I just got the following e-mail from University of Maryland University College regarding some changes coming in Fall 2011.
This has actually already been implemented in their European and Asian divisions this past semester (they run these through a long-term DoD contract). Apparently the 8-week terms are successful, but I don't know if it would be for me. For a 3-credit F2F class, this would be the equivalent of meeting twice a week for 2.5 hour class sessions each (if you look at their public course schedule, Europe/Asia F2F classes actually meet for 3 hours twice a week). That is a lot of one class! Classes I've taught at UMUC use high-quality interactive modules to standardize "lectures." Each week of a module covered the amount of content you'd expect to find in 2-3 F2F lectures. 1 of these module sections felt like a good pace to me, 2 of them a week sounds really tough. Hopefully students don't put these off and end up with that 5-6 hours of lecture they're supposed to be doing staring them down on Sunday night. I don't have direct experience with the for-profits, but I find it hard to believe that this works for schools like Phoenix. Their standard 5 week course should yield 8 hours of lecture/discussion and 8 hours of homework/group work. Are Phoenix students really spending 16 hours a week on each course? This link (http://www.prescottschools.com/university_of_phoenix_pd_05-10.pdf) makes it look like the 5 week classes are standard, with 3 week graduate classes (That would be like 30hrs/week on a course)! We shall soon see if 8 weeks is something UMUC's students are willing to do. Personally I would just get sick of the class after that much time spent on one course. I do know that UMUC's advisors are very careful to not over-enroll students into more classes than their past academic record shows they can handle. A part time student should probably do no more than 1 class per 8-week term. This is probably what they're trying to streamline, allowing students to focus on just 1 course at a time (and 1 proctored final at a time).
