With almost 75 percent of Northwest Vista College students attending college part-time, giving students options has been a priority for this college. And one of those options has been online classes.
Almost 15 percent of course sections at NVC are fully online. If we exclude math and INRW refreshers and orientations, there are 324 fully online sections out of a total of 2,311 course sections. Additionally, 208 faculty, or about 25 percent of the faculty, are certified to teach online courses.
Laura Lawrence, NVC director of Teaching with Technology, says, “Those are the highest numbers we’ve ever seen in both the number/percentage of online courses and the number of online-certified faculty. I believe NVC should be very proud of these statistics as we have shown that we can increase course availability even when our buildings are full to capacity, and we can say that our faculty are proactively seeking certification to meet those student needs.”
Many students like online classes due to the flexibility they provide, especially while trying to juggle work and families. A 2015 Babson study said that more than one in four students (28 percent) now take at least one distance education course (a total of 5,828,826 students, a year-to-year increase of 217,275).
Here are some more interesting tidbits about the growth of online classes at NVC:
- In Spring 2010, we offered 145 online sections; by Spring 2016, that number had doubled.
- Since 2010, the number of different courses (not sections) offered online has also more than doubled, from 52 to 112.