As classroom options dwindle, more Valley College students are turning to online education as an alternative to complete vocational certificates, associate degrees and for general or professional enrichment.
“Currently we tell students that they must rearrange their schedule to fit the times the college offers courses. But many students have tremendous outside responsibilities that makes it impossible to commit to a specific day and time for 16 weeks ... Now they can take that extra class and make good progress towards their AA degree. For people such as these, I work to create online courses,” said Jim Marteney, Distance Education Trainer at Valley College.
Valley College and several other California colleges use ETUDES to deliver online content through ETUDES. The ETUDES platform provides college level distance-learning delivery methods. One of many providers, it is a nonprofit organization which offers centralized hosting, support, site and account management. The organization also provides training for the 25,000 educational facilities that utilize its services. 104,000 students enrolled. This is an increase from the 75,000 in previous years.
Marteney, comments on the origins of online courses, “I started offering resources online in the late 90’s and added more and more and have been teaching full online courses since Spring of 2007.”
This fall Valley College offers over 100 online classes ranging from Business to Theater and honors courses previously unavailable in this format. The college offered only 73 classes last fall.
More Valley College instructors, like Arantxa Rodriguez, Professor of Cinema and Media Arts, are taking a proactive approach to help students continue with their academic attainments. This semester she is teaching Cinema 105, the department’s first online class. This course is an overview of the history of cinema, from American to foreign genres; silent films to contemporary cinema. This is also the first online class Professor Rodriguez taught.
“I would like to teach as many online classes as I can, I just need them to be made available, I will definitely teach online classes in the future,” stated Professor Rodriguez.
As with anything new, there are kinks. One is the ability currently absent is to host online video and materials. This something that Professor Rodriguez believes will be resolved soon and she stays positive about what online courses have to offer.
Marteney expands on this point, “There are many things we are doing to improve online teaching. As for instruction, my goal is to help instructors capture their style online by showing them all the tools that are available … In the last 4 to 6 years students have been becoming more and more used to communicating online through sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Now we can take that skill and use it in our online courses.”
“I have the advantage of reaching students that I wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise, students that have children, full time jobs or need a flexible schedule,” Rodriguez said. She continues, “ETUDES is very, very good. My students love, love the flexibility of ETUDES, just love it. I love it”
Distance learning is working to make all the campus student services available online for all the students from course advising to financial aid. We are improving our student help to make it easier for students to learn how to succeed in an online course.
Marteney concludes, “I currently have in my class a single mother of four young children. She wants an education to better herself and to be a role model for her children, but she cannot afford childcare for all her children so she can take classes. With online course opportunities, she can continue her college education. She can be a mother and a student,” he said.
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