Megan Reed, Campus Carrier Editor-in-Chief
Berry will begin offering some summer courses online beginning in the summer of 2015.
These courses will give students the option to take a course with a Berry professor and receive course credit without living on campus during the summer. Students also currently have the option to take a summer course at another college and transfer the credits to Berry.
“We had been looking for several years at the number of our students who do transient work at other institutions and talking about ways that we might be able to provide courses here that would work for them, recognizing that students need to be different places during the summer working or interning,” provost Kathy Richardson said. “We decided we would be willing to experiment, to do some alternative delivery courses next summer, just to see if that might work for our students.”
Courses offered this summer will include Introduction to Psychology, American National Government, Introduction to Literature and Orientation to Animal Science.
Some faculty members may choose to make their course a “hybrid course” and require students to meet on campus for some lessons or exams. Richardson said the professor teaching the course will have the opportunity to decide what will be the most effective.
“There is no one size fits all,” Richardson said.
Junior Ree Palmer, who serves on the Academic Council, said training will be provided next month to help faculty prepare to teach hybrid courses and to familiarize them with video technology.
Faculty would continue to use Viking Web for many functions of the course, and a committee is currently looking at other programs, chief information officer Penny Evans-Plants said.
“Various areas [on campus] have lecture capture ability. We have that in the new sandbox in the library,” Evans-Plants said. “But we don’t have a campus-wide system for managing lecture capture, and of course we don’t have any sort of video management system now.”
Evans-Plants said a decision about the specific programs to be used will be made next semester.
Some faculty members will live-stream their lectures, while others will prerecord video clips for students to view. Evans-Plants said programs will be available for either option, as well as online chat programs for students to have discussions or ask professors questions.
Professor of psychology Alan Hughes, who will be teaching Introduction to Psychology over the summer, said he plans to utilize this technology to facilitate class discussion.
“There will be assigned readings where of course students will have to read chapters, but I plan to assign times where we all would be online doing conference chats about the material,” he said. “I can pose questions and have them discuss, and we’ll have dialogue that way.”
Hughes said he believes students will be able to learn just as much from an online course as a traditional on-campus course.
“I do think the class can be as meaningful, as rich as it would be here,” he said. “I envision the class to be very much the same. It’s just not in person.”
Richardson said this summer will serve as an experiment for alternative delivery courses, and the college will then assess students and faculty to determine the effectiveness of the courses.
“Will faculty feel that students are accomplishing the learning outcomes for the course? Do the students feel as though they’ve learned what they should have in the course?” Richardson said. “We’ll embed some different questions on the course evaluation instrument and really encourage students to give us some good feedback there.”
Palmer said she was anticipating student feedback and believes that offering courses online will be beneficial to students.
“I know for students like me, who have double majors, things can be tricky sometimes with getting classes to fall into the right place,” she said. “I hope that it opens flexibility for students to take classes in the summer and get … the excellency of Berry professors.”
Registration for classes for summer 2015 will be open in March.