Joliet Junior College will seek to increase online offerings for students.

JJC now offers 52 online courses, but students can not complete the work to earn an associate degree for an entire program by taking a class over a computer. However, administrators have started studying ways to increase online offerings.

Administrators discussed the new effort Wednesday night before the college board.

President Gena Proulx and Dennis Haynes, the interim vice president of academic affairs, met Wednesday with an official of Franklin University in Columbus, Ohio, which runs the Community College Alliance. More than 225 community and technical colleges across the country have joined the alliance, which allows students to earn a bachelor’s degree by taking an online courses at their local community college.

“The discussion that we had with Franklin University is not just about allowing our students to get a bachelor degrees online,” Proulx said.

“It is important for our staff members, who might have an associate degree and want to get a bachelor’s degree online.”

The goal is to offer JJC freshman in the fall of 2007 the chance to earn an associate degree by completing their course load entirely through online classes, Haynes said. Students could take classes from a computer at home or at JJC and, in a pursuit of a bachelor’s degree, have the credits transfer to a four-year college, he said.

“Compared with other community colleges, we’re not where we need to be with our online courses in terms of the numbers or degrees online,” Proulx said.

“Some colleges that we have looked at have 30, 40 or 45 degrees online and we don’t have any. We need to ramp up what we’re doing.”

For the coming year, faculty members are developing 17 new online courses, Proulx said. But it takes ”an awful long time” for the faculty to prepare an online class, she added.

Students are increasingly logging onto the college’s Web site to register for classes, Harderson said. So far for the upcoming semester, 5,488 students have registered with their computer, compared to 5,057 last year and 1,570 for the 2004 fall semester, he noted.

This entry was posted by Taman Siswa on Saturday, August 12, 2006 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Education News, Online Education. Tags: College, Student, Study, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.