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Proposal
to Establish
the
College of Applied and Professional Studies (CAPS)
Rutgers
University
Office
of the Vice President for Continuous Education and Outreach
Draft
Revision
October
1, 2001
***************
Introduction
Over the next quarter of a century,
higher education will undergo an irreversible revolution, driven by powerful
societal, economic, and technological forces. Demographic data indicate that
the 18-22 year old cohort is growing at a rate of about 2.2 percent per year; a
30 percent increase will occur between 1996 and 2008. The growth rate for the
post-baccalaureate educational sector is even higher, some estimates placing it
as high as 18 percent annually. Higher education will be facing a massive
paradigm shift.
Post-baccalaureate education will
increasingly become place-flexible for a growing portion of our future
clientele. Many of these people will
have long-since graduated from college, and will be out in the workforce. They
need further education for personal and professional development. Many of them
need (and will profit from) a Rutgers-caliber program. To serve these future educational consumers,
we will have to take the education to them.
Rutgers can meet this challenge with a
distributed adult education network for the entire state of New Jersey. Our
natural clientele is the upper segment of the educational market. This is the group of people who require
high-caliber applied and professional training to broaden their own skills, and
enable their upward employment mobility. Some of that can be accomplished by
moving the instructor to areas of regional need, taking the education to the
students, rather than having them come to campus, the traditional strategy.
This type of response, distributed program delivery for adult and place bound
students, will take on even greater importance as all of higher education,
Rutgers included, strives to meet the enrollment demands of the emerging tidal
wave of traditional 18 to 22 year olds.
Other strategies are available for
taking the instructor to where there is need.
We can serve many portions of the state electronically from our three
campuses or from strategically located off-campus facilities. Interactive video
classroom facilities are already available on all three campuses, Freehold, and
other off-campus locations. Thus, interactive synchronous instruction is
currently available. Through the Rutgers Regional Network SONET-ring technology
slated for completion April 2002, and connectivity through NJedge.net we will
be able to reach virtually any location in the state with synchronous
interactive and/or asynchronous instruction.
We are
engaged in ongoing conversations with both regional groups and community
colleges about unmet educational needs within the state. The call for
baccalaureate degree completion programs, via distance learning for that
distributed community college clientele, is so pressing that the State
Commission on Higher Education has agreed to serve as a clearinghouse for such
programs throughout the state. Rutgers is clearly the institution that is best
positioned to deliver the top-quality upper division credit and degree-bearing
programs.
There
is some urgency. Every institution in our region is experimenting with distance
learning. The large AAU publics from neighboring states are already approaching
our potential New Jersey higher education partners. Several of our county
colleges have even entered articulation agreements with an institution not yet
even licensed in New Jersey. If we do
not seize this opportunity, someone else will, and we will become progressively
marginalized. We must act now or cede our public service and outreach mission
to others.
For
these reasons, we propose the establishment of a new academic unit at Rutgers
University, designed to better align academic planning and distributed program
delivery with rapidly changing workforce developments in the state of New
Jersey.
Challenges nationally in higher
education
The entire nation finds itself in an
increasingly complex educational environment, and the higher education
community is scrambling to respond to very rapid changes, among which are the
following[1]:
·
Part-time students are the fastest growing clientele in higher
education, a demographic trend that will continue well into this new century.
·
The
composition of the U.S. civilian labor force will change dramatically by the
year 2005, but the number of new entrants into that labor force will be
insufficient for the economy’s needs.
·
Tuition costs continue to outpace inflation, thereby placing ever
greater emphasis on flexibility in acquiring affordable portions of programs
and degrees.
·
More Americans are college-bound than ever before, encompassing a
much broader range in age and ethnicity, as well as more equitable
participation by gender.
·
Continuous learning yields higher earnings, as workers upgrade the
skill sets being demanded by virtually all professions.
·
Nearly half of the adult population participates annually in
continuing professional education activities.
