Dusty old courses that haven’t been offered in years are coming back to life, like zombies rising from the graves of old college catalogs, thanks to the new opportunities made possible by online education. While there are plenty of lists of seemingly silly or trivial college courses floating around the web, those lists are pretty subjective. For example, a graduate course I took at Boston University, which I learned so much from and solidified my decision to go to graduate school, was taught by a professor whose signature course was listed in Rolling Stone magazine as an example of one of the most egregious time-wasters in colleges across the country. I hardly considered it a time-waster!
The fact is, though, that courses that might seem absurd to others could be entirely necessary for someone else’s studies. Sadly, those smaller or less popular courses often end up axed from the schedule at campus-based colleges when few people enroll in them. With rising college costs and increasing budget cuts, many colleges can only afford to run highly-enrolled general education courses, or courses that are required for majors. This prevents them from running smaller-enrolled and therefore less cost-effective elective courses, which are often focused on more limited, intensive subjects. Community colleges in Colorado are even experiencing such high admissions numbers that they have run out of classrooms and instructors even for popular required courses, let alone for less popular courses.
Eastern Illinois University’s Online Creativity
Colleges are starting to realize that the affordability and flexibility of online courses allow them to run those oddball or less popular courses, even with low student enrollment. This is certainly the case at Eastern Illinois University, where Geography of Illinois is being offered for the first time in ten years—and online for the first time. Why a whole course on the geography of one state? It’s valuable for those planning on becoming school teachers. State geography is a great way to introduce young students to some basic concepts in geography, and as the Canadian Council for Geographic Education points out, geography helps young people develop important self-knowledge, because it “provides a conceptual link for children between home, school, and the world beyond.” But aspiring teachers need a chance to learn it from an expert before they can teach it. And that’s where online education creates room for ”niche courses”: courses that appeal to a small number of students.
Why Offer Niche Courses Online?
The chance to offer rare or unusual topics in online courses contributes to what is called the “breadth and depth” of college programming. Most major college accrediting agencies include in their requirements a “breadth and depth” component that colleges must fulfill in order to be accredited. For example, Section 4.6 of the Academic Program Standards of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) requires that “degree programs have a coherent design and are characterized by appropriate breadth, depth, continuity, sequential progression, and synthesis of learning.” This means that for a History major, a college that offers only general education survey courses certainly offers breadth, because a Western Civilization survey will cover hundreds of topics. But survey courses don’t offer depth—the very nature of a “survey” is often limited and superficial. “Depth” comes from the more limited topics, such as a course on Nazi Germany or Renaissance Italy. In these kinds of courses, the college ensures that the academic program provides students with the opportunity to focus on more critical analysis of a more specific range of information.
NEASC’s requirement is common in university systems across the country, too, because the very concept of breadth fulfills the mandate of liberal arts education, which aims to provide students with a greater understanding of themselves and the world. The California higher education system is very explicit in its breadth requirements for students, from its smaller community colleges all the way up to the jewel in its crown, the University of California at Berkeley. It’s also common at smaller colleges across the country, such as MacMurray College in Illinois. The concern for breadth and depth is even relevant within majors: students in the University of Minnesota Computer Programming degree program are required to take a diverse array of courses that deal with different aspects of computer programming. If there are some courses on the books that have not been offered in a while, colleges and universities can now offer them online and help students fulfill their programs’ breadth requirements.
The Value of Niche Courses
As a professor, my mouth starts to water when I think about all the dream courses I would love to teach but for which there might not be a large enough audience, like “The Role of Guerilla Theater and 1960s Politics.” Such a course probably would not meet even the minimal enrollment requirements to run in any semester at a small campus-based college. It’s also a course I would definitely have taken when I was an undergraduate, but the economics of the large state university I attended probably would not have been able to justify a course with such limited appeal.
Clearly, online education benefits colleges and universities and their students because it provides the opportunity to offer smaller, specialized niche courses that previously would have been swept into the dustbin of a college’s history. For students in all fields, though, having more course options is a great way to make their educations expansive and intellectually-challenging. In a competitive job market, specialized knowledge may also set students with broad knowledge apart from other job candidates. In other words, when the zombie courses come back to life, don’t run and hide!
Do you have a dream course that you would love to teach or take? Tell us about it here!
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