CU Online
| Established | 1996 |
|---|---|
| Students | 9,287 for the 2013-2014 academic year |
| Location | Office and administrators in Denver and Aurora, Colorado, United States |
| Website | cuonline |
CU Online is one of the first fully accredited online education programs, created in 1996 by the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver). With CU Online, the pedagogy of CU Denver faculty has been extended globally, allowing local students as well as international students to partake in the same education.
Initially launching with three online courses, CU Online has expanded its catalog to over 450 CU Denver online courses, with 18 full CU Denver degree programs and 12 certificates that can be completed entirely online. The online courses themselves are considered just another option for CU Denver students, as they offer the same credit and are taught by the same on campus professors. The student-faculty ratio also remains the same for both on campus and online courses (roughly 17:1). In all, there have been 160,002 students from 1996-2014 who have taken online classes at CU Denver.
The online courses run on a traditional semester schedule, where they start and stop at the same time as the on campus CU Denver classes (Fall, Spring, Summer). As such, the online courses are not "self paced", but rather are "asynchronous", which means students can login anytime of day or night. The amount of time students are expected to be logged in is dependent upon the professor.
Each online course is developed to convey and teach the same content and material as its on campus counterpart, but in a way that’s conducive to the electronic medium. Each student is assigned a homepage in order to:
CU Online employs Canvas by Instructure. Canvas is Cloud based, and CU Denver uses it for its completely online courses as well a supplement for the on campus courses in the form of blended learning, which means it doesn’t distinguish between supplemental course use and blended/hybrid courses. With Canvas, professors can record audio and video messages, utilize IOS and Android, RSS support and web conferencing.
Online courses are typically divided into units of class discussions (ongoing posts of classmate queries and comments), downloadable assignments and quizzes. What students are actually graded on is based on the course and the professor, however, class participation is usually required in the form of threaded discussions. Similar to a traditional on campus course, the content of the course is subject to the discretion of the professor.
With CU Online, lectures are delivered from various formats, such as:
...
Wikipedia