Dive Brief:
- Community colleges will have a new option for sharing online courses through a consortium from the nonprofit League for Innovation in the Community College and course-sharing platform developer Academy.
- Colleges must be members of the League to join. They can offer other participants’ courses to their students for credit, and they can enroll students from other schools in their classes.
- Online course-sharing gained traction during the pandemic as colleges sought to address gaps in their remote learning offerings.
Dive Insight:
The new consortium would apply the concept nationally, said Joshua Pierce, Acadeum’s CEO and co-founder. Community colleges already shared courses within regionally focused groups such as Texas’s DigiTex (run by Acadeum), MarylandOnline’s Seat Bank, and New Mexico’s SUN Online. More than 300 U.S.-based schools are currently listed as members of the League.
Academy is behind several other regional and nationwide course-sharing efforts, including the Council of Independent Colleges’ Online Course Sharing Consortium, formed in 2018 and features four-year schools. While the concept has been around for decades, it is not as developed among community colleges as in other higher ed segments, Pierce said.
Supporters of the practice say it can help schools fill gaps in their curricula and make money from enrolling students from other institutions. These agreements can also satisfy transfer credits easier as participating colleges can predetermine what courses they will accept.
Interest in online course-sharing ticketd up during the pandemic. Academy added a consortium for colleges to help students whose education was disrupted by the pandemic. He said that initiative didn’t end up enrolling as many students as they had hoped. Still, the company added 125 colleges last year and now has more than 350 schools in its network.
“Covid was definitely an accelerant to schools getting in the pipeline, closing faster, and then launching,” Pierce said. Other online course-sharing options cropped up during the pandemic, including a platform for schools in the Big Ten athletic conference and another for the University of Massachusetts’s campuses.
Schools in the new consortium apply and are approved to offer classes on the platform. Other colleges independently vet the courses before providing them to their students. Unless the lessons being shared are part of a new program launch, schools don’t need their accreditors to sign off on the offerings, an Academy spokesperson said in an email. Institutions pay an annual fee to participate in course-sharing, a cost based on enrollment and the consortium. Students spend their college as they usually would.
It comes as another course-sharing platform involving community colleges tries to get off the ground. Annual, which counts several community colleges among its founding partners, aims to offer short-term courses to the public that connect to skills demanded in the job market. It can also be a pipeline tool for the colleges. EdSurge reports that the platform recently marked its second anniversary, has people using it “in the hundreds,” and is looking to ramp up. Editor’s note: This article has been updated with more details about the new course-sharing initiative.
