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In the year since the University of California launched its cross-campus online education program, it has worked to add more popular courses and make it easier for students to access amid low enrollment rates.
In recent months, UC officials have increased the number of general education courses offered online and developed a more simplified, easy-to-understand registration process.
The UC’s cross-campus enrollment program began in winter quarter 2014 with 11 courses, and 1,100 students enrolled across the UC system. A total of 1,500 students enrolled in 14 courses in fall quarter, said Ellen Osmundson, coordinator of the Innovative Learning Technology Initiative, the department within the Office of the President that runs UC Online and hosts the online cross-campus enrollment.
In the first three quarters of the program’s existence, however, fewer than 5 percent of enrollees have signed up for a class organized by a campus different from their own.
Officials sought to give students a wider range of options when signing up for classes, allowing them to take courses that may only be offered by another campus or with a professor they like who doesn’t teach at their school. The project’s funding for the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 academic years cost the state $10 million each year.
To up enrollment, officials are working to include more general education classes that tend to fill quickly, Osmundson said.
“The focus has been expanding these high-demand lower division courses our students need to graduate in a timely matter,” said University spokeswoman Shelly Meron.
Jochen Stutz, a UCLA professor who will be teaching Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences 2: “Air Pollution” through UC Online in spring for the first time, said he chose to move the course online because the traditional class consistently fills up quickly.
Though he is optimistic about how effective the online version of the class will be, he thinks awareness of the program, and online education as a whole, is still lacking.
“We asked our 180 students in AOS 2 last quarter how many of them had taken an online course, and it wasn’t more than 10,” he said.
By Sunday, Stutz’s online class was more than half full, with about 80 spaces left.
Along with offering more popular general education classes, several UC campuses, including UCLA, are working to make the registration process easier and course credit information more accessible, said James Williamson, director of Campus Educational Technology Systems and Administration, which helped implement UC Online at UCLA.
When the program launched, students could only cross-enroll at the UCLA Registrar’s Office in person, and information about which general education or major requirements a student would receive from a course hosted by a different campus had to be sought out from the department running the class, he said.
Now, the Registrar’s Office, on its website, explicitly states what general education and major requirements each course will count for UCLA students, he said.
Despite these changes, the program has had a hard time attracting students to sign up for courses hosted by campuses other than their own, though the format and credit policies are the same for all classes regardless of who is hosting it.
“Studies have shown that even when fully online courses are offered, people tend to take them in a 50-mile radius from their home,” Williamson said. “Why is that? I don’t know. It’s weird.”
Students who wish to cross-enroll currently must do so through a separate website from MyUCLA, which hosts enrollment for traditional classes as well as online classes organized by UCLA, Osmundson said. Her office is looking into ways to integrate cross-enrollment better with each school’s registration portal, she said.
With these improvements underway, Osmundson said she is optimistic the program will see a significant increase in student interest over the next few years, despite its slow initial growth.
Osmundson said she expects Gov. Jerry Brown to renew funding for UC Online for the 2015-2016 school year. In summer, Brown will sign the state’s budget, which may include funding for the program.
Clarification: The Innovative Learning Technology Initiative, not UC Online, hosts online cross-campus enrollment.