Course Sharing Conversations: Joe Thiel, The Montana University System

We recently sat down with Joe Thiel, Interim Deputy Commissioner, Academic Research & Student Affairs at Montana University System, to learn more about why their system chose to pursue course sharing, and how their initiative is increasing access to ensure learners can take the courses they need to stay on track and achieve their educational goals.

Why did Montana pursue a course-sharing initiative?

Montana is a huge state geographically. The northern end of our state takes 13 hours to drive across and our population is small. We have many institutions of higher education who serve small rural communities, place-bound students, and typically operate at a small scale. Between the Montana University System and our state’s seven tribal colleges, there are 19 public institutions of higher education. Among those who particularly carry the two-year mission, all but a couple are under a thousand student headcount in the typical year. What that means is that they struggle to offer the array of academic options that students in their communities need to get good jobs, jobs that those communities need to fill in order to sustain themselves, their hospitals, their education systems, and their core businesses and industries.

That really has been the genesis of course sharing for us. There is an existential risk not only to our campuses in rural parts of the state, but also to the communities in the rural parts of our state. It’s important that we find a better way to work together to expand what we can offer to students, in terms of what courses and programs are available, when those courses and programs are available, and what modalities best serve students whose lives might not allow them to pursue traditional timetables for higher education.

How did you identify course sharing as a solution to these challenges?

We gathered a few data points that really brought into focus why academic collaborations and course sharing between institutions could be an important solution for us. First, we looked at transfer pathways between institutions. We have great transfer infrastructure in our state. We have common course numbering for all undergraduate courses. We have things that other states envy in terms of being able to make it clear to students what they ought to take if they want to be on track as a transfer student to get to a bachelor’s degree.

At the same time, we mapped much of our bachelor’s level curriculum in the most popular transfer disciplines. We found that most of our two-year campuses didn’t deliver the full curriculum. Not only did they not have the full curriculum available to their students to be on track as a transfer student, in many cases they didn’t have the faculty in their communities or the student population to be able to offer that full curriculum. For those institutions, they were telling students, “we have a path that gets you on track to a bachelor’s degree, but we don’t have a way to actually facilitate that full path,” to make that pathway real for many of those students. So we looked at course sharing.

Early on, we did a data exercise where we looked across our state and asked, if we were able to share our online catalogs at the lower division, the division where it’s most important for transfer students, what could we change in terms of what’s available to those students in terms of unique lower division courses? For three quarters of our institutions, we found that sharing our online catalogs would more than double the unique lower division courses available to students in a typical term. And in many cases, this would open up these transfer pathways to create real pathways that could cover the full lower division curriculum in popular disciplines.

That’s really interesting. So course sharing is helping you increase access to make sure students can actually navigate their pathway?

We have a lot of students who start at their local college for a great reason. It’s because it’s built to serve them. It’s built to give them access and an entry point to higher education. That’s particularly true in a state like Montana where, you know, those are the only accessible higher education opportunities.

We want those institutions to provide a clear path and a clear road to help students achieve their educational objectives. But what we found is that in reality, we had a road that was missing some big chunks and had some big potholes where students were finding unexpected roadblocks in their path to a degree. Those roadblocks included not having access to coursework that could keep students on track.

What course sharing is helping us to rectify, is making it so that students can access the coursework they need, when they need it, to be on track to their degree program. At the same time, we’re making it possible for small institutions, who have to make really tough choices about what they can afford to offer and what they have access to the faculty to offer, to expand options and provide those opportunities for their students.

There’s always more to learn.