Giving Compass' Take:

• At the Online Learning Consortium's Innovate conference, staff and faculty from small liberal arts colleges expressed concerns about the ramifications of online learning for their curriculum. Some want to embrace it, but others believe it takes away from core values of the personalized liberal arts education. 

• How can small private colleges find a balance of personalized classroom learning and still offer online courses? As the trend towards digital learning grows, colleges must find ways to adapt. 

• Read about the new trend towards using MOOCs and the impact student learning. 

When financials are steady and a college doesn’t have a desire to expand its reach beyond a physical campus, is online learning necessary—or even relevant? That was a question posed last week by Janet Russell, director of academic technology for Carleton College, at a session at the Online Learning Consortium’s Innovate conference.

So far, the school has only offered one online course, a summer bridge program called CUBE (Carleton Undergraduate Bridge Experience) focusing on quantitative skills. CUBE was met with positive feedback, Russell said, and received permission to run again this past summer in 2017. But the course is “a significant departure from college policies and practices, including having no summer courses and no online courses,” she said.

But despite some success with the online learning experiment, faculty and administration at Carleton are resistant to expand the online presence of the small, private liberal arts school.

Many faculty at her institution believe strongly in the intimate nature of a small liberal arts college, and tout its ability to offer a uniquely “high-touch” and in-person learning experience. “We are so nervous about using the word ‘online learning,’” she said. “Could this tarnish our brand?”

Russell struggles with these issues. Not because she disagrees, but because she understands well where wary faculty and staff are coming from—and she shares some of their concerns.

Carolyn Speer, at Wichita State University, suggested gauging faculty to see if there is an interest in doing research about online learning, and grounding programs in that. “There is tension around the real and online world, and we are at a point of transition and that is an interesting place for research,” she said. “We aren’t getting less online as a culture, so that’s a potential area for research.”

Read the full article about online learning by Sydney Johnson at EdSurge