North Seattle College's campus front steps circa 2003
(Photographer Erik Braziunas)
Consider reading this narrative in the order in which it was composed, starting with Post #1.
This first look at how Distance Learning / e-Learning grew at North Seattle College (NSC) will introduce some ideas that will be further detailed in future posts. Tracking the history of class enrollments was very important to NeLSC's (North's e-Learning Support Center's) mission. I routinely plotted these enrollments after each term (quarter), building the 23-year "unofficial" charts that are shown and described below.
ENROLLMENTS AS A MEASURE OF E-LEARNING SUCCESS
In an earlier post, I mentioned that NeLSC's daily goal was to help faculty and students successfully utilize their classroom technologies. Were faculty and students accomplishing their objectives and thus satisfied with their teaching/learning experiences in distance learning / e-learning "classrooms", whether such classrooms were fully online, hybrid (partly in-person / partly online) or "enhanced" (that is, having a full schedule of campus meetings but supported by required use of an integrated "online learning management system")?
One immediate way of measuring whether e-learning seemed to be working was to determine if faculty and students were continuing to "sign up" for such classes. We had ways to measure faculty and student satisfaction through surveys, completion-rate studies, grade comparisons, and, most importantly, direct faculty and student feedback, but I felt that charting enrollment trends gave us an easy and direct way to check on e-learning's appeal and validity.
WHY CHOOSE "SEAT COUNTS"?
Enrollment data and trends can be presented in different ways. One way is to count the number of students in e-learning classes, regardless of whether they are registered for one class or several. Another way is to present the data in FTE fashion, meaning "Full Time Equivalence", aggregating all e-learning credits taken in a quarter by full-time and part-time students into an equivalent number of full-time students taking a full load of 15 credits.
I plotted "15th-day seat counts" as a way of measuring participation in distance learning / e-learning courses. A "seat" reflects one student "sitting in" one e-learning class. A student taking three online classes would, for example, count for three "seats." These counts could be converted directly to the FTE numbers described above if all courses consisted of the same credits (typically 5 credits for most classes). However, a few special classes only consisted of 2 or 3 credits or even 6 or more credits, and so the official FTE trends will be slightly different than these 15th-day "seat counts." I was really just interested in "bodies in classes", regardless of credit levels, as a way to gage participation, so that is why I worried less about precisely matching up with formal state-level FTE reports. The differences are secondary anyway.
It should be noted that actual enrollment data themselves can adjust over time. Each quarter's enrollment numbers conventionally stop changing after the 10th school day of a quarter, when students can no longer "register" for a class (that is, be counted in data reported to the State Board). However, instructor permission still plays a role, and a "final" enrollment count is determined after the 15th day of a quarter (my data choice for these charts). But some exceptions continue to occur, and minor adjustments (for example, due to late incoming data or re-coding of particular classes) can make official numbers change a bit even when a quarter is over. Again, such differences will be minor.
WHAT THESE "OVER-STUFFED" VIEWS REVEAL
The "seat counts" shown in the charts below were based on the 15th-day "final" numbers we determined from the college's official source and as reported to the State Board. As mentioned above, sometimes a number in the system was adjusted slightly after a quarter ended, and I have tried to catch and incorporate any such changes whenever our charts were updated.
The charts begin with enrollment of 17 students in North Seattle College's first "distance learning course" in Spring Quarter 1994, and end with the "e-learning" seat counts for the 2015/2016 academic year (after which I retired). The earliest counts do include some enrollment in non-online "distance learning" courses like telecourses and "ITV" courses (an ITV course being a synchronous multi-campus course taught at one campus and shared live with others through an "interactive television network"), but these latter enrollments are later overwhelmed after 1999/2000 by those categorized as online learning.
