Today's Trib has an article "Global campus debut is a dud" at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-globalcampus04jan04,1,5676558.story
University of Illinois officials expected that their Global Campus project would start small. But when online classes began Wednesday, there were fewer than 15 students enrolled, far lower than the 75 students predicted last year.
Officials attribute the low enrollment to having little time to market the project after a four-month delay in getting it approved by university trustees. U. of I. President B. Joseph White, who has predicted that online enrollment will eventually exceed the 70,000 students at the university's three traditional campuses combined, has banked his reputation on the project's success.
"It is important for people not to focus on the doggone numbers for these initial enrollments. The key is that it exists now. We can offer classes," said Chet Gardner, White's special assistant in charge of the project. "Now we have to give our marketing efforts time to get our enrollments up and become financially viable."
Wayward, you beat me to the punch by about two minutes, so I'm kicking your post to the front, and posting mine here in comments:
The really sad thing is that EIU is at Parkland everynight and on the weekend with Masters and 4 year degree's, while the U of I doesnt have on line classes, nor do they have night and weekend classes for it might intefere with Professors busy research schedules.//// People have jobs that require them to be at work during the day... the quality of education at EIU might not be as high at the U of I, but its more accessable and isnt that what education is suppose to be all about?
The U of I already has several on-line programs, with two out of the College of Education that are considered models for on-line learning across the nation. I agree that this is an awareness thing - give it a couple of years and the enrollment will swell.
But I definitely agree about the inconvenience of the schedules. It is pretty difficult for someone to take graduate classes at U of I without quitting work all together. I did it, but it wasn't easy.
Well, not only is the enrollment miniscule, but also the programs offered aren't exactly your regular college (or even graduate school) classes.
I should confess I've been highly skeptical of this thing from the get-go, mainly from a technical perspective. But listening to the radio report saying how "many, if not most, of the students have full time jobs and can't get to campus etc etc" it struck me that this doesn't sound all THAT different from the various other "complete your degree at home" or "get extra education credits, to qualify for continuing education to get benefits/raises at work" type things. Sure, the thing has just started out. But, nursing and online education? You can get a degree in online education? (Nothing wrong with online education I guess but having it as the first program seems oddly incestuous, somehow.) DO they envision having classes like math and history?
So, it seems the audience at least for now is completely different from the physical campus students, and NOT just in a "oh they can't make it to campus" sense.
I hear they've outsourced many of the technical aspects. I don't know details. But, I'd love to know, for instance, how they handle assessments? How do they get the students loaded into the course software? Manually? If not, who did that programming? They register in Banner[1] , perhaps it's a case of "the exact section in Banner is imported via their vendor provided hook that works with [whatever program the Global Campus runs in]" but otherwise, it's a bunch of work to write such things, and the rollout was pretty quick.
How exactly are the intellectual property issues being handled, as of now? Who owns the current content? I imagine the Global Campus wants to own it, if so, who are the authors? Anyway, I guess I'm just curious. Maybe someone who knows more will post.
[1] Weirdly enough, I had occasion to see a student register in the Banner interface recently. I'd never seen that front end, and it was surprising to see that due to the way the semesters were entered into the system (Spr vs. Spring, seems they're pretty... free form) and alphabetical issues, the default term, first on the list of terms you have to pick from, was Spring 2008 for GLOBAL CAMPUS. Urbana-Champaign was second on the list, requiring the student to manually pick it. I will say, that's lame. 40,000 >> 7. (Of course behind the scenes it's just crazy numeric codes.)
bhss73 - I know someone who is getting a degree via the "EIU at Parkland" program, and is pleased with it. But that program had regular classes (she also took some plain local Parkland classes too, before that). She took things like math.
The Global Campus, at least so far, doesn't really seem to be aimed at the "regular person, working, has no college and wants some" with regular, start from the beginning, classes. The original hype DID make it seem that this audience was the goal, but now I just wonder.
I have heard many gradutes of the U of I, with advanced degrees, express concern that on-line degrees will water down the degree(s) they received. Sure EIU can do it, but EIU is hardly a world class university. A lot of people think it makes the U of I like the U of Phoenix, turning the flagship U into a diploma mill.
What do other world class schools do? Does anyone know what Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, or Chicago is doing with on-line classes?
How is this program being funded?
I have no connections with the U. of I., but if I did, I would have been upset at the early announcements about the program in which U. of I. administrators touted the University of Phoenix as a program they want to emulate. U. of Phoenix is a diploma mill and a research institution like the U. of I. should not want the University of Phoenix even mentioned as a comparison with its programs. My second thought was, "wait a minute, didn't the News-Gazette just have an article the other day saying how successful the start of the on-line program is?" It would be nice, given the News-Gazette's independent financial structure if it really did operate as an independent newspaper rather than as an arm of the public relations branch of the U. of I. Day after day, we get re-worked press releases from the U. of I., packaged as independent reporting. It makes one despair.
