The report continued: “We expect in coming years that a large majority of students will receive at least a portion of their postsecondary education through [online] distance education. … A growing number of students with time and place restrictions will have access to fully online degree programs.”
Higher-education technology officials said California—and other states lagging behind in online distance education—could expand college access through online college classes if decision makers from myriad institutions agree on standards for what constitutes high-quality online learning—a recommendation included in the LOA’s report.
“Part of the challenge is really the overarching process of figuring out how we’re going to agree across institutions … and how online [distance] education will be delivered and accessed,” said Elizabeth Meyer, director of online learning at the University of California San Diego campus, a program that has grown from 40 courses in 2005 to 2,000 today. “It’s an exciting time to be looking at ways we can leverage technology, but settling on what makes a [web-based] course legitimate is something we struggle with.”
Following federal and state efforts to spur college access and completion through the creation, sharing, and distribution of online content, the LAO analysis recommends sharing web-based lessons and online college classes among different segments of the state’s higher-education system, such as the California Community Colleges and California State University (CSU).
Because these two systems don’t share material from the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT)—which is “a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff, and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy,” according to the organization’s web site—the report said this results in “duplicative spending of state resources.”
“A more cost-effective approach would be for faculty to make their content available to colleagues for reuse,” the report said—a practice that could save campuses about $10,000 per course.
To encourage this practice, California could offer state grants to faculty members who create and contribute online course material to MERLOT, according to the report.
Providing grants to faculty members who create online curriculum content and make it available to peers at other institutions could foster sharing not just among community colleges, for instance, but among public campuses of any kind across the state.
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