Columbia College's online campus accommodates increasing enrollment

Gary Massey uses a firsthand story about a long-distance trucker taking one of his virtual classes to illustrate the convenience of Columbia College’s online campus.
“He’d said he’d wanted to go to college for a long time,” said Massey, associate dean for adult higher education and the online campus. “All of the truck stops now have Wi-Fi, so he can take his laptop on his truck and upload work at truck stops and take exams.”
Columbia College began offering online courses 10 years ago. There were 185 students, 10 courses, a few faculty members and no undergraduate degrees.
“It became wildly popular, and we added more courses as we created our first degree, then added more courses, more degrees,” Massey said. “Today we have, with only some exceptions, all undergraduate degrees online, and now we have over 40 staff members, graduate and undergraduate degrees; 300 adjunct faculty scattered around the world; and a third of our full-time faculty also teach online.”
On average, there are more than 16,000 enrollments in each session.
Because of the growth in online students, Columbia College acquired a building, the former home of Columbia Photo, located a half-block south of the main campus on North Eighth Street. The building houses a computer lab, but it’s not for students; it’s used by online instructors.
“There are no classes held in the lab because they’re all online,” Massey said. The online campus uses the space to train the instructors four times a year on a rotating basis. The two-day training sessions usually consist of about 30 newly hired faculty members.
“We train roughly 120 new instructors per year,” said Michele Smolik, director of instructional technology for the online campus. “While the training covers administrative policies and best practices for teaching online, the majority of the training is devoted to lab time in which instructors learn to use our learning management system, Desire2Learn.”
D2L is an online-based tool that houses all class content, including traditional classwork such as the syllabus and quizzes as well as nontraditional content such as videos, audio and photo slideshows created by instructional technicians at the college. There also are instant messaging tools for the students to communicate with one other.
The typical age range for online classes is slightly younger than students enrolled in Columbia College’s “in-seat” programs, which is 33 to 35, Massey said. “Online it’s two or three years younger.”
The average cost for an online class, $225 per credit hour, is $35 higher than on-campus classes.
“The online program overall costs the college more to deliver,” Massey said. “The extra cost is due to software. … It’s still much cheaper than traditional four-year universities.”
The vast majority of students take online classes to work toward a degree, according to Institutional Research Director Misty Haskamp. “For all Columbia College students who took any online course work in 2009, 98 percent were degree-seeking,” she said.
There is a 25-student cap on each online class to keep online discussions fluid and manageable, and every section of each class uses the same textbook.
“We try to keep it on the same scale,” said instructional technologist Fresa Jacobs.