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E-Learning and Its Challenges Increase at Community Colleges

April 14, 2009 - The Wired Campus

As the number of online-learning students increases at the nation’s community colleges, so do the challenges of providing them with good online instruction and providing faculty members with the tools to deliver it. That’s the message in the results of a new survey of community colleges.

The survey shows that enrollments in online courses shot up in 2008, by about 11 percent over 2007. The poll was done by the Instructional Technology Council, an affiliate of the American Association of Community Colleges. The 11-percent figure is in line with the 12.9-percent growth in online enrollment for the previous year, reported earlier by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Completely online courses were offered by 72 percent of the institutions. Blended courses — with at least 30 percent of content offered online, augmented by face-to-face meetings — were offered by 14 percent of the colleges.

A sizable number of colleges indicated they were dissatisfied with the learning-management system they were using to deliver these courses. Thirty-seven percent of them said they might switch in the next few years. And switches happen: In 2007, 77 percent of colleges said they used Blackboard and WebCT; in 2008 that was down to 59 percent.

The rising star among learning-management software seems to be Angel Learning. It was used at just under 10 percent of colleges in 2007 and doubled that, to just over 20 percent, in 2008. That might be because the continuing lawsuit between Blackboard and another learning-software company, Desire2Learn, has made colleges leery of both.

In the survey, both faculty members and administrators rated training in how to teach these distance classes as one of the top challenges that they face. In a conversation at The Chronicle today, Mary Spilde, president of Lane Community College in Eugene, Ore., said she has had to reposition staff members to train the faculty. A member of the information-technology department who used to focus on administrative software now only does faculty training, she said. But finding the resources for technical training, she admitted, is a continuing struggle even as the college’s online-education component grows. —Josh Fischman

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