To enable reliable reporting on distance/online programs that provide increased access for students to complete coursework from locations other than campus, the Distance Education Coding Committee is proposing that all seven campuses of the UMS use one or two methods for coding students in distance/online academic offerings, with the potential for one institution using a different methodology as determined by that campus.
Over the past few decades, opportunities and need for students to complete UMS programs and courses either partially or fully through modalities other than face-to-face, campus-based instruction have grown. These online/distance courses and programs align with the UMS mission to provide access to a wide range of academic programming to as many students as possible. Through online courses, regional centers, and low-residency programs, the UMS meets students where they are and provides relevant programming in modalities that fit with many students’ daily lives and geographic locations. Academic offerings include graduate programs, undergraduate majors, minors, certificates (grad and undergrad), etc. that are offered to students through technology, online or otherwise.
At the time of this proposal, a few methods exist within the UMS for coding students in distance/online programs:
UMFK codes students enrolled in distance/online programs at the academic plan level (major), which provides transparency in terms of student enrollment in distance/online programs, but complicates reporting that focuses on academic areas and reports across program modalities (e.g., to report on Nursing enrollment, one must know that there is a second Academic Plan to add to ‘Nursing’ plan enrollment, namely ‘Nursing Online’).
At UM, UMM, UMPI, and USM, students in distance programs are assigned to a Student Group for online education. Student Group is a difficult data field to maintain after the initial assignment to the group. Using this field is an easy up-front solution, but one that results in a fair amount of inaccuracy in the data. Students who are put into the student group are often not removed from it if they change their major, change their status from online to face-to-face (or vice versa), graduate from that particular program (the group needs to be discontinued at completion), or many other data changes that result in inaccuracies.
At UMA and UMF, distance/online students are not tracked at the program or student levels in PeopleSoft. At UMA, information on distance/online enrollment is gathered on individual students by examining the modalities of students’ course enrollments. At UMF, enrollment in distance/online programs is at the program level-where all students enrolled in a given distance/online program are known to be distance/online students by nature of the program itself, but the programs are not designated as distance/online in PeopleSoft.
Over the past few decades, opportunities and need for students to complete UMS programs and courses either partially or fully through modalities other than face-to-face, campus-based instruction have grown. These online/distance courses and programs align with the UMS mission to provide access to a wide range of academic programming to as many students as possible. Through online courses, regional centers, and low-residency programs, the UMS meets students where they are and provides relevant programming in modalities that fit with many students’ daily lives and geographic locations. In order to plan and evaluate these distance/online courses and programs, and to track student success in these academic endeavors, it is critical that we be able to accurately and easily identify these courses and programs, as well as the students enrolled in them.