Enrollment is falling at community colleges across the country.
In the past year alone, nationwide enrollment at two-year colleges dropped 6 percent, according to a December report by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
The biggest loss is among so-called nontraditional students — a key demographic for community colleges. Enrollment for this student group, made up of those over age 24, is down about 15 percent over the past two years, according to the report.
One area in which two-year colleges report seeing growth, however, is online education.
Online course enrollment at Seminole State College in Florida jumped 15.5 percent between fall 2013 and 2014, notes Christine Broeker, the school’s interim executive director of e-learning.
At Odessa College in Texas, online enrollment grew 18 percent in the past year, says Don Wood, vice president for institutional effectiveness.
Community colleges struggling to recruit and retain students are capitalizing on this trend by expanding online programs, adding support systems for online students and investing in professional development for instructors teaching virtual courses.
Learn how to get [four-year credits with online community college classes.]
Instructor training and support are key to quality online courses, Wood says.
“The traditional approach is that teaching online courses is easy. Once you set it up, you can mail it in,” Wood says. “It is actually much more challenging for faculty to teach online than face-to-face.”
Online instructors need to be available when students are, Wood says. And online students typically aren’t working on courses during the day.
“Our students work a lot at midnight,” he says. “They’re engaged at odd hours.”
CUNY LaGuardia Community College in New York is among those beefing up training for professors, says Janice Karlen, a business and technology professor.
“Faculty teaching online participate in seminars ranging from several sessions to an entire academic year and learn such things as revising a syllabus for online learning, developing appropriate assignments for the online environment, and selecting and using the most appropriate technology,” Karlen says.
[Explore three statistics to consider when assessing online faculty.]
Many community colleges are taking care to align new online programs with local and regional business needs.
Odessa College looked to its customers — students and the community — to determine which programs to add, Wood says.
One result was a new associate of science degree in the school’s energy technology department. The instrumentation and electrical technology degree program was developed in partnership with Chevron.
New technology in online courses also helps schools such as Odessa meet students where they are, says Greg Williams, president of Odessa College.
“One of the largest employment areas in West Texas is trucking,” Williams says, explaining that truckers haul water used in fracking to one site, then typically wait for hours to have their load replenished.
“They can take a course while sitting there in their downtime,” he says, adding that mobile-friendly course delivery systems combined with lessons and explainers recorded on video make that possible.
Beyond simply adding new courses and degrees, community colleges are also making their online programs more accessible to students, says Ann Hatch, spokeswoman for Dallas County Community College District in Texas.
“Community colleges like Dallas Colleges Online are enhancing online learning by … offering classes on flex schedules or in blocks of time that meet students’ needs and aren’t necessarily based on the traditional college semester,” she says.
Odessa College’s new “Fast and Focused” program, launched in fall 2014, splits the standard 16-week semester into two eight-week blocks.
“Before, I was only able to take two classes a semester,” says Vanessa Garcia, a technology major at Odessa. “Now I can take two classes each eight-week semester.”
For Garcia, 30, that means finishing her associate degree at age 31 instead of 35, putting her one step closer to her ultimate goal, says the mother of two.
“This isn’t the stopping point for me,” she says. “I definitely want a bachelor’s degree.”
[Learn why businesses and universities are courting community college grads.]
To ensure students like Garcia don’t just enroll in online programs, but thrive in them, some community colleges are going the extra mile to provide tutoring, counseling and resources, such as library assistants dedicated to certain courses to help students with research.
Seminole State College added a team of “student success specialists” — advisers with whom students can connect via Skype, phone, email or chat.
At Odessa College, each student is assigned a success coach and becomes part of what the school calls a “Design for Completion” team — a community that follows students from their first day on campus or online through graduation.
The mentors and counselors at Odessa don’t wait for students to come to them, either, says Shawn Shreves, vice president for information technology at the school.
“If a student has a bad day on a test, we have someone calling them the next day,” he says.
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Community Colleges Expand Online as Overall Enrollment Declines originally appeared on usnews.com