Approximately 6.4 million adult students over the age of 25, will enroll
in higher education by 2002.[2]
·
Single women head increasing numbers of families. This particular
group is especially interested in educational opportunities that are convenient,
both in time and place.
·
The total current enrollment in credit-bearing asynchronous
distance learning courses is almost 700,000 adults. This number is expected to grow
to over 2.5 million by 2005, representing a compound growth rate of
approximately 20 percent per year.
·
Job growth is fastest in occupational groups requiring more
education, thereby placing greater demands on the educational system. Much of
this education will be at the post-baccalaureate level.
·
The older adult population is expanding rapidly, with individuals
remaining in the work force longer, reinforcing the need for lifelong
post-baccalaureate opportunities that are skill-focused and career related.
Colleges
and universities throughout the nation are now working to serve the adult
student and broader sectors of our market area, through the delivery of needed
or desired programs. The adult,
off-campus clientele will have different needs than traditional, on-campus
18-22 year olds. In addition to
programs that develop very specific job market skills, adult-oriented programs
are also designed to broaden, enlighten and entertain. Collegiate units that
routinely serve the adult student have admissions criteria that recognize the
learning derived from life or work experience.
The New Jersey challenge
The national
trends mentioned above are particularly evident in New Jersey, where an
estimated 25,000 adults are enrolled in asynchronous distance learning courses.[3]
This trend is fueled by employer interest in advanced education and training
for its workforce that is accessible, but that does not interfere with ‘job
time’. The number of students in
asynchronous courses in New Jersey will grow to over 100,000 within the next
five years. Surveying the challenges facing our state over the next decade or
two, it is clear that we need a rapid-response academic unit. Even a very
superficial glance at emerging issues provides a clear picture of the
significant challenges facing the state.
In
keeping with emerging nationwide trends, it is estimated that the number of New
Jersey high school graduates will increase from 78,762 in 1996 to 102,600 in
2008. Every one of the state’s higher education institutions will be hard
pressed to respond to on-campus demands, resulting from the enrollment growth
from this ‘baby boom shadow’. Higher Education in New Jersey is scrambling to
keep up, and is already falling behind. The leading edge of this demographic
wave is already passing through its collegiate years, hinting at further growth
in post-baccalaureate adult continuing professional education based solely upon
demographics.
To
make the situation worse, systemic and structural changes in business and
industry since the mid-1980s require lifelong professional education for people
in the work force who wish to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving labor
market. It is estimated that today’s typical college graduate will require the
equivalent of seven additional years of education and/or training, over a
working lifetime, to stay competitive in the employment marketplace with the
current rate of change.
Just as
structural changes in the economy have resulted in the increased need for
life-long learning for workforce competitiveness, so has the need for such
programs to be locally accessible. People must retrain periodically, but they
cannot do so by returning to campus to do so. It is clear that Higher Education
will have to take the education and training to them.
Several studies
now show the need for upper-division degree-completion programs, distributed
throughout the state. A recent survey of community college presidents has
identified 110 currently unmet requests for upper-division off-campus or
distance learning degree completion programs (Appendix A) for regionally
place bound and adult students. The delivery of cogent programs in a
marketplace that is shifting rapidly over space and time is not well-served by
the traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ solution. We have to ‘take our show on the
road’.
In addition to growth in distance
learning challenges, several areas in New Jersey are, or soon will be,
critically deficient in public upper division and graduate programs. The Commission on Higher Education already
has identified the Monmouth/Ocean County region as a priority. There, the
number of students graduating from high school will increase 50 percent within
the next decade, and job growth in technology and tourism, key elements in that
region’s economy, will outpace the state average. The northwestern region of
the state, including Warren, Sussex, and Western Morris counties, will also
experience higher than average growth, in both population and industry. The population of Sussex County, for
example, continues to grow at approximately 20 percent per decade, far
exceeding the state’s average growth rate.
Adults in this region are not well served by public higher education.
