President Speaks: Course-sharing can help small colleges weather the pandemic – Education Dive
Officials at one institution explain why they are expanding work with a consortium to offer online classes to more students.
Richard Merriman Jr. is the former president of the University of Mount Union, in Ohio. Bryan Boatright is the assistant vice president for academic affairs and university registrar.
Like almost all other small private colleges with residential campuses, the past three months have tried our community in previously unthought of ways. The coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, forced us to shut down our campus in a matter of days and move all courses online.
But, in some ways, the situation has forced our institution into a promising experiment with online courses — drawing in the roughly half of our faculty who prior to March hadn’t taught online or even used our learning management system.
As we map our way through this crisis and beyond, we have a critical backup that could benefit many institutions like ours: membership in a course-sharing consortium. This consortium — the Council of Independent Colleges’ Online Course Sharing Consortium — allows us to navigate the current environment more nimbly, giving our students access to far more courses specifically designed for online and allowing us to better accommodate students’ increasingly complicated lives and demanding schedules.