CSU and California Community Colleges Partner on a Tool to Find Transferable Online Courses
Two of the largest higher-education systems in the country are partnering to pilot an online course finder tool to increase students’ access to 10,000 online and transferable courses.
The year-long initiative, called Finish Faster!, launches this month for students enrolled in a California State University or California Community College, together which serve nearly 2.6 million learners.
“This collaboration with CSU gives both systems the opportunity to better serve our state's students so they can complete their higher education goals even faster,” Alice Perez, vice chancellor of Academic Affairs for the California Community College system, said in a prepared statement.
Students may use the course finder to finish CSU breadth or general-education requirements during the summer to help them graduate on time. At the community college level, students could take online courses from either a California community college or a CSU in order to more quickly meet requirements to transfer or complete an associate's degree.
Students already had the option to take courses from other California state institutions for transfer credit. Gerry Hanley, assistant vice chancellor for academic technology services at CSU, says that the tool is intended to make that process faster by cutting down the time it takes students to search for courses they need.
“When you have half a million students in the CSU system, there are going to be some semesters where a campus may not be able to provide enough seats in the courses for all the students,” says Hanley. The goal is to make it easier for students leverage both college systems to get the online courses they need to graduate on time.
California community colleges have also struggled in the past to help students get the courses they need to finish on time. A report by the Public Policy Institute of California found in 2013 that nearly 600,000 students could not enroll in classes after budget cuts that led to reduced staffing and slashed course offerings.
Legislative proposals to turn to massive open online courses and other third-party learning providers to step in to fill those gaps with online courses were met with opposition from faculty members skeptical of the for-profit providers, Inside Higher Ed reported.
The tool would instead be used to help facilitate a transfer of courses from campuses that have not reached full capacity and connect open seats to students at other campuses where a particular course isn’t available.
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