Charles A. Wight, associate vice president for academic affairs at the University of Utah, joined the Tech Therapists recently to talk about the growth in online education. At the University of Utah, online education was at a “hobby level” for the past 10 years. But this spring the proposals for online courses had tripled, and Mr. Wight suspects this is a trend for the future.
“Right now, we teach about 5 percent of our credit hours in fully online courses,” he says. “I think in the next few years that will triple to 15 percent, then it will level off.”
“We have to be pretty careful,” he says, “because the people who are doing this are the early adopters and people who are into technology anyway. … As this becomes more mainstream, we have found that we have to help faculty incorporate good practices into their teaching, or we find that [online teaching] is done less carefully.”
