The Course Availability Own Goal

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A short while ago, I wrote about new research showing that being shut out of desired classes significantly harms student success.

An obvious solution, at least to me, is to use online courses as a pressure valve when on-campus sections can’t meet demand. Students seem willing to take this option, it appears to improve success, and the online supply keeps growing.

Despite this, many barriers still prevent online courses from being used to relieve demand. It’s another higher-education own goal: we keep making students’ lives harder because we can’t get our act together.

The shutout problem

Two recent studies examine how course shutouts affect student progress. I covered them in more depth elsewhere, but here’s the gist.

A team of Purdue University economists examined a setting where a batch algorithm randomly assigned course schedules. This randomization let the researchers observe what happens when students can’t get into the courses they requested.

Their findings complement research done at Foothill-De Anza Community College in California, using eight years of registration data and an innovative design analyzing wait list logs, comparing students who eventually got off the wait list with those who didn’t.

Both studies found that, on average, being shut out did not affect the time it took students who made it to graduation to graduate. On the surface, this might seem like it indicates a small issue . . . until you look a little deeper. Course shutouts did affect course taking behavior, including increasing students propensity to take no classes in a given semester, how students chose majors, and the rate at which students transferred to different schools. Furthermore, these measures were more pronounced for minority groups and women.

In the California study, being shut out increased the likelihood that a student took no courses that term, effectively stopping out.

These impacts were strongly modulated by race. Underrepresented minority students were especially likely to transfer to another two-year college when shut out of a course. Asian students tended to transfer to a four-year institution, while white students showed no measurable effect.

In the Purdue study, being shut out reduced credits earned that term (students generally did not replace the course) and decreased the likelihood of majoring in a STEM field. These effects were heavily shaped by gender, with women experiencing substantially greater impacts than men.

I’ve summarized the findings across both studies.

The impact of the impacts

While the Purdue and Foothill studies described above give us a sense of how not being able to get a course affects student success, a different study on student course demand by the software company Ad Astra provides a sense of the scale of the problem. Using data from partner institutions, they showed that a majority of students (57%) are affected by not being able to take a needed course.

Go online young woman, go online

Lack of course capacity affects a majority of programs and students. But can the availability of online courses help ameliorate the problem? This really leads to two different questions.

Would online options help?

Research suggests that using online courses to address capacity constraints improves student outcomes, even for students with weaker preparation. One study analyzing six years of data for more than 10,000 students across thirteen popular majors at a single institution found that students in departments offering more online courses—and therefore more flexibility to meet specific needs, performed better than students in departments with fewer online options.

Given the inherent flexibility of online learning and its freedom from classroom space constraints and scheduling conflicts, it should be a strong solution to course shutouts and broader availability problems. Moreover, online course offerings have grown in both availability and popularity, with the percentage of students taking at least one online course per term steadily rising for more than 12 years.

Students themselves seem willing to use online courses to address availability issues. A recent report on digital learning in Canada shows that 51% of students would take an online or hybrid course when an in-person class isn’t available. That’s lower than the 64% who say they would take an in-person class when an online option isn’t available, suggesting some lingering hesitancy about online learning.

Are online options realistically available?

Despite evidence that online courses can relieve availability and bottleneck pressures, many institutions still aren’t using them to do so. The Ad Astra report referenced earlier indicates this gap. A small number of students are using online courses to address course availability and shutout challenges.

The fact that only 17% of shut-out cases are addressed by students taking an online course is striking, given the impact of being unable to get into required classes described in the Purdue and Foothill studies described above.

Why aren’t online courses used more often to meet demand?

Back in 2013—the Middle Ages of online learning, if not quite the Dark Ages—Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein wrote about using online courses to relieve bottleneck classes. They argued that limited capacity, combined with institutions viewing online learning primarily at the program level rather than the course level, prevented online options from being deployed as a flexible workaround.

In recent research I conducted I found a host of additional barriers that still make it difficult for students to use an online course to address on-campus capacity shortages:

• Policy hurdles. Rules on everything from differential tuition (online vs. in-person) to vaccination requirements often block on-campus students from enrolling in online sections or vice versa, except at a handful of universities.

• Rigid modality silos. Many institutions treat online and on-campus as separate, non-mixable modalities, making it onerous to add an online course ad hoc without special approvals. At many schools, on-campus students can’t even see online options in the registration system.
  
  There are, of course, exceptions. At the University of Central Florida and Oregon State University, for example, students see both online and on-campus sections listed together during registration, enabling true flexibility.

  

  Typical course registration screen at UCF showing multiple modalities

• SIS challenges. At some institutions, the way that the SIS or registration system is set up limits what institutions claim they can do in terms of making all options visible.

• Guardrails. When I spoke with institutions that do allow on-campus students to cross-register for online courses, almost everyone said they were exploring policies to limit cross-registration, or at least to give online students priority, because online sections were sometimes filling with on-campus students, creating shutout problems for online students. This is despite the fact that, where cross-registration is allowed, most on-campus students take only a few online courses overall. That suggests many demand problems are really a case of constrained supply across modalities.

Seeking solutions

This remains a serious student success issue. We need to make it feasible for students to assemble schedules using a mix of on-campus and online modalities. Priorities include:

• Update policies for flexibility. Tie tuition to a student’s primary status (e.g., on-campus, in-state) rather than the course modality.

• Set registration guardrails. Build in sensible rules, such as giving online students precedence for online sections, without erecting hard silos.

• Make bottleneck relief part of strategy. Treat access to online courses as a core lever in the institution’s online learning strategy. If there isn’t a written online strategy, developing one should be the first priority

• Leverage systems and consortia. As Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein argued in ancient times (I am enjoying this), identify system-wide or consortial online providers to fill bottlenecks. Align policies and create tuition-sharing arrangements where needed.

• Share SIS know-how. Collaborate across institutions using common SIS/registration systems to document workarounds and configurations. Some schools have solved this, learn from them.

Parting thoughts

This is a classic head-scratcher: higher education’s rigid, siloed policies get in the way of mission and student success. Online options are expanding, but no quickly enough and not as a strategic solution to shutouts. The goal should be to help students progress in the most efficient, lowest-cost way while maximizing their chances of success. Policies, and solvable technical quirks, shouldn’t block access to the classes they need.

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