Portland State’s Center for Online Learning is beginning to feel growing pains. The center, which designs online and hybrid courses at PSU, has accumulated a $2 million surplus, generated by the Online Learning Fee. It is now planning to spend the revenue on renovations for a new location, hiring staff and providing additional services for faculty and students.
Portland State’s Center for Online Learning is beginning to feel growing pains. The center, which designs online and hybrid courses at PSU, has accumulated a $2 million surplus, generated by the Online Learning Fee. It is now planning to spend the revenue on renovations for a new location, hiring staff and providing additional services for faculty and students.
The online learning fee—an additional fee charged to students’ accounts—is $30 per credit hour for partial online classes, or hybrid courses, and $60 per credit hour for full online classes. Students taking online courses first incurred these charges in the 2010–11 academic year. The surplus is a result of the accumulation of online learning fees; however, a state-mandated hiring freeze left the center understaffed, preventing it from providing much needed support to students, faculty and staff, while still collecting the same amount of fees.
According to Melody Rose, vice provost of Academic Programs and Instruction, the freeze prevented the center from expanding its staff. “The hiring pause has prevented COL from hiring all the additional staff needed for service to the campus,” she said in an email.
The freeze ended in March in tandem with the closing of the most recent Oregon Legislative session. During the freeze, the state of Oregon hired 1,931 employees, including one position in the Center for Online Learning at PSU. Johannes De Gruyter was hired as a policy analyst on March 1. “He was hired because we have to be in compliance with state and federal law and COL didn’t have anyone in place to help us meet the guidelines,” Rose said.
“There are significant issues in state and federal compliance matters related to online learning that we need to resolve (copyright law, ADA, intellectual property, etc.),” Rose said via email. “Johannes was hired to help faculty be compliant with these laws and with the new federal guidelines that required universities to get permission from each state where we have online students.”
Rose said that because the online learning fee is a relatively new charge, it is difficult to estimate revenue. “Given that revenues fluctuate with student online learning demand and the fact that we don’t have years’ worth of data for that demand, making revenue projections is tough. What I can tell you is that last fiscal year the fee produced over $2 million in revenues,” Rose said.
It is anticipated that the surplus will be used for renovations at the center’s new location. It is currently located in a non-PSU owned building and must allocate some collected funds for rental costs.
“We will use most of the reserve to do renovations and to move the team to a more central location next year. Moving will save money long-term and create better accessibility for our faculty,” Rose said.
As of now there are two full-time staff members working in the center’s Learning Technology Collaboratory. Additionally, the center has instructional designers training staff members who want to develop online courses. The designers and faculty work together to design rubrics that make course goals clearer for students and streamlines the development process.
Nancylee Stewart, a part-time online instructor, wrote in an email interview that there are always struggles to overcome when it comes to designing an online course. “When teaching to a rubric, it is sometimes a challenge to incorporate some aspects of course content and have them fit into the rubric structure.”
“It is a little harder to ‘read’ students and get immediate feedback about what they do and don’t get,” said Adjunct Professor Sarah Sterling in an email. Sterling also teaches online courses. “My sense is that some students respond better to online classes than others…I think students are best served by having both face to face and online options,” she said.
Both professors said that the center significantly assisted them in developing their online courses, although both expressed it would be difficult for them to teach a course developed by another professor.
“Like any faculty member teaching a regular face-to-face course, I write and compile my online lectures to reflect my background, and I choose examples that I have found to be effective in demonstrating important disciplinary concepts,” Sterling said. “Another faculty member may or may not employ my lecture topic selections to teach a particular subject. I would not feel comfortable teaching an online class written or compiled by another instructor for the same reason,” she added.
Stewart had some reservations but said, “[It’s] very possible. However, as a professor, courses are often updated based on new practice and policies in the area of study; current events; my learning curve about how to develop better classes, new resources, etc,” she said. “The greater consistency that working with the COL brings, however, would definitely be a help for another teacher to teach the course.”
COL Director Gary Brown said that it is also working on several initiatives to increase the efficiency of the online learning system. The center will be partnering with the Office of Information Technology in order to expand technical support for online and hybrid courses.
“In addition to working with OIT to create templates that promote a common look and feel (and more efficient technical support), we are also implementing a review process based upon a national effort that has identified best practices in online course design,” Brown wrote in an email.
“Another key initiative—directly supported by the fee—has been our effort to provide better technical and application support for all online and hybrid courses as well as for those that may be simply web-enhanced,” Brown said. “In collaboration with OIT, we are gathering better data to understand where and what kinds of support will be most useful, online and at Smith Center, for students and for faculty,” he added.
Online enrollment has seen a drop in the last year, according to statistics provided by Brown.
“We had 2,225 students enrolled this spring compared with 2,632 last spring, so there was a slight decline,” Brown said. However, he added that many of the online classes offered by PSU were being filled. PSU currently offers more than 1,000 online and hybrid courses, which are supported by other universities statewide.
