Demand for online courses rises at UPEI

Demand is rising at UPEI for courses delivered online, and the university is responding with more offerings, officials say.

The school now offers 43 courses online, compared to 34 in the summer of 2017. Registrations for those courses have risen from 1,261 to 1,708.

"It has been growing quite a bit over the last few years," said Kathy Gottschall-Pass, the interim vice-president academic and research at UPEI.

"It just give students more options to be able to learn at their own pace."

She said during winter when classes are often cancelled due to storms, students taking online courses can continue their work uninterrupted.

We are the world

More students are also taking longer to complete degrees since they also hold down jobs, she said.

"They're doing a few courses at a time, and having online options just gives them so much more flexibility often they can work on them on evenings or weekends," she said. "So it's really quite advantageous."

Some courses are now offered with both in-person and online components, she said.

Gottschall-Pass notes a master of education is the only degree that UPEI students currently can get completely online.

"What that means is we often have students from across Canada or across the world taking our program at the same time!" she said.

'Part of the culture'

What about the valuable discussion and dissemination that takes place in classrooms?

Faculty using online courses often make online discussion groups, Gottschall-Pass said. Some courses allow students to connect online and see other students, and even press a button to "raise their hand" and ask a question they type in.

"Technology really allows us to do a lot of things virtually.Years ago we could only do face-to-face in the classroom," she said.

Attitudes have changed toward online courses, too, she said.

"Students are very digitally-savvy," Gottschall-Pass said. "So they're very accepting of online options."

Professors have also been learning how to do the courses in more interactive and interesting ways, she said.

"The more successes we see the more requests we have from students ... it becomes part of the culture," she said.

She said UPEI is discussing developing more online courses in the future.

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