BURLINGAME — Late last week, Allen Community College received word from AffordableColleges.com that, after a nationwide survey, ACC had been selected third in a list of the country’s most affordable community colleges that offer online courses.
It’s one of many awards heaped onto ACC’s online learning program, which, today, includes more 1,600 students.
It’s difficult to appreciate, unless you’ve peeked into the bowels of the machine yourself, just how many moving parts make up ACC’s department of online learning. Besides the faculty, who teach the courses, the program depends on the collaboration of a 24/7 technology support staff, a retinue of academic advisors, an on-call tutoring company, a virtual library, writing center, bookstore, a couple of administrative assistants, and more.
“All the services the student needs depend on a huge web of support,” explained Regena Aye, who, as dean of online learning, has kept the program whirring with prosperous efficiency since 2010. “And so while online learning is being singled out for recognition, it really took the whole college to get us there.”
According to Aye, the popularity of online learning grew out of at least three predicaments that the traditional brick-and-mortar model of education was never able to adequately address:
“First, we can offer classes that neither campus can get enough critical mass to offer,” explained Aye, whose main office is located at the second of ACC’s two campuses, in Burlingame. “There may be two students interested in criminal justice in Iola and two at an area high school and two in Topeka and two here. We can bring all those students together to get enough to meet our minimum to have a course.” Where, previously, a college would yank from the course catalog a class that failed to meet the minimum number of students, “we can offer a deeper number of courses than either campus can, because we can pull those students from all over into a single class section.”
“Secondly, we’ve become a curriculum enhancer for the 62 high schools we work with. So, if your high school has budget cuts; or if you’re a rural high school and you can’t find a Spanish teacher or a math teacher who can teach calculus; or if your family and consumer science program has been cut because of the budget, but your students want to take an early childhood education class — that’s where we step in and can give your students more curriculum options.”
Currently, about 600 high school students take courses through ACC. “And every once in a while,” boasted Aye, “we’ll get students who graduate with their high school diploma and their associate’s degree at the same time.”
“And the third thing? People need classes that aren’t bound by days and times. People’s work schedules are different. A lot of folks have more than one job. And they need something that’s flexible, that they can do after the kids go to bed or on the weekend or when they have a family member to watch the kids. So we fill that gap as well.”
MUCH OF ACC’s online success is to do with its rigorous attempts to swaddle each student who participates in this form of “distance learning” with as much support as is institutionally possible.
“Because it’s easy to feel isolated,” said Aye. “It’s simple to walk into the front office at a school and tell someone you need to see a counselor. But if you’re online and you don’t know who to contact, it can be really hard to navigate those processes.”
To this end, the college, besides having been early in adopting a standardized and highly interactive interface across all of their online classes, has added a “student support technician,” whose goal, in nurturing a constructive relationship with the online enrollee, is to ensure that the beginning student is able to see his coursework through to the end.
“One of the myths of online learning is that it’s easier,” said Aye. “Well, it’s not. It’s harder. You’re more on your own. You need self-discipline and good time-management skills.
“Most online programs will have a success rate of 45 -50 percent, which is incredibly low. But, at Allen, our success rate is much higher. In the fall of 2015, 74 percent of our students who were in an online class on the twentieth day completed with a C or higher. In the spring of 2016, it was 77 percent.”
But Allen’s goal is to prime online students for life after community college, too, said Aye. She gives much of the credit for that to the college’s vice president of academic affairs, Jon Marshall, who has been tireless in crafting arrangements with the area’s four-year universities, so that a student’s transition from a two-year college to a larger school will be as happy and as profitable as possible.
“For instance, Kansas State University has quite a few “2+2” agreements with us. What that means is that you do two years at a community college and you take the curriculum that K-State wants you to take at Allen. And then when you go to K-State, it’s already lined up that those credits will transfer, and then you enter as a junior and know what you need to take at K-State those last two years.”