The creation of a new ‘bricks and mortar’ institution is not recommended, nor
is it probable that the projected regional growth will be accommodated within
the bounds of existing campuses.
What has been happening in higher education and what
will continue to happen is that students change. They are just as bright, just as interested and just as
motivated. But they are also employed,
older and have responsibilities. Many
of tomorrow’s students will not be able or willing to take two to four years
off so that they can qualify for an on-campus degree. That doesn’t mean that institutions will go without students, it
simply means that some of the best and the brightest will look for more
attractive or feasible alternatives.
So, Rutgers doesn’t have to do a thing and
enrollments on-campus will stay up, and even increase based on a growing number
of “typical” college-aged students.
Does the State University want to educate that population of students
residing in the state who cannot come to campus? Many of them are just as capable students, who may live and work
at distances that make commutation to one of our three main campuses
impractical. Many of our counterparts
have decided that they like qualified students regardless of location. In fact, they think that New Jersey is
fertile ground for great students.
Babson and Duke are two examples of out of state institutions currently
providing programs to AT&T and Lucent, corporations we would regard as “neighbors”. So, the void is being and will continue to be filled. The only question is does Rutgers
participate in filling it?
Although
Rutgers has a number of professional schools (e.g. management, social work,
education, pharmacy), we offer fewer distributed degree programs than many
large institutions. Programs such as Management of Justice Systems have
considerable distributed potential, but have not been developed well to
date. Programs that are most
conspicuous by their absence within the university, given major current economic
activity, are real estate and land development, recreation administration,
applied computing and network administration, allied health administration, and
aviation. Peer land grant and state university institutions have successfully
added many such programs to their distributed education portfolios.
Rutgers
was one of the first universities in New Jersey to enter into partnership with
a community college in an effort to provide coordinated upper level courses for
off-campus students completing a baccalaureate degree. A growing number of place-bound
non-traditional community college graduates want to obtain a baccalaureate
degree, but do not have convenient access to a state four-year
institution. The statewide need for
degree completion programs is so critical that the NJCHE is assisting with the
assessment of regional requests. If New
Jersey institutions cannot meet these programmatic needs, ‘out of state’
institutions will.
There
are several advantages to providing new applied programs through a coordinated
approach within a new academic unit, including:
(1)
A new university-wide academic unit will more likely achieve the
externalities of scale that would improve the level of service to the regional
place-bound and adult off-campus student.
(2)
It would more likely be able to provide a wider range of applied
and professional undergraduate and graduate opportunities than would narrowly
defined professional schools.
(3)
It will be better positioned to respond to the public need for new
programming in a timely fashion.
(4)
By operating on a self-sustaining basis, it will seek to
reallocate resources in an appropriate manner to programs with growing demand,
from those programs no longer in demand.
(5)
It would be in a better position to develop a state-wide network
of off-campus learning facilities, thereby supporting large scale, state-wide
programs more effectively.
All of these advantages, and more, would
allow us to fulfill public service roles that historically have been within our own
domain, but that Rutgers has allowed to atrophy as it focused on research and
traditional campus bound populations.
The need for new graduate and professional
certification programs
Previous
efforts to provide credit courses at off-campus locations have been decentralized
and largely circumscribed. Courses have
been highly focused albeit with limited degree availability. This is in
striking contrast to developments among our peer institutions, both regionally
and nationwide. Penn State, for example, has announced its plan to make as many
as 25 of its leading graduate professional degrees available off-campus, and
via the Internet, projecting enrollments as large as 10,000 annually.
University College of the University of Maryland, with 30 degrees, is also expanding
off-campus degree availability.
Rutgers
efforts at the graduate level have been largely uncoordinated, as well as
decentralized. Although credit-bearing courses are offered at several dozen
locations by units from all three campuses, Rutgers fails to achieve a coherent
presence in any of these communities.
Monmouth County is the exception.
