The facts: The University’s Distance Education program allows students to take online courses for an additional charge, over and above from their typical tuition charge. There has been a task force created to work on ways to deal with distance education.The University’s Distance Education program allows students to take online courses for an additional charge, aside from their typical tuition charge. There has been a task force created to work on ways to deal with distance education.
Our opinion: The task force created should allow traditional students, who are paying tuition, to enroll in online courses without the additional fees.
N.C. State’s Distance Education program is meant to further students’ education outside the classroom; however, the cost of these classes have been preventing some students from exploring this alternative to on-site classes.
The typical degree-seeking student pays tuition for a 12-hour semester, but if a class is offered online, students have to pay an additional fee to take it. This is because the money-collecting process is different due to the typical tuition for on-site courses. But with the class sections of on-site courses decreasing from budget cuts and the selection of online courses increasing, the time has come for the Department of Distance Education to remove this extra cost for non-distance education students.
Due to this conflict between students and online courses, Provost Warwick Arden has created the Distance Education Task Force, which will be charged with the responsibility to create a better system for distance education classes. This task force is moving toward lifting the cost from online courses for traditional students.
We commend their efforts on following through with updating the out-of-date policy regarding distance education, but they should move quickly so students are able to sign up for online courses as soon as possible.
One of the main reasons for the importance of these online courses is they provide an easy, effective way for students to meet their GEP requirements. This is especially important with the elimination of certain course sections.
This semester for instance, there are two class sections for WGS 210: Women and Gender in Science and Technology, the first being a class in Burlington Nuclear Labs allowing for 30 students, the second online allowing for 125 students. This course is considered a GEP U.S. Diversity course, a requirement for the majority of degree-seeking students at N.C. State.
So, unless you are one of the lucky 30 who got into the on-campus class, you end up postponing the requirement or paying more for it, a lose-lose situation in any case.
The cost of maintaining these online courses is not nearly as much for the University as the cost of offering their on-site counterparts. For those, the only result is the student being swindled out of the true educational experience—having a teacher available for one-on-one time.
If the task force would make it so students who pay the typical tuition price for a 12-hour course load could also enroll in online courses without paying more, students would have better opportunities to fulfill their requirements.
