Pearson eCollege Helps Barton Community College Serve Education to Soldiers Overseas

More than 6,500 enrollments, including international students, reached from a Kansas community college

For 12 years, Pearson eCollege has been helping Barton Community College and its online learning division, BARTONline.org, power its eLearning program through the tools and resources provided within the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) learning platform. This reliable learning platform helps deployed U.S. soldiers to continue pursuing their education in far away places, like Afghanistan.

Small College in Kansas With a Worldwide Audience
Barton Community College is located in Great Bend, Kansas, a small city of about 16,000 people situated pretty much exactly in the center of the state (and the U.S.). Its mission is “to deliver educational opportunities that improve the lives of students, meet the workforce needs of the region, and strengthen its communities.”

BARTONline.org, the college’s online program, currently has more than 6,500 enrollments and growing. A recent internal trend analysis report shows that BARTONline.org course enrollments are expected to exceed 10,000 by 2013, says Wynn Butler, Executive Director of Distance Education.

Part of that growth can be attributed to BARTONline.org’s ability to spread out its strong local presence across an expansive global landscape. Many of its students currently live in places as far away as Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and beyond. “It has expanded to places we never expected,” Butler says.

Military Presence Factors Into International Growth
Part of the reason for this global expansion deals with Barton Community College having a satellite campus about 120 miles to the northeast of Great Bend at the Fort Riley U.S. Military Installation. Soldiers who happen to attend on-ground classes at Fort Riley often get deployed overseas and then continue their education through BARTONline.org, which offers associate degree and certificate programs in arts, applied science, science, general studies, dietary management, hazardous material management, emergency management, and medical coding.

Ability to Create Special Programs Helps International Efforts
Recently BARTONline.org built a tailored program for the Kansas Army National Guard 1-6th Agricultural Development Team that was deployed to Afghanistan. The 1-6 ADT has a special online course team established to support the educational goals of the unit’s 20 soldiers. Each soldier will complete nine credit hours, as a cohort group, through BARTONline.org and the Pearson eCollege eLearning platform while stationed in Afghanistan from end of July through December 22, 2009.

Reliability of the Network
Another contributing factor to BARTONline.org’s success, especially internationally, is that online access to Pearson eCollege has proven to be more reliable than the community college’s online connection. Pearson eCollege has gone down for only 20 minutes one time over 12 years, Butler notes. “Pearson eCollege provides a stable learning environment with multiple connections to the Internet. Recently, the Barton campus network went down for 48 hours when someone accidentally cut the line while digging with a backhoe.“ Students outside of the community college’s Internet access, however, could still access their online courses through Pearson eColllege.

Always-On Help Desk
Butler also gives high grades to the Pearson eCollege 24/7 help desk that BARTONline.org makes available to students, instructors and administrators, by phone, e-mail or live chat, whenever an issue might arise no matter where an online student may be located.

“A couple of years ago folks were saying that we could run our own help desk, and we could save money by staffing it eight hours a day, five days a week. I get a report every month that is a review of where all the calls are coming from, when, and what subjects are covered in order to see if we have any systemic issues that need to be addressed. Bottom line is I showed that report to the college president and the board, noting that 60 percent of help-desk calls come in after 5 p.m. or on the weekends. So, no way we could run a help desk ourselves. “ In addition, customarily dramatic time-zone differences for students living overseas is not an issue with 24/7 service.

Complete Online Infrastructure Drives Success
Overall, the ability to quickly build out online special programs on demand, apply easy enrollment features for prospective students, offer reliable Internet access from multiple locations, and provide 24/7 help-desk support have given BARTONline.org the necessary infrastructure to keep its enrollment figures moving upwards with new students from all over the world.

* BARTONline.org recently renewed its Pearson eCollege contract for another four years and is looking forward to increasing its usage to include Learning Outcome Manager (repository for the storage and management of learning outcomes) and its Enterprise Reporting (tracking , analysis and mining tools for gaining insights into program activities) features .