New Online Consortium Combines Community Colleges, Research University and Private University to Deliver AA, BA, MBA Degrees

The new Edlearn Online Consortium is a collaboration of community colleges, a research university and a private university that have come together to offer Associate's, Bachelor's, and Master's degrees online. The colleges all use a single application, registration, and advising interface; including a concierge advisor whose task is to be a single point of contact for students enrolling at multiple member colleges.

A new online educational consortium consisting of community colleges, a research university and a private university make it possible to get a degree from respected and accredited institutions without ever leaving your home. The Edlearn Consortium consists of seven Seattle area community colleges and two universities based in Washington State. This innovative structure allows students to move seamlessly from an Associate Degree to a Bachelor Degree, and on to a Masters degree using a single online portal and point of contact: www.edlearn.org.

The student chooses a degree or certificate program and designates a home campus". Students access library, advising, and other online student services generally from their home campus; but also have access to the consortiums concierge advisor", whose sole purpose is to assist the student in navigating concurrent registration at multiple institutions. Students are required to take the English and math requirements of their program from their home campus, can select other courses from across the consortium.    

The Consortium provides advantages for both students and the member institutions. First, from the students perspective, the consortiums prices are extremely competitive because most of the members are public colleges. Second, students can start (or finish) their program online and travel to the member college to complete it, or finish the entire degree online. Third, consortia in general provide for a much wider range of courses and have arrangements between member colleges that encourage credit transferability and seamless transition between degrees. The drawback of online consortia (until now) was that they required a student to use multiple admission, registration, advising, and payment systems in order to take advantage of their generally more comprehensive and affordable offerings. Edlearn solves this problem in two ways. First, all of the co-matriculating colleges use the same online application, placement testing, registration and payment system. Second, the concierge advisor" provides a single point of contact for online students. They ask their questions, the concierge then accesses the member colleges to get answers, and relays this consolidated response to the student.

The Edlearn Consortium also resolves a major dilemma for its members shared by many colleges. The high cost of developing distance learning programs has hindered schools who cannot develop a comprehensive enough set of offerings to effectively market them unless they were able to charge an extremely high tuition rates. State college funding formulae did not envision distance learning programs serving out of state" students, so public schools typically run their online operations as self supporting" (without state subsidies). Public colleges also do not have large marketing resources since their traditional mission typically orients them to local markets. This puts them at a disadvantage relative to for-profit education providers, many of whom are not accredited. Edlearn allow member colleges to pool both their curricular resources and their marketing funds to compete for online students.

Editorial Information:
Dean Kempter
Executive Director, Edlearn Consortium
C/O BCC North Campus
3000 Landerholm Circle SE
Bellevue, WA 98007
dkempter@bcc.ctc.edu

Admissions Information:
Gina Murray
Concierge Advisor
3201 Smith Ave, Ste 200
Everett, WA 98201
Gina.murray@universitycenters.info
(425) 259 8602