Groundbreaking legislation in California would compel the state’s public universities and colleges to provide a system of faculty-approved, online courses for college credit.
The bill’s author, California Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, said it would represent the first time state legislators have asked public colleges to bestow academic credit for courses online.
The law seeks to address serious concerns with the availability of courses, Steinberg said, in the hopes that more approved online classes would eliminate the “bottleneck” of students awaiting a seat in the classes they need. At public universities within California and across the country, if courses are at capacity, students cannot obtain seats for classes required to complete their majors. Consequently, they must often wait for the next available class, a situation that could pose financial problems for students who have to stay on for another semester to meet their credit requirements.
“No college student in California should be denied the right to complete their education because they could not get a seat in the course they need in order to graduate,” said Steinberg during a recent online press conference.
If the bill passes, it will open the door further for massive open online courses (MOOCs), which have made fast inroads into the educational landscape and opened up online classrooms for unlimited numbers of students. But Steinberg assured constituents that this move is not seeking to create a substitute for campus-based institutions.
Under the new law, faculty would certify up to 50 online courses in areas where these bottlenecks are happening, he said, and only if the university is not already offering an online alternative. The 50 courses can be from anywhere, but they must be approved by a nine-member panel at the institution. This legislation also does not represent a funding shift from California’s current priorities.
Rich Copenhagen, President of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, joined Steinberg’s press conference to urge constituents to support the legislation. As it stands now, he said, many students face serious financial hardship because they can’t get into needed classes, with some forced to waste money on semesters of frivolous classes in order to keep financial aid as they wait for necessary courses to open up. This law would alleviate that problem.
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