In this instance, Rutgers has a coordinated effort, through the
Rutgers-Brookdale Partnership in Higher Education. Elsewhere, there is little
or no coordination between Rutgers academic units. Each collegiate unit chooses its sites and orchestrates its
programmatic development and advertising independently, without regard to other
university efforts in the area.
As
will be described in detail below, the creation of a new academic unit
operating off-campus is not intended to interfere with the autonomy of existing
schools in how they plan and operate their off-campus programs. However, the presence of the new school will
provide greater program availability and will create a distributed delivery
network for those programs. This
infrastructure can be a valuable resource that existing units with off-campus
efforts would be encouraged to share, yielding significant concomitant benefits
to all.
There
is considerable statewide demand for degree-granting programs in emerging
professional areas that Rutgers has not addressed. Projections of labor demand
document a shortage of well-trained professionals in several applied
disciplinary areas, including applied computing and network administration,
real estate and land development, management of justice systems, and others.
Traditional
collegiate faculties, already fully deployed in research and providing
on-campus instruction, cannot be expected to redirect resources from these
tasks. Not surprisingly, attempts to engage existing academic units to meet the
distributed program needs of the state in these rapidly emerging fields have
been thwarted, frustrated by full-deployment on-campus, and the natural desire
to pursue mission critical research. The workable solution is to create a new
unit that will take the development and deployment of market-driven programs as
its raison d’être, engaging a faculty
that will be rewarded for quality distributed instruction as its primary
mission. This new unit will be charged
with the task of developing an off-campus infrastructure that can foster and
encourage mutually beneficial partnerships between itself and with existing
Rutgers collegiate units, and community colleges statewide.
Rutgers
is not the first major institution to follow this path, and it behooves us to
learn from those who have gone before. Virtually all of our peer institutions
have found ways to serve the needs of emergent professional programs, and
adults seeking to remain competitive in the workforce. Diverse programs in
liberal studies are almost always included as a counter-weight as educational
enrichment for these service missions.
We reviewed four large mid-Atlantic programs, as a way of identifying
the lessons that should guide our own efforts. We provide extensive program
detail for each of these programs in Appendix B, but a few salient
observations here should suffice to convey the central organizational and
strategic messages for Rutgers.
University of Maryland, University College
University College
of the University of Maryland has pursued its prime mission for 50 years: to
provide adult, part-time students with high-quality off-campus educational
opportunities. UMUC receives partial state support ($17M for FY2000), and has
500 full-time faculty. UMUC has a
regular faculty track, from Instructor ® Assistant Professor ® Associate Professor ® Professor. Classrooms are positioned throughout
the Maryland-Washington, DC area, and at over 100 overseas locations. Students
can ‘attend class’ from anywhere in the world by connecting via the Internet.
UMUC has the largest online program of any university in the world; students
can choose from dozens of complete Bachelors and Masters programs, via the
university's own proprietary interactive classroom software. UMUC provides many
of its programs entirely on-line, and deploys highly regarded distance
education software that enrolls over 6,300 students in over 23,000 course registrations
annually. Multiple curricula, with convenient delivery formats and innovative
credit options, are promoted as ideal for adult, part-time students who are
looking for a top-quality, practical education.
We are learning much from the examples and
successes of some of our peer institutions, particularly in the mid-Atlantic
region. Beyond our own region, many of our peers have been leaders in this
field for many years. For example, the University of Wisconsin established
early in the 20th century what was to become known as the “Wisconsin Idea” of
public service to the statewide community. The University of Wisconsin
Extension Division was established in 1906 and received funding in 1907. The
objective was to ensure that the resources of most campus schools and
departments would be made available to people in all Wisconsin communities.
CAPS has been designed with the Wisconsin Idea in mind. Some of the more
important lessons learned from the study of our peer institutions include:
·
A separate academic unit dedicated to the
mission of applied and professional studies is needed to be responsive to the
market.
·
A separate academic unit dedicated to the
mission of distributed program delivery for place-bound and adult students is
necessary to serve clients well.
