Despite Pandemic, It's Business As Usual for Some Students

With social-distancing restrictions from COVID-19 extending further into summer, many Ohio colleges and universities are forced to continue offering all their courses online, a new way of teaching for most of them and a very different way of learning for their students.

The result has been a sudden and significant disruption for Ohioans who are midway toward earning a college degree, not to mention recent high school graduates hoping to start a college career this fall. Based on negative experiences from their initial taste of online learning this spring, and with no end yet in sight for pandemic restrictions on classroom and campus life going forward, many students are reevaluating their options for fall.

But for more than 4,100 Ohio students, it’s still business as usual as they work toward their degree. That’s because they attend Western Governors University, an accredited, nonprofit college – now available to Ohioans – that was one of the first to build the power of online technology around a different model of learning. It’s a model that’s focused on the individual student, letting each student learn when and how they want.

“In the flash of an eye, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the traditional model of higher education and forced some deep rethinking at traditional, campus-based colleges and universities,” said K.L. Allen, state director of WGU Ohio. “Their tradition of classroom-based, face-to-face instruction has suddenly shifted to online learning, a shift of technology and mindset for which few were prepared. While schools struggle with fitting their traditional teaching model into a very different approach to learning, Western Governors University is taking it all in stride. After all, we’ve been teaching our students and awarding degrees this way for more than 20 years.”

At WGU Ohio, students follow a competency-based model of higher education, one that allows them to earn credit toward a college degree by demonstrating their mastery of a subject and its skills, rather than the one-size-fits-all measure of “seat time” – calculating a student’s progress toward a degree by the number hours that student sits in a classroom. There’s no need to attend lectures or to “log on” at a specific time. Instead, WGU students complete their programs by studying on schedules that fit their lives, at home and arranged to accommodate work and family obligations. In addition to learning from instructors who are skilled in online teaching, each WGU student is assigned a dedicated advisor to motivate and mentor them throughout the process.

In 2018, Ohio became the eighth state to partner with Western Governors University, a collaborative of state governors who saw – more than 20 years ago – the transformative power of competency-based education as a way to help close the skills gap and help busy working adults pursue an in-demand job in healthcare, nursing, business, teaching, and information technology.