Executive Summary

Options Report (pdf)

Strategic Areas

Benchmark Colleges

References

• Golden Gate University is a private, for-profit university that has five campuses in California and one in Seattle.
• They have a separate CyberCampus with its own Dean who manages all of their Distance Education offerings and is based in San Francisco.
• Approximately one-third of the total university enrollment is housed in the CyberCampus that has been in existence for over 6 years.
• About one third of their online course enrollments are from outside of California. Very few are resident outside of the US. The majority of the others probably live near one of our campuses but some clearly are NOT within commuting distance of our campuses.
• They offer 22 graduate programs, 7 graduate certificates, 6 undergraduate degree programs and 1 undergraduate certificate program entirely online.
• They also offer hybrid courses (called mixed mode) courses but these are managed by the campus that offers the face-to-face portion of the course.
• Requests for new courses or programs are forwarded to the Dean of the CyberCampus from a dean of a department or area. Priorities for development are based on student demand, need and expected enrollment.
• The CyberCampus Dean is responsible for technical infrastructure, training and support of all those using online tools, not just full-online courses.
• Faculty members who teach for the CyberCampus are still members of their local campus departments or schools.
• They use e-College as their course management system and contract with them for 24/7 tech support for students and faculty. They have their own staff to train and support faculty on instructional issues during normal business hours.

• They still have some two-way video-conference courses which were set up for specific corporate customer groups but these are dwindling and being phased out in favor of online and hybrid programs.

• They have a proctored in-person exam for EVERY online course. (Their interpretation of the WASC guidelines is that this is mandatory.) These are done locally for a student who is not near one of their campuses.
• They are encouraging EVERY faculty member to have an e-College website for their course even if it is NOT a hybrid or online course. They see the value of the online tools for all courses even though not taught by distance.
• They do NOT want to become a strictly online college but see that there is a large market for this type of education and intend to remain a key provider of these courses - especially for working professionals.
• They have fully online orientation tutorials and even offer students a change to take a demo class to see what the experience is like before enrolling.