·
The starting point for successful programs
in this arena is market demand and workforce development needs.
·
The academic product needs to be
programmatically coherent and provide added value for the customer.
·
A dedicated academic unit can provide a
seamless and one-stop administrative apparatus for the customer.
·
Like the Wisconsin Idea, the boundaries of
the University are the boundaries of the state. CAPS will address this
objective through multiple off campus locations and a variety of delivery
formats, to provide service, first and foremost, to the entire state of New
Jersey.
·
There is a natural affinity between
continuing, professional, and distance education, and housing all three within
the same academic unit makes both academic and administrative sense.
·
Highly responsive organizations adapt more
quickly to market changes and use routine feedback and quality control elements
from the beginning of the program cycle.
·
Multiple curricula with convenient delivery
formats and innovative opportunities for place-bound and adult part-time
students are prerequisite components of successful dedicated schools of applied
and professional studies.
Rutgers University’s proposed College of Applied and Professional Studies
(CAPS) is a natural way to respond to current trends in Higher Education.
Rutgers
is unique. It is New Jersey’s capstone public university, as well as its land
grant institution with outreach education as a substantial part of our historic
mandate. Rutgers must reassert its presence throughout the state, by providing
carefully selected, and high-quality educational programs to New Jersey’s
distributed citizenry. This will require vision, understanding of the
continuing professional development needs of our state, deployment of high
quality innovative programs, central planning and coordination, highly
coordinated marketing, and an effective management strategy for a widely
distributed operation.
A revitalized outreach vision
This proposal is
for the establishment of a new academic unit at Rutgers University, designed to
better align academic planning and program delivery with rapidly changing
workforce developments in the state of New Jersey. This new academic unit, the Rutgers University College of Applied
and Professional Studies (CAPS), will have a clear mandate to develop and
deliver high-priority, innovative and flexible educational programs that will
have the following distinctive features:
Top Quality: Because Rutgers is the top-quality professional education
provider in the state of New Jersey, CAPS will develop and market high quality
programs for the top end of the educational market. Rutgers can define and
compete for that market by:
·
Ensuring
that our courses, our curricula, and our faculty have been vetted, via the
standard Rutgers review process, involving departmental, collegiate, and
university-level evaluation, prior to being offered.
·
Requiring
subsequent/ongoing self-study, peer review, and outside review of all programs on
a regular basis, as well as student evaluations of courses, programs, and
faculty.
·
Insisting on
proper certification/accreditation (within a reasonable time frame) by such
professional bodies as normally provide that service for the sorts of professional
programs we plan to offer.
·
Hiring only
top-quality faculty to develop and deliver these programs; faculty who meet the
same rigorous standards as on-campus Rutgers faculty, though chosen with their
alternative instructionally-focused mission in mind.
Applied and professional studies: CAPS will concentrate on delivering upper
division degree completion and post-graduate applied and professional education
to a growing adult off-campus clientele, by the following:
·
Expanding
selected graduate certificate and masters degree programs, consistent with New
Jersey’s emerging workforce needs (see Appendix A),
·
Developing
novel upper-division baccalaureate programs, in concert with New Jersey’s
community colleges and Rutgers’ University Colleges on all three campuses, thereby delivering a workforce equipped with the
necessary skills for employment in a highly volatile and rapidly changing labor
market,
·
Restricting
development of undergraduate programs to those that serve the off-campus adult
and Commission on Higher Education targeted populations, such as applied
computing and network administration, the management of justice systems, real
estate and land development, and general professional studies programs.
·
Developing a
high quality full-time faculty, whose reappointment and promotion would be
based primarily on teaching-advising-counseling, service, and secondarily on
scholarship, the latter oriented toward industrial or public service issues.
Market-driven strategies: CAPS will utilize innovative business models to
insure cost-effective/cost recovery delivery of programs, starting with the
following
·
An initial
investment of $3 million over a three-year period for the development and support of initial infrastructure and 16
non-state funded faculty positions.
