Carleton is developing eight new online courses and modules to be released in September.
The initiative comes from a funding opportunity set up by the Ontario government. Carleton received the third highest number of funded courses in the province with eight approved courses.
New online courses will be forensic psychology, structural equational modelling (psychology), big data history, written comprehension I (French), and business statistics I and II (math).
New online modules, which are online components to in-person classes, will include R for biologists (a biology course about a programming language), fundamentals for polyhedral combinatorics (math), and children’s rights.
Ontario Online announced the funding opportunity for any post-secondary institutions in Ontario. The body has offered funding and collaboration opportunities on online courses to provide more options to post-secondary students since 2014.
Carleton responded by alerting all faculty members of the opportunity. Through Teaching and Learning services, Carleton faculty members developed approximately 30 proposals to submit for online courses and modules. Proposals included budgets tailored for each online course and module with a cap set by Ontario online at $75,000 per online course.
“What really made this call for proposals different from the previous one is that there was a significant component of the evaluation of the proposals based on finding high quality collaborators and collaborations that were rich,” said Patrick Lyons, Carleton’s director of teaching and learning.
Some of the courses will be developed and shared across institutions, Lyons said, like the forensic psychology course being developed by Carleton professors Shelley Brown and Adelle Forth. The course is being developed in partnership with Brock University and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, and will be available to students at all three institutions.
Expenses involved in developing online courses could include production costs such as filming high-quality videos to be included in the course, compensating faculties for professors who will take a lighter course load while the course is being developed, and quality assurance from external reviewers to test that everything is functional. Costs are also included for accessibility, such as including closed captioning or other accommodations for students with disabilities.
Developing online courses is meant to strategically increase student outreach, Lyons said.
“We know that students are looking for increased flexibility, increased options, and we also know that some students ultimately prefer the environment that’s offered online,” Lyons said.
Nate Bryan, who’s taken an online course at Carleton before, said it was both a positive and negative experience, partly because of the heightened opportunity for procrastination.
“It’s a nice option to be able to have if you can’t get things [in your schedule] to work the way you want,” Bryan said.
Kate Yang, another Carleton student, said she might take an online course, depending on what type of course it is.
She said the option is nice for in-class courses with huge class sizes, but she wouldn’t want to take a language course online.
The courses will operate on Carleton’s already-established online course platform, and be supported by CUOL.