In the chart above, the four colors reflect the four quarters during each academic year. Summer Quarter (blue) was a shorter 8-week term that usually ran from late June into August; Fall Quarter (purple) was a normal 11-week term from late September into December, Winter Quarter (yellow) ran from January into March, and Spring Quarter (green) ran from April until June, with the academic year ending on June 30th and the new one beginning on July 1st. Enrollments for the abbreviated Summer Quarters were usually much less than for the other three quarters.
Despite the fact that the seat-count numbers for early years are unreadable (and the later-year counts are nearly unreadable), I believe that these colorful bar graphs provide insight into "distance learning / e-learning" growth at North Seattle College at a "30,000-foot level." Clicking on the charts will helpfully expand your view of them if you are interested.
The seat counts in the first few academic years are influenced by telecourse enrollments, but, starting with the 1999/2000 academic year, nearly all enrollments shown reflect the accelerating growth specifically in fully online learning classes. By 2015/2016, around 20 years since the start of distance learning curriculum at North Seattle College, annual enrollment in fully online classes had reached around 9000 seats (excluding the hybrid and enhanced campus categories). An especially dramatic rise in NSC's online learning enrollments occurred during the 2007/2008 and 2008/2009 academic years. Clearly more faculty and students were finding that an online modality was a viable mode of teaching and learning. I believe that NeLSC's efforts to prepare and support faculty and students for utilizing the technologies in pedagogically effective ways represented a crucial contribution to the adoption of this modality.
Other colleges around the state and the country were also undergoing shifts in the methodologies of teaching and learning. South Seattle (Community) College was growing its own online learning program and seeing a similar trend, although not at this level. Seattle Central Community College, traditionally strong in the correspondence mode of distance learning, was also growing, albeit more moderately, in online learning as well. Leaders in e-learning enrollments around Washington State were Bellevue (Community) College, followed by Edmonds (Community) College and Spokane Falls (Community) College along with North Seattle College.
A SECOND CHART ADDS TO THE STORY
When hybrid and web-enhanced campus courses were first designed and introduced into NSC's curriculum (and coded as such in the State system) in Winter Quarter 2005, our definition of "e-learning" expanded to include these modalities. Categorizing learning as strictly "e-learning" or strictly "campus learning" no longer fit well with the myriad blends of modalities and methodologies now being utilized as effective ways to teach and learn. The classical description of college courses that linked "credit hours" to "seat time" had become outmoded because "seat time" could no longer simply be tied to time "sitting" in a physical campus classroom. However, at least at the time of my retirement, a better way to describe curricula had yet to be implemented.
The chart below adds in NSC's hybrid and web-enhanced campus enrollments (the latter being specific to campus courses using the Canvas online learning management system) to the fully online course mode shown in the previous chart. Distinguishing each of these three e-learning categories of enrollments in each of four quarters for each year means that a total of 12 (count'em!) glorious colors must now be used (with associated seat-time numbers overlain on them). Readability has become even more challenging!
However, what is clear is that e-learning, now defined as (1) replacing, (2) reducing or (3) blending into traditional on-campus in-person learning environments, was demonstrating exponential growth. If nothing else is readable, at least one can see that, at a "30,000 foot" view, on an annual basis, the college had reached about 30,000 individual class enrollments within this spectrum of learning modes by the end of the 2015/2016 academic year. This "seat count" was in addition to all the traditional "seats" occupied by students taking on-campus classes but not also using an online learning management system like Canvas (although still potentially using web-based materials like digital syllabi and other technologies like word processing).
The chart shows that the three categories of e-learning (fully online, hybrid, and web-enhanced campus) have similar seat counts to one another each quarter and, therefore, look to be comparably "popular" in enrollment. These three "categories" reflect portions of a spectrum of technology usage. Online learning management systems like Canvas were being utilized in classes ranging from fully remote to fully on-campus. North Seattle College was growing such usage exponentially without yet reaching a plateau.
Foremost, these trends demonstrate their overwhelmingly successful efforts of dedicated faculty using the technologies that our college adopted. I also believe that NSC's e-Learning Support Center team played a vital role in preparing and assisting these faculty and their students in achieving their success.