This investment, like that of both SROA and the Reinvestment in Rutgers
initiatives, will provide significant beneficial leverage. This investment will
generate 30 additional self-supported full-time faculty positions by 2004-5.
·
Enrollment
levels projected for 2007-2008 are expected to generate approximately 47
full-time, self-sustaining faculty positions and 15 staff positions, thus
leveraging this initial investment by a factor of almost 4:1.
Distributed education: CAPS will decouple higher education from
‘place-based’ thinking, taking the educational expertise of the University to
the clientele. Rutgers will develop a
presence throughout the state, thereby bringing the University to the student,
through the following actions:
·
Creating a
network of accessible off-campus locations to expand educational outreach and
explicitly linking our educational mission to our Land Grant mandate.
·
Employing
distance-learning technologies (including both online and interactive video
modes of instruction) to extend educational opportunities, both within the
borders of the state, and beyond.
Contact Point: CAPS will provide, where mutually agreed to, an infrastructure umbrella
for Rutgers’ widely disparate, and eclectic collection of off-campus offerings
by:
·
Working with
Rutgers’ on-campus colleges whenever that is mutually beneficial, and in the
same fashion as with the community colleges, capitalizing on their educational
expertise, while providing the CAPS staffing, administrative, and marketing
umbrella for the benefit of our entire off-campus enterprise, to ensure that
CAPS will complement ongoing efforts, building on current successes.
·
Developing high-quality
initiatives that will take nothing away from any existing off-campus program,
and will work toward mutually beneficial relationships by (1) setting up
off-campus connections, partnerships and resources, (2) putting in place with
RUCS and NJEdge.net the Internet and telecommunications network, and (3)
continuing to survey the demand for new and existing programs.
·
Ensuring
that existing schools will be able to determine if they want to participate,
when they want to participate, and how they will want to participate in these
initiatives.
The
expertise of current tenure-track faculty will be an invaluable resource for
CAPS students and faculty, and CAPS will work to extend the services provided
by its infrastructure to any other departments or schools whose students and
faculty will benefit from such collaboration.
Degrees to be offered and possible
programmatic priorities
Since CAPS is designed to provide applied and professional
training to adult students, it should grant degrees that both represent the
nature of these programs and appropriately differentiate CAPS degrees from
those granted by other Rutgers schools and colleges. Thus, CAPS will offer the Bachelor in Professional Studies (BPS)
and the Master in Professional Studies degree (MPS) only.
A variety of factors were considered in the
development of proposed programmatic priorities, including: (a) identification
of regional program demands, (b) identification of key service areas, and (c)
efficient and effective delivery modalities.
The recent Commission on Higher Education Survey of two-year colleges
was useful in these efforts, as were workforce demand data. In response to
these developing educational challenges, we are considering development and
implementation the following preliminary set of off-campus, place-bound and
adult focused program initiatives:
·
upper
division degree-completion and master degree programs in applied computing and
network administration with programming, database, digital video and animation,
webmaster, and media and graphics subspecialties;
·
upper
division degree-completion and master degree programs in the management of
justice systems;
·
upper
division degree-completion and master degree programs in real estate and economic
development, including development, finance, management, and construction
project management subspecialties;
·
upper
division degree-completion program in recreation and tourism management, with
subspecialties in turf & golf course management, hospitality, and
recreation management; and
·
upper
division degree completion and master degree programs in general professional
studies, the former focusing particularly upon graduates from narrowly defined
community-college technical programs that award the A.S. and A.A.S. degrees,
which are difficult to articulate into existing baccalaureate degree-completion
programs.
Common to all programs would be the integration
of several professional competencies including, but not limited to: leadership,
diversity awareness, critical thinking, mediation and negotiation skills,
communication skills, information technology, and teamwork. Weaving a common
professional studies theme through several program areas is an efficacious
model for working adults with successful precedent (the BPS model developed at
Syracuse is one example).
