Giving Compass' Take:

• College Consortium is spearheading a new effort for member schools to share online courses and tuition revenue so that traditionally underfunded programs and courses can sustain themselves.

• How does this model benefit the students and small schools?

• Read about some other ways to improve online education.

In K-12 education, despite the presence of fully virtual scho ols, most students experience online learning as a component of their brick-and-mortar schooling. For years, high schools have used online learning, for example, to plug holes in their course offerings where they didn’t have a subject-matter teacher to offer a class.

Today, many schools participate in consortia where they share access to content and teachers at other schools—and in turn benefit from the courses other schools offer.

These groups offer schools a way to expand their catalogs without incurring the full cost of a class for which there may be limited demand. That in turn has helped many schools offer the full suite of classes that students might desire, in spite of budgetary pressures. It’s been a valuable way for many institutions to expand their course catalogs and dip their toes into online learning.

A new effort powered by College Consortium is seeking to turbo charge that effort in campuses across the nation by allowing member schools to share online classes and tuition revenue. The company helped launch the CIC Online Course Sharing Consortium this past fall, an effort to facilitate online course sharing among the Council of Independent College’s member schools, which include 680 independent colleges and universities.

Through revenue-sharing arrangements, the model allows colleges to sustain traditionally underfunded programs and courses, and encourage specialization in others, while also adding additional revenue. Even colleges that are sending students to other institutions’ courses are realizing revenue growth, while also allowing students to fill in academic gaps to mend their GPA and graduate faster.

Read the full article about sharing online classes by Michael B. Horn at EdSurge.