UC online pilot project moves forward

By Susan Sward--This post was originally published on the UCOP Website.

The University of California has issued an invitation to faculty to participate in a rigorous pilot project designed to test whether undergraduate online courses can be taught in a way that delivers UC-quality instruction.

The project will involve as many as 25 for-credit courses offered in a wide array of disciplines, and faculty will have until Dec. 13 to submit letters of intent stating their interest in developing and teaching an online course as part of UC's Online Instruction Pilot Project. The university expects most courses selected for the project to be ready for student enrollment by January 2012, and the pilot project will continue until the end of that year.

This project, its planners say, is exactly what UC, as one of the world's most prestigious centers of research and learning, should be doing — exploring online instruction's potential benefits and problems. The project will conduct research on how faculty teach, how students learn and how they are challenged in the online environment. The hope is that the research findings could have broad implications for both online and classroom instruction.

The pilot project is structured as a research program in which faculty will be at the center of the effort.

"One of the reasons we are doing this project now in an organized way at the university is to really get the faculty involved,'' said Gary Matkin, UC Irvine's Dean of Continuing Education, Distance Learning and Summer Sessions and the leading architect of that campus' online program during the last decade. In that period, UC Irvine estimates more than 11,600 students have taken online instruction in continuing education, undergraduate and graduate courses.

"What we have found in our experience is that when faculty get involved, they end up having all their questions answered, and they come away positive about their experience of teaching online,'' added Matkin, who is a member of the Online Pilot Project's steering committee. "We know already that individual undergraduate courses can be delivered at UC-quality level because we have done it in summer sessions both at Irvine and at Berkeley.''

Another member of the UC faculty involved with the pilot study also underscored its value.

"What I am most interested in is whether UC online instruction would be capable of producing a product worthy of UC,'' said Keith Williams, a senior lecturer in UC Davis' Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, and former chair of the University Committee on Education Policy. Williams, who has been working with project staff on developing the pilot project, added, "We also want to better understand the financial aspects of online instruction and what effect it will have on the faculty's workload — we need a better handle on this.''

Demand for UC classes grows

The project is getting under way at a time when there is a growing demand from students for a UC education, and UC budget projections show an increasing gap between these enrollment pressures and the university's funding for on-campus construction of brick-and-mortar facilities.

According to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California, the state is expected to have 1 million fewer college graduates than its work force will need by 2025. In addition, President Obama has set a national goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates ever by 2020.

During the project, faculty will take part in the framing of course content and the eventual review over what worked and what didn't work in pilot courses.

In January, a faculty-appointed interdisciplinary review committee will help determine which letters of intent will be selected to continue to the planning phase.  Faculty whose letters are accepted will work with project team members in the planning phase to develop course design principles and determine an evaluation framework for the pilot. One of the efforts at this stage will be to identify lower division, high-enrollment courses that might be good vehicles for online delivery.

Course proposals due April 2011

A request for full proposals will be released in March 2011 and proposals will be due in April 2011. Selected proposals will move forward to the pilot's implementation phase, where faculty — with support from the project team — will develop, deliver and evaluate the online courses.

The pilot's evaluation process will target important questions regarding quality, pedagogy, costs, student assessment and faculty workload.

The project is responsive to a recommendation made by the UC Commission on the Future in its recent draft final report. The commission urged that there be a pilot program to determine the "quality and feasibility issues regarding fully online courses for UC degree credit. Specifically, we hope to develop information to support decisions about whether a major expansion of online education can help increase access to a UC quality education, and perhaps reduce instructional expenditures."

Faculty concerns to be studied

If the pilot project is deemed a success, UC could move to expand the number of undergraduate online courses it offers and could eventually offer such courses to community college students or others interested in taking UC-taught courses for credit. However, before any decision is made on any online expansion, the faculty would have to agree that courses meet UC's high quality standards.

In July, UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Christopher Edley — one of the project's leaders — spoke at a UC Regents meeting, urging UC to embark quickly on a research-based pilot program to explore teaching and learning in the online environment. In the months since then, there has been active discussion among faculty and students about the merits of online instruction. Some faculty concerns deal with whether online education can impart the caliber of learning offered in the classroom and whether online students will learn and retain as much from online instruction as they did in the classroom.