The challenge will be to develop curriculum and faculty at a
rapid pace while maintaining educational integrity and excellence worthy of the
Rutgers name. Mechanisms for doing so, through collaboration with existing
units and involvement of tenured faculty, are discussed later in this document.
Regional
coverage
It is obvious that the need for these and other programs
is widely dispersed throughout the state.
New Jersey’s Higher Education Capacity Task Force has, among other
findings, recommended partnerships between institutions as one way of
addressing existing and future demand in regions of the state that are
currently underserved by public higher education. As New Jersey’s comprehensive
public research university, Rutgers must provide leadership in such
partnerships, addressing these new challenges. CAPS will provide a mechanism
for addressing program priorities that have not been well served to date.
To meet
these pressing and growing needs, CAPS will be the degree-granting collegiate
unit for Rutgers’ off-campus campus and distance learning communities,
especially for applied and professional masters, baccalaureate-completion, and
undergraduate inter-disciplinary courses, programs and degrees not yet
available through an existing unit. This single point of contact for off-campus
students establishes a visible and tangible off-campus presence for Rutgers,
throughout the state of New Jersey.
Rutgers
plans to deploy these and other appropriate programs initially in several
regions throughout the state that have been identified by CHE as underserved by
public higher education: e.g. Monmouth-Ocean, Trenton-Flemington, Atlantic-Cape
May, and Northwestern New Jersey. We already have a presence in the first two
areas; the third is being discussed with the higher education and government
officials in the Atlantic City region, and the newly located Western Morris
continuing education center can provide a preliminary site while other deployment
strategies are explored for the northwestern portion of the state.
While leased facilities throughout these strategically
defined regions will serve as locations for in-person program delivery, Rutgers
will also integrate telecommunication and internet technologies extensively
into CAPS programming, through both two-way interactive video and internet (or
web-based) courses, making use of the Rutgers Regional Network and NJEdge.net
where feasible. Thus, the CAPS
instructional program will be successfully distributed throughout the state
because the fundamental strategy is built upon a range of delivery methods including: live instruction at distributed sites, live
instruction at multiple distributed sites using two-way interactive
technologies, live hybrid courses that utilize considerable internet support
and finally, courses that are based entirely upon asynchronous interactive
pedagogy.
Rutgers will deploy instruction and training resources to
meet strategic regional workforce needs, in collaboration with our community
college partners and the state. It may be useful to have a regional presence at
the local community colleges, but details aside, the operative principle will
be to provide a physical presence wherever needed to handle the traffic that
will develop.
Advantages
of a separate college
The development of a stand-alone academic unit, with a
broadly defined professional and applied mission to serve off-campus and distance
learning students, has the following advantages:
·
Rutgers
clearly is the preferred program provider in the state, and it needs a
mechanism to respond to statewide needs in a coherent and timely manner.
Today’s service model of choice is “one-stop-shopping.” There are a number of
competitors in this arena of applied and professional studies. However, when
given the option, time and again adult and continuing education students have
expressed the desire to receive their education from Rutgers University. At the
same time, these very students, busy with professional lives and family
commitments, are not willing to spend an inordinate amount of time navigating a
difficult Rutgers bureaucracy. Furthermore, for many, the inconvenience of
travel to one of the Rutgers campuses is the final, and critical barrier to
participation.
·
The
establishment of an academic unit charged specifically with the task of
off-campus and distance-learning programs provides for a clear and single point
of responsibility. This is one of the
clear lessons of success that has been learned by our peer institutions.
Providing a seamless academic and administrative apparatus for the customer is
impossible without a dedicated academic unit with this mission.
·
The
new College can ensure and enforce quality control and quality program
assurance over developing off-campus programs. It will protect the off-campus
portfolio from unplanned growth, something that can divert much needed
resources from other institutional initiatives. Just as the on-campus program
is developed with strategic goals and targets in mind, the distributed
education model must follow a strategic plan that can only be achieved through
coordination within a single academic unit.