What's that, about 5 administrators per student?
Harvard has a distance-learning program. I remember hearing about Yale and Princeton teaming up to make classes available on-line for alumni. Not sure where that is at these days.
Farther down in the Trib article, mention is made of the Springfield campus' already well-established online program.
About 1/4 of UIS' 4,800-plus students are totally online, and about half take at least one online class. In fact some of the UIS faculty were not happy with the Global Campus initiative as they thought it was trying to replace or upstage what they had already accomplished.
Online UIS students already come from all over the nation. Every commencement now includes online students who have never even seen the campus until the day they graduate!
Unfortunately, a lot of people still don't know, or forget, that UI has had a Springfield campus (the former Sangamon State University) for a dozen years now.
If all three campuses already offer online classes, why not just coordinate and market them better instead of reinventing the wheel?
Kind of amusing watching this as my wife is taking her classes online at the UIS... Some frustrations are the same (Banner fun and games) as here on campus, but all in all, seems to be a very good system they have there. I guess expanding from that direction was not considered due to the taint of "UIS" though...
"It is important for people not to focus on the doggone numbers..."
Maybe they would have better numbers if Ned Flanders weren't running the dang diddley Global Campus-arooney.
I didn't know anything about the program, so I went to its website to learn more. It's Flash-only. If you don't have Flash installed (as I don't for Firefox), it simply loads a blank orange page. That's just inexcusably incompetent.
"Maybe they would have better numbers if Ned Flanders weren't running the dang diddley Global Campus-arooney."
If there was a hall of fame for IP comments, this would have to be a contender. I haven't laughed this hard in a long time.
Cosign.
Anonymous 10:10 AM laments: "Day after day, we get re-worked press releases from the U. of I., packaged as independent reporting. It makes one despair."
Yeah, at least since the last redesign. Not only are they press releases, but they run on the FRONT page as the major feature most days! National news will be buried.
Granted, I don't rely on the News-Gazette for national news (it's a local paper, reporting on local news really is its best niche) but the U of I press release stuff is really obvious.
For most majors (excluding Engineering and the like) EIU's undergraduate education is as good as if not better than U of I's. UIUC is a graduate school where undergrads are tolerated.
I'd agree except for the campus resources. It's a lot easier for anyone--undergrads included--to do research through U of I than EIU.
You really think EIU is better than UIUC in anything? Example please. EIU isn't even the third or fourtth choice among state schools.
The entire experience at UIUC is differnence, the teachers are better, the ranknigs are better and the students are better. Students learn not only from the teachers but their peers.
Where is EIU ranked in anything? You need to do some research, but EIU may not have trained you to do that.
where's the beef?
You really think EIU is better than UIUC in anything? Example please. EIU isn't even the third or fourtth choice among state schools.
The entire experience at UIUC is differnence, the teachers are better, the ranknigs are better and the students are better. Students learn not only from the teachers but their peers.
Where is EIU ranked in anything? You need to do some research, but EIU may not have trained you to do that.
I'll start by saying that I'm neither a graduate of EIU or UIUC. I went somewhere else, but that's unimportant.
It's obvious the above post was written by an UIUC student or graduate. And it's quite condescending. First of all, explain how "the students are better." Secondly, I think you are buying into the hype about all of the ranking crap. I've always maintained that a good student can get a better education at a less renowned school than a bad student can get at a supposedly top notch school. The only thing that you are guaranteed to come away with from UIUC over EIU is more student loan debt. The rest is up to the individual.
Oh, btw, EIU has much smaller class sizes (I'm assuming) than UIUC. That's a notch for EIU, imho.
I don't think it''s condescending to note that UI is much better when someone posts that EIU is equal to or better than the UI in some departments. You remind me of the folks who don't like valedictorians, because they make other students feel stupid, but of course it's ok to honor the outstanding athletes.
If you don't like the rankings, feel free to throw away, we'll just say EIU is better cos they're nice. Let's not rank anything. Let's not keep scores in sports.
I'm sorry if I offended you by saying IUUC has better students. Of course, grades, like rankings, have absolutely no meaning. An A student is no better of a student than a C student.
And we shouldn't mention the Nobel Prize winners at the UI over the deaces and today, because that might hurt the feelings of the EIU professors, who've got masters degrees and all ,which is about the same as a Nobel Prize.
Luckily, in the real world you're never judged on anything.