner characteristics and online teaching and learning strategies
• Interactivity for active learning
• Evaluation and assessment strategies
• Accessing and integrating digital library resources
• Copyright and digital media

In addition, faculty are taught how to use Centra (a synchronous communication tool) and Tegrity (a multimedia content authoring tool often used for adding video and audio to PowerPoint presentations). Mazoue says that Tegrity "is very useful for creating online lectures. It has been popular, and I would say our Summer Institute faculty have been some of the innovators and most heavy users of Tegrity."

Mazoue adds that Summer Institute faculty are typically "fairly well-versed and savvy when it comes to using technology. They have used technology before (JMU uses Blackboard, which has high usage inside many of its face-to-face classes), and they are looking for an opportunity to have a block of time in which they can put together and use all the skills they have acquired."

`The following month, in June, faculty are using those skills to their fullest extent as they teach their fully online courses, which can range anywhere from four to 10 weeks, depending on the nature of the course being offered.

According to Mazoue, the summer online courses are helping to fulfill the needs of a niche population of students at JMU, which is a traditional rural campus in Virginia (Fall 2004 enrollment of 15,809).

Most JMU students live near or on campus and leave during the summer, taking on jobs and/or internships. These students, according to JMU student surveys, often take any number of required general education courses, for instance, during the summer at a community college close to where they live, or they defer taking some of their required courses until the Fall or Spring semesters, often delaying their graduation dates. This student enrollment trend revolves around that fact that JMU does not offer enough sections of required courses during the Fall or Spring semesters. By offering summer online courses in subjects that these students need to graduate, students are able to take these courses while remaining at home during the summer and continue working at their summer jobs and internships.

Last year JMU administration imposed a $20-per-credit hour technology fee on all fully online summer courses, resulting in increased revenues. "Some of this money is trickling back down to us," says Mazoue. "It is more than financially paying for itself. The administration has been very excited." During the summer semester of 2004, about 450 students enrolled in 25 fully online summer courses that were generated by the Summer Institute.

Adding to the positive financial aspects, the summer institute program is really serving three needs, says Mazoue. "In addition to serving the students’ curricular needs, we are addressing faculty development as well as strategic institutional needs, such as how to handle increased enrollments and deal with capacity constraints (that the physical plant cannot effectively accommodate at present). That is what’s really interesting about this. It is a very focused approach that really ties these three strategic needs together."

The Summer Institute is now branching out from developing pre-scheduled once-per-year individual courses to reaching out to departments and colleges. "Our intent is to develop core courses within departments and bring together groups of faculty to develop departmental resources," Mazoue says. "We want to tie the development of these online courses a little bit more programmatically within departments." In this kind of scenario the Summer Institute would provide more customized training and course development services on an ad-hoc, departmental basis scheduled at times outside of the current annual Summer Institute program.

While there is no centralized system at JMU whereby faculty are required to go through any specific department to offer online courses, CIT, primarily through its Summer Institute, has become "kind of the de-facto online course development department," says Mazoue. "It has increased our visibility on campus. We are recognized."

http://cit.jmu.edu/osi/