Five UC Berkeley professional schools and the UC Berkeley Extension will develop cutting-edge tools for online education thanks to a $1 million gift from a campus foundation, officials announced Tuesday.
Over the next 18 months, the five schools and extension will use the money from the Chamberlin Family Donor Designated Fund at the UC Berkeley Foundation to create test courses, workshops and other online initiatives. The gift will be split up among the extension and UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering, Graduate School of Education, Haas School of Business, School of Information, and School of Public Health.
The move is separate from the controversial systemwide foray into online education for undergraduates, led by Christopher Edley, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. That move has been subject to criticism from faculty who say the lack of personal interaction cheapens the quality of a UC education and could be a financial boondoggle when the UC is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts from the state.
The UC first began pursuing online education in March 2010, when Edley presented his online education proposal to the UC Commission on the Future. Since then, the university has approved an undergraduate pilot program, though limited funding for the initiative has delayed its implementation.
The UC now hopes to have 29 online courses for the spring 2012 semester.
But proponents of online education argue that the development of online courses increases accessibility and affordability for students while creating a new source of income for the UC.
Adam Berman, executive director of the Berkeley online consortium, said the Chamberlin-funded pilot will help determine the financial viability of full-scale online courses.
“We are really piloting the next generation of online learning,” said Adam Berman, executive director of emerging initiatives for Haas.
But information school dean AnnaLee Saxenian said Edley’s pilot and the Chamberlin-funded initiative are inherently linked. She said the information school will use some of the gift to help develop its undergraduate courses for the UC program, including an online Introduction to Information course.
According to Karen Rhodes, executive director of marketing and communications at the engineering school, the school has not set any specific plans for how it will use its slice of the money — about $100,000.
“It’s going to be a period of exploration — there are a lot of different directions the college can go with this,” she said.
She added that the school is particularly interested in developing professional or master’s degree programs relating to integrated circuit design.
“This is a pilot, and the thesis here is that there are a variety of emerging technologies that are creating opportunities to rethink how we’re educating students,” Berman said. “We need to understand how these technologies should be incorporated into Berkeley’s plans.”
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“opportunities to rethink how we’re educating students”
Presumably the Legislature will be delighted with technology that could allow a student to earn a degree without ever attending a class or meeting a professor or another student. Cheap!