Community Colleges still in Demand in Distance Education

Online education seems to be the future of the education sector and it continues to grow, reports suggest. According to a report by the Instructional Technology Council, online enrolment in community colleges in the year 2013 saw growth even if the overall enrolment in such two- year institutions seemed to drop. The Council is affiliated to the American Association of Community Colleges and released this report, on online learning, in their annual meeting.

In the year 2013, around 142 officials, related to distance education, who responded to the survey said enrolments for community colleges were up by 5.2%, which is lower than previous years, but they also pointed out that in those years, the overall enrolment both in-person and online, was higher but that was not the case in 2013. So basically the trend has changed over the years resulting in the drop.

“Online enrollment has continued to be the predominant source of enrollment growth in higher education during the last nine years, and the growth in online enrollment continues to slow.”

– Instructional Technology Council's report

Interesting stats the report revealed

The report revealed a few rather interesting figures and facts. It shows how important online education is to community colleges but says that is doesn’t always apply to MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses. The report says that nowadays it appears that colleges are deciding against MOOCs and not going that way at all. 42% of the survey respondents, last year, said that they had no plans of including MOOC content in their courses and this year that figure has increased to 73%. The report also adds that just about 3% of the colleges are actually using the content from MOOCs in their courses.

“Poor student retention rates and public failures...have called the appropriateness of the MOOC approach into question. Distance educators were aghast to hear MOOC executives state that only 5 to 6 percent of their students completed the MOOCs in which they enrolled. Their college administrators would never have allowed them to continued teaching online with such low student retention rates.”

– Instructional Technology Council's report

Some other findings & revelations

According to the report, in the learning management system market of community colleges, the loss of market shares have stopped. Comparing Blackboard with other products has not been easy as, it has bought other entities like Angel, etc. over the years. However, along with the other entities and products, Blackboard now captures 58% of the shares at community colleges. Other products that have been gaining ground are Moodle, that has risen to 17% this year from last year’s 14% and Instructure Canvas has also risen in the community college scenario with 12.5% compared to last year’s 9. One product that has lost ground, considerably, is Desire2Learn.

Out of the survey respondents, 54% say that their institutions charge a payment or fee for the distance courses they provide. The fee varies from $4 to $75 per credit with a standard of $23.

One of the biggest challenges faced by administrators of distance education is to provide sufficient services for students who take up distance learning. In fact, according to the report, this is the third year in which this challenge has been identified.

So it would be right to say that online enrolment to community colleges is on the decline but still going strong. This goes to prove that the demand for online community college courses has not stagnated completely.