The University of California’s 10 campuses, facing severe budget cuts, may no longer be able to educate as many students as before. This month Christopher Edley Jr., dean of Boalt Hall, the law school on the Berkeley campus, proposed a surprising solution in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece: Open an 11th campus, online. Mr. Edley found receptive ears in Sacramento, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s adviser for jobs and economic growth, David Crane, says it “is something we are very interested in hearing more about.”
Mr. Edley obliges, in an interview with The Chronicle:
Q. Why is an online campus an urgent issue?
A. My primary passions are in the racial-justice arena, and it’s perfectly predictable that underrepresented minorities will increasingly be left behind unless we find new strategies.
Q. What made you consider online education?
A. Many transfer-ready students in the community-college system were opting to go to the University of Phoenix rather than go to UC. Even more surprising, this phenomenon was disproportionately true for blacks and Latinos. My hypothesis is that it is because of the convenience—the ability to do part-time, anytime course work, the ability to work part time, stay at home, et cetera. So the question is, How do we go about creating a model for online instruction that has the quality characteristic of a UC education and that can be done at a scale that would permit the university to service the entire 12.5 percent of the California college-aged cohort that the state’s master plan for higher ed contemplates? We’re currently only serving about 60 percent [of that proportion of the cohort].
Q. Opening up an online campus has upfront costs. How could this program be financed?
A. I am very confident that if we decide to move forward, we can raise private resources for the upfront investment, either from donations from friends of the university that are eager to see us develop new revenue streams, or from private investors who would front the capital in return for a slice of the net revenues.
Q. How have faculty members reacted to your proposal of an 11th online campus?
A. The reactions have been mixed, but I think cautiously supportive. There are only a few people that are immediately and decisively dismissive. Most, I think, can imagine something working at some level at some point, so the devil is in the details.
This has got to be more than a course here and a course there to reduce pressure on the political-science department or the gateway course in nanotechnology. I’d say wait until we present a fully developed plan.
On the Berkeley campus, there’s a significant body of opinion that thinks professional master’s degrees may be more promising than undergraduate offerings. That’s not my sense of the possibilities, but I could well be wrong. It could be that both upper- and lower-division degrees work.
Q. How would you ensure that the quality of the online campus is at a University of California level?
A. First, use the best teachers and very high production values in the video offerings, not just setting up a camera in the back of the room while somebody delivers their lecture. Second, each course has to have content assessments and grading that are every bit equal to what one gets on campus. Third, the tuition has to be sufficient to support this venture completely, so that it doesn’t pull state appropriations away from the traditional on-campus enterprise. As a practical matter, my personal view is that tuition should be equal to the on-campus tuition, in part to signal that we really do expect the quality to be the same.
Q. What are the benefits for students?
A. Students would still have considerable savings because they wouldn’t have housing costs and many of the other financial burdens involved in full-time campus education.
I also think that one important possibility here is that online offerings, particularly in the lower division, could relieve the pressure on in-class instruction or for on-campus students that currently face the squeeze getting into key gateway courses.
Ideally, one would have on-campus and online students enrolled in the same offering, which would further underscore the academic equivalence of the course work.
Q. Would the cybercampus be restricted to California students?
A. I think the potential market for this is not only tens upon tens of thousands of UC-eligible students for whom we don’t have room because of limited state appropriations, but also [those] in Kentucky and Kuala Lumpur who may find that a cyberdegree from the world’s greatest public university is better than the options available to them locally.
Q. Should current faculty members teach these courses, or would the university look for new professors?
A. The faculty leading this would have to be core tenure-track UC faculty. It’s a UC degree, and the Academic Senate—appropriately—would insist that the faculty would be indistinguishable from the traditional faculty. So I would expect that the best faculty would teach regular courses, and that some cybercourses would be included in their course mix. There would have to be an instructor of record and graduate students available for one-on-one contact and for grading purposes.
My own hope is that various campuses in our 10-campus system will develop lower-division online programs using their own faculty or borrowing from other campuses. Then the upper-division work, where students have to declare a major and expect more-specific offerings, would be carried out at the level of the UC system, drawing on faculty resources from all 10 campuses. So in the lower division, students would get totally transferable equivalent credits at say, Berkeley or Santa Barbara, but then the upper-division work would lead to a B.A. from the UC cybercampus.
Q. Have you ever taught in an online setting? Would you teach in the online campus?
A. I have not but would love to. Look, if you have pride in your teaching and you get satisfaction out of reading papers and final exams that demonstrate how much progress your students have made, then … technology that allows you to multiply your impact beyond the four walls of your classroom can be an exciting prospect, especially if you don’t have to grade all of the exams yourself.
Q. Have you spoken with the president [Mark G. Yudof], Board of Regents, or other administrators about your suggestion?
A. I’ve spoken with the president and casually with a few regents, and there is a strong willingness to explore it seriously. The president and I have talked about it quite a bit, and he’s given his enthusiastic blessing to aggressively exploring these options, and we’re beginning that work.
Q. How soon might an online campus become real?
I’m notoriously impatient about things like this, so my own view is that basic offerings at the lower-division level should be identified and produced by this spring in order to offer people admission to lower-division work in the admissions cycle late fall. But most of my colleagues suspect that I’m on drugs.
In all seriousness, I feel some sense of urgency about this for fiscal reasons. That has to be balanced with an appropriate caution. You have to do this right—the quality, the marketing, student support. It needs to be first-rate right out of the box. Otherwise it doesn’t deserve the UC label.
