Dive Summary:
- The California State University System is set to announce today that, in partnership with Pearson, Cal State Online will start offering courses in January.
- Cal State Online will coordinate virtual courses from the system's 23 campuses in a centralized online hub, not unlike Penn State World Campus and UMass Online, and the efforts to do so have been long in the making.
- Some critics feel that a major impediment to progress in the system's aggressive online expansion has been challenges from faculty, who cite concerns that the plan to work with for-profit partners undermines Cal States' public mission and that centralizing the courses creates competition for the campuses.
From the article:
The largest public university system in the United States is finally realizing a vision of a centralized online hub -- but is doing so in a relatively contained way, at least at the start. The California State University System is announcing today that Cal State Online will begin offering classes next January, in partnership with Pearson. The 23 campuses in the system have offered virtual courses for years, but unlike numerous other public university systems in the country -- see Penn State World Campus and UMass Online -- Cal State has been slow to coordinate those offerings in a centralized way. ...