Jia Frydenberg, director of UC Irvine's Distance Learning Center and a colleague of Dean Matkin, said the campus's experience with online instruction in its summer session, undergraduate and graduate courses has demonstrated the value of the approach.

"Online serves a valid student need because it allows students to individualize their learning experiences,'' Frydenberg said. "If students prefer to hear things, they can listen to audio. If they prefer a more visual experience, they can view lectures, and they can do it as many times as they want over and over until they feel they have mastered a complicated topic such as statistics. You can't do that in the classroom.''

By reviewing results of how online students are learning and how online faculty are imparting their lessons, the pilot project participants will generate data that could be used to tailor future instruction in a way that improves its content and enhances its delivery to students.

"What is exciting about this online pilot project is that you can do the research first and discover early in the process the right way to do it rather than just muddling through,'' said Michael Dennin, a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Irvine.

Dennin, who already has taught a general science course three times and a math course once online, said the general course worked well, and more work has to be done to make the math course a more effective teaching vehicle.

"As faculty get educated about online instruction, they realize it's another tool for teaching that can be used poorly or well,'' Dennin added. "Because we are doing the research in advance in the pilot program, we expect to do future online instruction well.''

As the debate continues over online education's potential, UC Davis' Williams noted that "while I share and empathize with the faculty's concerns, I think the university is facing a new and different world, and we have to look at different ways of responding. We certainly would not want to offer anything that was not of the quality we offer now."

Student interest is strong

Williams said before the courses are launched, faculty course designers and UC administrators will work to identify what key ingredients define "UC quality" and what measurements should be used to evaluate the effectiveness of each online course. While much of the research to date has shown online students can learn at least as well as those in the classroom, there are still many questions to be examined about online instruction's potential benefits. The launch of the pilot project occurs almost a year after UC surveyed about 3,000 UC students and found strong interest in online education: Four-fifths of students said they were somewhat likely (38 percent) or very likely (42 percent) to take online courses for credit toward their on-campus UC degrees.

Nationwide surveys also have found online courses are on the sharp increase. A Sloan Consortium study found that in the fall of 2008 alone, more than 4.6 million undergraduate students were taking at least one online course. It also reported that one in four college students now takes at least one online course.

Research universities' results are mixed

Already many other research universities have offered online instruction — often at the graduate or extension course level — in programs which are as diverse as they are numerous. These schools include Columbia University, University of Illinois, University of Texas, Penn State, University of Maryland and University of Massachusetts.

The results of online programs have been mixed. The early efforts, which focused primarily on educational publishing as opposed to credit-bearing instruction, tended to be a struggle. Typically, programs have done better when they were highly focused, faculty-supported and grounded in institutions' existing capacity to deliver online instruction.

In recent years, advances in network technology and social networking have combined to support online instruction's progress. The instruction mode also has benefited greatly from substantial advances in the ability to gather and analyze data about learning effectiveness of online solutions.

To learn from the institutions with a great deal of online experience, the UC pilot program team interviewed those schools' program participants about where their programs succeeded, if they did, and where they could be improved.

"Online education at the university level is not new, and there is a world of experience out there which is essential for us to analyze and to draw upon," said Daniel Greenstein, UC's vice provost of Academic Planning, Programs, and Coordination. "We will continue to do that in the coming two years."

UC faculty expertise to be tapped

At UC, online instruction is already being offered: There were more than 1,200 extension courses in the 2009-10 academic year as well as numerous undergraduate and graduate online courses. While most of the extension courses do offer transferrable credit, few have UC credit. By comparison, all courses in the pilot project will offer UC credit and will have to be approved by the relevant UC faculty body with authority over the course being proposed.

What the pilot project aims to do is use the existing UC faculty online expertise as a base from which to build a detailed study of whether for-credit undergraduate courses can be taught in a variety of disciplines at a level worthy of a highly selective university such as UC.

Williams cautions that the complex issues presented by the Online Pilot Project will involve careful study - precisely the effort the university is making with this pilot.

"People often want to see a red or green light, but it's seldom that simple," Williams said. "We have to be realistic — we may not do it exactly right the first time, but the process may give us information to do it better a second time around."