The University of Akron Faculty Senate has voted to suspend the “GenEd Core” courses at Wayne College, based on a preliminary report indicating students aren’t doing well enough in the classes.
“This is not an elimination of GenEd courses at Wayne. It’s not even eliminating every online GenEd course at Wayne. It’s specifically a suspension of ‘GenEd Core’ courses, that is those courses taught online through Wayne at a low-low rate,” said faculty member Constance Bouchard, who made the motion at Thursday’s Faculty Senate meeting. “The official report notes failure rates were significantly higher in these online courses than in face-to-face versions of the same courses … this multiplication of online courses lure in unprepared students with their extremely low prices and sets them up for failure.”
The preliminary report, prepared by the administration, looks at the results of the program rolled out a year ago by UA President Scott Scarborough.
According to the report, 70 percent of the grades were C or better but 30 percent were D’s and F’s. The withdrawal rate for the GenEd Core courses was 8.8 percent, which is worse than for other GenEd courses. Of the 601 GenEd Core students nearly two-thirds are freshmen and sophomores. A quarter of the students who took one of the courses in the fall semester failed to register for another spring semester.
The average grade for all the students in GenEd Core courses is a C-plus.
Boosting enrollment
In an interview with the president on Monday, Scarborough named the program as one of his top five incentives to help increase enrollment. He said the idea is to attract students away from other community colleges with extremely cheap general education courses, offering a fee of only $50 a credit hour rather than the usual $350.
“A lot of people are afraid of the cost of higher education, so we wanted to do something that said you don’t have to go to a community college if you don’t want to. We offer also very low cost general education courses that you can take here and get your start here and then stay a part of a four-year university.”
He said the university offers 12 or 13 of the most common general education classes at one-half the cost it would be at a community college.
“It helps students lower the total cost of their college degree,” Scarborough said. “There is a minimum ACT you have to have to come here, unless you want to begin at Wayne College, which is our community college in Orrville, these courses are offered there and any student can take the classes.”
Lessons online only
Bouchard, a history professor at UA, said the courses were billed as “blended,” roughly 50-50 online and face-to-face, with a significant “experiential, real world hands-on experience” component. But in practice, the courses have been 100 percent online.
“The overwhelming majority of the students [roughly 85 percent] who took these courses last fall were not newly lured students, but ones already at UA, so it was not a recruiting device,” said Bouchard, who also criticized the advertising for the program. “The failure to advertise it since the one big announcement a year ago means the students signing up now for fall 2016 are also our current students or students who planned to come anyway … and want to save some money.”
She said all the courses had been taught before as online courses, one or two sections at a time. Now dozens of sections are offered online and the regular face-to-face GenEd courses, both on the main campus and at Wayne College, have been substantially reduced.
“This is deplorable,” she said, “since every study has indicated that those with weaker academic background — and those early in their college career — do much worse in an online format than a regular face-to-face class.”
She said that’s why the faculty is upset; it sets up “our most vulnerable students for failure.”
Bouchard said Jim Tressel offered some online GenEd courses for incoming freshmen in the summer when he was head of Student Success three years ago.
“The students flunked in droves. … With all the distractions of summer, unprepared students are not going to do well in a course packed into five or eight weeks rather than the normal 15. In fact, it was so bad, the students had their failing grades erased from their transcripts.”
Todd A. Rickel, the UA vice provost who proposed the program to the president and whose office did the preliminary report, said on a positive note the new GenEd Core classes have triple the number of transfer students that regular courses do.
Rickel said the program was designed as a “two-year pilot project to gauge receptivity to the program and make any needed adjustments to it.”
He did point out that the Faculty Senate Academic Policies Committee — which conducted a review of the initial motion — “unanimously recommended that it is too soon to make any decisions about the program and recommended getting more data. We concur with that thinking.”
Marilyn Miller can be reached at 330-996-3098 or mmiller@thebeaconjournal.com.