California Bill = Path Around Curricular Bottlenecks Through 3rd-Party Online Providers

As numerous mainstream and higher education media outlets have reported--for two, see the New York Times and Inside Higher Education--the California state senate president is poised to introduce a bill that would provide students with a pathway around curricular bottlenecks--introductory courses that they have to have to fulfill degree requirements, but for which they face long wait times to take due to limited capacity. This problem has been particularly severe in California as several years of state budget cuts have reduced institutional capacity to deliver must-have general education courses at the same time as demand for higher education has grown in the face of a difficult economic climate.

The state senator's plan would require California's public colleges and univerisities to grant transfer credit for online courses from third-party providers that would allow students to fulfill degree requirements that they can't at their institution of record because they can't get into the necessary course. A panel of faculty members drawn from each of the state's higher education systems--the California Community Colleges, the California State University, and the University of California--would have to vet the courses as meeting the same academic requirements as the institutionally delivered courses, and only courses that match the 50 most oversubscribed introductory courses across the systems would be considered. Other criteria for acceptance would include "... whether the courses included proctored tests, used open-source texts — those available free online — and had been recommended by the American Council on Education [College Credit Recommendation Service]. A student could get credit from a third-party course only if the course was full at the student’s home institution, and if that institution did not offer it online" (New York Times, 03/12/13).