Sault College seeks to add more online learning choices

Sault College plans to expand its range of online course offerings for domestic students and increase the amount of overall revenue it receives from online learning to five per cent by 2024, said Lori Crosson, Sault College continuing education and e-learning director, in a presentation delivered to the college’s board of governors at its regular monthly meeting Thursday.

Currently, 1.4 per cent of the college’s total revenue (approximately $750,000) comes from online learning.

“We’re going to start expanding it to include college graduate certificates, and we also want to get to a point where we have Ministry-funded diploma programs fully online, so we’re currently doing an analysis of which college programs we may want to venture into based on labour market research and student needs,” Crosson said.

The college is looking at adding 25 to 30 online courses with the help of an online designer, including 10 to 15 new online certificate programs, having already trained and graduated students from such programs as personal support worker (PSW) online through Contact North.

“We graduated 23 students this fall from the PSW program, and we’ll be offering another intake this winter term, and we already have a number of applicants for that program,” said Rachel Hill, Sault College e-learning program manager. 

Crosson said Sault College has already successfully surpassed some of its goals in online learning by increasing the number of online learners over all three semesters by 12 per cent.

The applicants to Sault College e-learning typically come from all ages across Ontario and include students from other community colleges and recent high school graduates, Crosson told the board.

Between March and June of this year, 11 new online certificate programs were approved by the Sault College board in a variety of areas, ranging from certificate programs in Children’s Mental Health to Social Media and Digital Communications.

Moving forward, Sault College educators and administrators will seek board approval for such online certificate programs as Water Treatment and Distribution System Operations to Management in Applied Artificial Intelligence.