BANGOR, Maine — In a major initiative designed to help stabilize the University of Maine System’s financial future, trustees are considering a plan for shaping how the state’s universities offer online courses.
The plan is titled Unified Online, but some faculty members are divided on it, saying they have serious concerns about whether the system will be able to pull off the initiative in difficult financial times and about the effects it might have on campus academic offerings and students.
Unified Online, which system officials outline in a draft report released this month, seeks to build a “robust menu” of online course offerings for students across the system, its seven campuses and beyond. It’s part of UMS Chancellor James Page’s One University push, an effort to make the system’s campuses more financially sustainable by reducing redundancies, increasing collaboration and differentiating the missions of each school by focusing campuses on the programs that make them strongest.
“What will best distinguish a Maine version of a unified online approach will be the access we provide to the people of Maine regardless of where they live, and the high quality we employ as we do so,” the report states.
To determine what the online offerings will be and how they’ll be administered, the system would create a Center of Excellence in Digitally Enhanced Teaching and Learning, which would offer online access to certain degrees from the seven campuses, as well as collaborative degrees. The aim is to unify online learning in a way that’s cost-effective and can reach the most students, no matter where they are in the state or which campus they attend.
That center also would work to identify workforce needs in Maine and respond by ensuring those programs are available to Maine students, even those who can’t make it to a campus every day, according to the report. They’d also find “niche” programs with national and international appeal that could be offered online and cut or combine online programs that are “unnecessarily duplicative,” according to the report.
Heading up this center would be a new system administrator — the associate vice chancellor for academic affairs for distance learning. That person would work under the vice chancellor for academic affairs, working closely with faculty and administrative teams from each campus and a Center of Excellence Leadership Team to identify, develop, build and market the online programs, according to the report. The vice chancellor for academic affairs role is currently vacant and also would need to be filled.
If the plan were approved by trustees, the system would immediately launch a search to fill the newly created distance learning administrative post.
Unified Online comes with an estimated $3 million price tag over the next three years, which includes a $175,000 salary for the future associate vice chancellor for distance learning and $40,000 annually for his or her administrative assistant.
It also includes a total of $122,000 in funding for tech equipment and supplies, and funding for three new designers and technologists, plus 25 student interns, to get the program up and running. The system also will invest about $334,000 to expand its help center hours and $250,000 over the first three years to train faculty in developing new online programs.
After reviewing the draft Unified Online plan, the University of Maine Faculty Senate’s Academic Affairs Committee wrote a five-page letter to system trustees outlining their concerns about the concept. In the letter, which will be forwarded to trustees before their meeting next week, the faculty members say they “appreciate the goal of providing quality, accessible educational offerings” through improved Web-based education at Maine’s universities. However, the committee said it doesn’t believe the plan is fleshed out enough in its current form.
They said they viewed Unified Online as a separate “virtual campus” that would remove academic programs and accountability from faculty at the system’s seven campuses and put that oversight in the hands of a Center for Excellence “for which no academic qualifications are laid out.”
“Unified Online services can help support faculty in creating the best and most technologically sound versions of the curriculum they create and control that promotes increased student access to a high-quality UMS education, but they cannot influence those decisions directly,” the letter states. Taking on such a role would compromise the quality of education, the faculty argued.
They also criticized the addition of a system-level administrator during what has been described as a “fiscal emergency” at the system and its seven campuses.
Howard Segal, a history professor at UMaine, said the impression among many faculty members is that “there’s no problem getting rid of [faculty], but there’s always room in the budget for a new administrative position.”
Faculty members at the flagship campus also expressed concern the centralized focus would “undermine academic oversight over the curriculum of all campuses” and downplays the contributions the Orono campus has made to the system’s existing portfolio of online class offerings.
UMS spokesman Dan Demeritt said Thursday that the team that assembled the Unified Online draft report are “pleased that the Faculty Senate at UMaine is offering substantive comments.”
Their letter joins 185 others that the team reviewed during the public comment process leading up the the report’s release.
“It would be a mistake to simply approve this proposal,” the UMaine Faculty Senate cautioned trustees. “Much more work needs to be done to address the serious concerns we have identified and to develop a quality approach to online education that serves the citizens of Maine.”
UMS trustees on the Academic and Student Affairs Committee will meet Monday to review the Unified Online Report draft at the system office in downtown Bangor. The full board is expected to consider it at a Nov. 15-16 meeting.
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter at @nmccrea213.