U.S. colleges and universities are increasingly concerned about declining enrollments and financial woes.
National data finds 57% of college students are enrolled in programs where there is difficulty completing their degrees on time, according to Ad Astra – an academic software provider. In addition, 78% of completion paths have enrollment levels that are financially unsustainable.
A recent white paper from Acadeum – If You Love Them, Let Them Go – notes postsecondary institutions are collaborating to increase learner progress, and revenue, as well. Acadeum – which administers the network – notes colleges and universities are embracing course sharing as a way to retain students and keep them on track.
The course-sharing network includes more than 475 postsecondary institutions. Benefits to the educational institutions include expansion of their learning catalogs, utilization of courses from partner schools to build or restart programs, and additional earned revenues.
Students avoid the risk of losing transfer credits because courses on the network are pre-approved by their institutions and courses are fully online, with many offered asynchronously.
The white paper says, “Collaboration – not competition – is the path forward for higher education.”
University of Mount Union
The University of Mount Union in Alliance, Ohio is part of the course-sharing network.
Students who need specific courses to graduate on time may find they are not offered at their school during the needed timeframe. They might have the option to take those courses through the sharing network.
Bryan J. Boatright, Ed.D., associate VP for academic affairs and dean of graduate, digital, and continued learning at Mount Union, says, “There are 15,000 courses available on the platform at any given time. Even if I’ve only approved 2,000 of those for my students to use, I now have 2,000 options available to my students that I could never possibly hire the credentialed faculty to teach those things on my campus. I can’t afford them.
“But now I don’t have to worry about affording them because someone else is doing it and I’m just buying a seat in their class.”
The course sharing option has allowed Mount Union to increase its summer class offerings, reducing the number of students finding those courses elsewhere.
It’s also been a boost for athletic eligibility. “We had folks who were going to play football in the fall but couldn’t because they had a terrible spring,” says Boatright.
“They were able to remediate over the summer by taking some of these Acadeum courses, which made it a lot more flexible because they were online versus having to go to a campus somewhere or to Mount Union’s campus.”
Mount Union also offers its own courses on the Acadeum network. Boatright says, “Every course that we build online is to the specifications of Acadeum, which is Quality Matters.
Quality Matters – a non-profit, quality assurance organization – provides a system that reviews, provides improvement, and certification of quality.
As a liberal arts college, Boatright says students will use course sharing to enhance what they’ve learned in the humanities programs. “That doesn’t really help a lot with the workforce when they’re leaving unless they can find something very specific.
“So, many of them will use Acadeum as a way to gain credits towards certificates that are specific to workforce. A lot of our education majors will do that. They’re specifically doing it because they want to add those to the transcript so they can sit for a licensure later.”
Angelo State University
Angelo State University (ASU) in San Angelo, Texas initially partnered with Acadeum in 2019 help to students on academic probation. But the school became a more active partner in 2021, according to Meagan Word, Ed.D., the school’s director of student academic progress.
Word says, “We quickly realized that was a tip of the iceberg. We shifted our focus to practically all cohorts of our students.”
She says the course sharing option became beneficial for students who are active-duty military, student athletes. “We have many pre-professional programs that have very specific prerequisites. Oftentimes our transfer students or our increased population of dual-credit enrollments end up out of sequence in some of their courses. We were finding that students may not align with our course rotations, so we have used course sharing in a multitude of fashions to help many cohorts of our students.”
Word notes it’s difficult to offer the school’s entire course catalog online, as well as challenging to offer every required course every semester.
She says, “Traditionally speaking, and in my day in college, you had to find a workaround. Either you asked a professor to teach an independent study, which was extra work on the professor scheduling your time with the professor’s time.
“Or they would send you to another institution that you hoped matched. And you hoped you would get a transcript in time so that you could still graduate. With course sharing, you’ve alleviated all of those concerns.”
Word says the courses are delivered in a variety of ways – including links to articles, pre-recorded lectures, participation through different learning strategies, and group chats.
To date, she says about 400 ASU students have taken courses at another institution and about 100-150 students from other schools have taken ASU courses.
“I did academic advising for 11 years, so I had a very good idea as to where gaps were, where our students were struggling to meet those needs, where we were potentially losing enrollments, and students weren’t finishing their degree. So, that’s how I ended up in the position,” explains Word.
“Angelo State’s focus and main way to gauge success in any of our students is always retention and degree completion. For us, as an institution, for our students – the end goal is that you have a job offer.”
Read the full white paper – If You Love Them, Let Them Go – here.
