A survey of Missouri’s public colleges and universities to learn which programs are graduating too few people to be worth spending money on is nearing an end. The higher educaiton department has been gathering information since summer and plans to make its report to the governor and the legislature next month. Deputy commissioner Paul Wagner says he was “pleasantly surprised” by the “energetic prticipation” by the schools.
He says all of the schools have reported how they’d deal with those programs–conolidating them with other programs, or even dropping them.
One alternative might be using the internet to share courses among institutions. He says several institutions have a French major but few graduates in the program. He says it might be possible for some schools to drop French as an on-campus program but to offer it through the internet with a teacher on another campus.
Another approach that might become a pilot project is to take many large lecture classes and turn them into online formats where students will learn at their own pace with a professor present to work with students having problems instead of trying to manage all of the students at once in a lecture hall.
