It was supposed to help students “swirl,” or take classes from different colleges at the same time.
Most Utah public-college students apparently prefer their distance education straight.
By next month, the Utah System of Higher Education plans to disband its Utah eLearning Connection. The decade-old consortium didn’t grant degrees, but it served as a central broker where students could access online courses offered by 10 public colleges in Utah through one application and one registration site.
Sound familiar? The latest victim of recession budget cut carnage is closing as a related program in Texas also faces steep budget cuts. Analysts predicted the recession would be a “bumpy economic ride” for such consortia in a recent paper, “The Funding of Academic Collaborations,” prepared by the technology cooperative WCET and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.
The Utah consortium was “a fairly small operation,” said Gary Wixom, assistant commissioner for academic affairs at the Utah System of Higher Education.
“As the Legislature and others looked at what needed to be done,” he said, “it didn’t have a high enough priority to withstand the reduction in funding.”
With an annual budget of about $250,000, the Utah eLearning Connection served just 200 students. An announcement on the program’s Web site says the consortium will work with its partners to “transition students to your designated home colleges.” Three people are being laid off, Mr. Wixom said.
Two ideas animated the consortium. One was to help rural students gain access to college. The other was to make it easy for students to take courses at more than one campus simultaneously, says Charles A. Wight, associate vice president for academic affairs at the University of Utah.
“I think they thought that market was larger than it really turned out to be,” Mr. Wight says. —Marc Parry