A GUIDING PHILOSOPHY AND STRATEGY
Furthermore, I also think that an important "key to our success" was the philosophy and strategy that we espoused from the start. Because on student transcripts distance learning course credits (whether, for example, from telecourses or online courses) were indistinguishable from credits tied to the campus versions of those same courses, we strongly felt that there must be a matching equivalence in student learning. The "quality" of distance learning courses needed to match up with their in-person counterparts. That philosophy, or rather "obligation", was a driving force as we worked with faculty to help them design online courses and help them prepare to teach those "distance learning" courses in pedagogically sound ways. And, to help faculty take on this substantial task, NeLSC also needed to support faculty and their students attentively throughout the quarter's learning process.
I noticed that some universities demarcated their online courses with special designators to differentiate these courses on student transcripts as if such classes needed special vetting. We felt "obligated" to ensure the "equivalency" (as much as possible) in our courses, regardless of modality since they appear identical to in-person courses on our college's transcripts. I think this philosophy drove us in NeLSC to work especially hard with our faculty as they took on the challenging task of creating effective learning environments for our "off-campus students."
A second "secret to our success", in my view, was tied to our understanding that the tools used for "distance learning / e-learning" were not restricted to "distance learning" environments, distinct from what was happening on campus. These tools (for example, online learning management systems like WebCT or Blackboard or ANGEL or CANVAS) allowed for a "blend" of learning environments. Whereas there were conversations at the "district level" about potentially creating a "virtual college" separate from Seattle's north, south and central campus colleges, I contended that such a separation would artificially disunite faculty, training, resources and support services.
I had seen that another community college in the state had built a distance learning program that employed "distance" faculty independent of the usual division oversight, and that faculty in the two "camps" were in competition and at odds with one another. In contrast, at our college, in general, the same faculty taught both on-campus and online classes, and this unity further supported the "equivalency" in learning that we strived for. In fact, many instructors found that teaching a combination of campus and distance courses together during a quarter fit well with their heavy work schedule ... and perhaps with their "sanity" in dealing with the logistics of a variety of college responsibilities and busy lives outside academia.
E-LEARNING AFTER THE PANDEMIC
The Covid-19 pandemic changed everything. Although I retired from overseeing NSC's e-learning operation in 2016, I continued to periodically teach online part-time at NSC as well as at South Seattle College and Green River College for another four years. When colleges had to switch entirely to remote learning in Spring Quarter 2020 via new technologies like Zoom for live (that is, synchronous) sessions along with asynchronous tools like Canvas, faculty and students had no choice but to adapt to using these e-learning methodologies in a hurry. I saw how preparing and assisting faculty and students to effectively utilize such technologies was a major challenge for all e-learning support services at all colleges.
I have used these charts as one way to demonstrate the growing appeal of e-learning for faculty and students and also to assess how well NeLSC's faculty/student preparation and support services were accomplishing our goal of helping provide effective learning environments. But, as a result of the pandemic's forced universal adoption of e-learning beginning in 2020, I believe it is no longer useful to use enrollment numbers to chart the "natural" growth in technology-use in curricula. Suddenly, e-learning was artificially "forced upon" colleges, for better or worse, and choice by instructor and student was hardly ever an option.
I do believe (and will share some projections ahead) that, without the pandemic, in a few years, we would have gotten to a "plateau" in which a full spectrum of learning environments (in-person, hybrid and fully online) would naturally work out and would match up in "seat counts" across the academic catalog. By "working out", I mean that the many possible "blends" of technology-assisted educational settings would have comparable success and meet the diversity of teaching and learning "styles" that we have in our society. But who am I to make lofty predictions when I could never have guessed where we would be today back 40 years ago when I sat at my first 128K Macintosh Computer in 1983 and thought how great it was to just not be using my trusty Olympia Electric typewriter with its white-out ribbon!
