Month: August 2009

I noted a couple of weeks ago that my professional responsibilities had changed as a function of my new role as department chair. The one component of this position that may be relevant to this blog is my administrative role associated with two department online programs (a graduate program in forensic psychology and the undergraduate major). The forensic program has been operating for a couple of years, but we are just rolling out the online undergraduate program. As I indicated in my previous post, my administrative role offers a different perspective than my previous roles as online instructor or graduate faculty member preparing other academics to teach online or design for online instruction.

Here is a concrete example – the financial challenge of an online program.

As a department, we have committed to a faculty in which all members are involved in teaching, research and service. We believe these roles are interdependent in that each is necessary and each role supports the others. When we moved last year to the initiation of the online major, we started by having existing faculty teach a few courses as overloads (with pay). However, this year with have added three faculty members. These individuals are not in tenure-track lines, but are given some expectation of stability. These individuals are expected to teach 5 “group” courses during the year (a 3-2 or 2-3) and all have research expectations. Nearly all of us are involved in teaching online courses, so the new hires both teach online and cover FTF courses when tenure-track faculty members teach online.

Here is a mathematical description of the money challenge. One can calculate the amount of return from tuition (approx. $225 per credit) that must be generated to cover instruction. We must generate approx. $13,300 per 3 credit course. The department receives approximately 55% of tuition dollars after money is taken out for Continuing Education and the college so we make about $370 per enrolled student. We do make some additional money in fees from 300-400 level courses. Here is the problem. We do very well in lower division courses and a few other courses taken by many majors. The problem is that we cap courses at 40 students and we must enroll approx. 36 students to cover instructional costs. So there is little room on the up side to generate a little extra money for administrative costs and GTA support (40 students online is a challenge and far more time consuming than 40 students FTF). When we get to courses likely to be taken by majors only we do receive an additional fee ($50 per credit), but we have far fewer students. The limited upside in fully enrolled courses does not compensate for the struggles to generate enrollments from online majors. We are pretty much breaking even.

I think we are doing what we should be doing to offer a quality program. We want those who take online courses to experience the same faculty members campus-based students experience. I offer this information as a concrete way of explaining what it takes. If our experiences are typical, universities need to be doing this because it is the right thing to do and not because they anticipate large financial gains.