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EdScoop
Need online courses? New university consortium has 1 million openings
Written by Colin Wood
Apr 3, 2020
Acadeum, a company that brokers enrollments in online courses for
university students who can’t get into the classes they need at their
own institutions, announced this week it’s assembled a coalition of 19
universities that are offering the remote-learning capabilities now
suddenly in demand at universities around the country.
In an announcement on LinkedIn on Wednesday, company co-founder and
chief academic officer Robert Manzer wrote that the Higher Education
Course Recovery Consortium is now operating to serve the needs of
universities whose course offerings have been disrupted by the COVID-19
pandemic.
The coalition, which includes institutions such as Indiana Wesleyan
University and Franklin University in Columbus, Ohio, is offering “deep
discounts,” Manzer wrote, for entry into online courses this year.
“More than one million seats are available through the end of 2020 in
regionally accredited asynchronous online courses with flexible start
times and offered in differing lengths, ranging from introductory,
general education to highly specialized topics to meet specific major
requirements,” Manzer wrote.
Josh Pierce, who co-founded Acadeum with Manzer in 2015 and serves as
its chief executive, told EdScoop that the company has assembled dozens
of similar consortiums, usually to help students who need a certain
class to graduate on time or who have scheduling conflicts that their
institutions can’t resolve alone.
“This is sort of an example in the extreme, of students not being able
to get the courses they need when they need them, so we’re built for
the problem,” Pierce said. “It’s pretty apparent to us on the front
line of schools that there’s not a lot of bandwidth to be thinking
through new solutions and different forms of technology.”
Universities have adapted quickly and in many cases successfully to
ensure their students can continue their educations without attending
in-person classes. These efforts, spanning hundreds of universities in
the U.S., have included everything from ensuring that institutions’
learning management systems and other backend platforms have the
capacity to handle increased traffic to moving traditional activities
online using virtual reality and video conferencing software, like
Zoom.
But Pierce said these challenges are nothing new for the consortiums
his company assembles and that his company’s technology platform is
ready to serve the students who need to conduct online coursework.
“We’re pulling together an immediately accessible consortium with
drastically expanded online options for students that are high-quality
in the sense that they’re better than trying to do it with Zoom that
will be readily accessible for the next year,” he said.
When things have returned to normal, Pierce said he’s hopeful that
institutions will have become more agile in the face of such
emergencies.
“We’d love to see this continue to happen in the future, this space to
be able to support itself when its ability to deliver is in pretty
extreme shock,” he said. “Whether that’s a hurricane or a forest fire
or something like that, we’d love to see the industry be able to pull
these kinds of solutions together in the future.”
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