SAN FRANCISCO — University of California leaders pledged Wednesday to sharply expand online education over the next few years, possibly aiming to have UC students take about 10% of all their classes online — averaging four courses toward their degree.
UC administrators also floated the idea of establishing a fully online academy that might allow students to earn the equivalent of a community college degree before transferring to a University of California campus.
Developing more than 150 new online courses for freshmen and sophomores by 2016, among other moves, "would be a magnificent opportunity to educate more students and be more efficient," UC President Mark G. Yudof said.
And in a nod to faculty concerns about being replaced by digital courses, Yudof promised that the new classes would be of high academic quality and would not cause layoffs.
The regents were under pressure from Gov. Jerry Brown to take such steps, and last week Brown's budget proposed giving UC $10 million next year to help finance new online courses, primarily entry-level general education courses that are now overcrowded.
Brown, who is a regent and attended Wednesday's meeting, said he was pleased by preliminary steps toward what he and other advocates contend will be wider access to college education and a way to lower costs and avoid tuition increases.
"This is very exciting stuff," Brown told reporters after the discussion. The governor predicted that there would be controversies about the effects on learning and the budget, but he said examining online classes is "work worth doing."
"I'm committed to going as far down that road as we can until we find out it's working great or we have to do something else," Brown said.
Just a day earlier, Brown announced the start of a pilot partnership between San Jose State and Udacity, a Silicon Valley online education group, to create low-cost online classes in entry-level subjects. Brown also plans to attend next week's meeting of the Cal State University trustees.
At the governor's urging, UC regents heard from leaders of three of the most influential new online organizations — Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Daphne Koller of Coursera and Anant Agarwal of edX — about how their free courses operate and how they might collaborate with UC. The three insisted that students can learn more in carefully constructed online classes, with more practice exercises, frequent quizzes and short videos, than in traditional lecture halls.
Although some UC campuses already offer courses through Coursera and edX, the regents did not seem in any rush to fully go into business with any of those groups. They said they needed more study of how partnerships could help UC financially. Among the issues are whether online classes should include commercial advertising and whether enrollment would focus just on UC campuses or beyond.
"People in China and people on Venus" would pay to take UC classes, said UC Berkeley law school dean Christopher Edley, a strong advocate of online education.
However, some faculty union officials and student leaders were skeptical about whether online classes would solve UC's money or space problems. Student regent Jonathan Stein said that most students would consider the idea of a full two years of online classes as "a degradation of their education" and that students in such a pre-transfer program would miss important college experiences like clubs, sports and leadership possibilities. Online classes can be "supplemental" but not central to a UC education, he said.
Yudof, however, countered that no one would be forced to take online classes and that many Californians can't take a full load of courses on campus because of family responsibilities or jobs.
Brown and others previously had criticized the slow pace of the UC system's effort to start online classes for credit. Although they conceded that not enough was achieved over the last two years, administrators told the regents that UC has more than 2,500 online courses, mainly in non-degree extension programs. Only 116 are for-credit undergraduate courses and only 27 of those are offered during the regular school year, with most offered in the summer at higher tuition.
Efforts are underway to allow students at all UC campuses to receive credit for online classes no matter which campus sponsored the course, a process that now can be difficult.
The regents in another matter also discussed a report that showed a relatively low number of women, blacks, Latinos and Native Americans on the tenure track faculty. Women composed 30.5% of that faculty in fall 2011 and those ethnic minorities made up 8.6%.
Those shares were slightly higher than the average of eight other universities, including the University of Michigan and Stanford, to which UC compares itself, but some regents said they were infuriated by what they said was little progress in recruiting and hiring minorities and women.
"How much more will we have to wait until the faculty looks like the students we serve?" regent Eddie Island said.
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