Defining Fully Online Courses

The Internet or World Wide Web has become the primary instructional delivery model for reaching students too busy or too far away to attend traditional campus-based courses. Almost 3.5 million students or nearly twenty percent of all U.S. higher education students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2006 term (Sloan Consortium, 2007). A fully online course is defined as a web-based course that is delivered 100% online with no in-class, seat time requirements. In this model, all instruction is available online through the UWF eLearning management system, Elluminate web-conferencing, or other web-based technologies. Although campus visits are not required, some fully online courses may require students to complete one or more “proctored exams”.  Instructors requiring proctored exams should review and utilize the UWF proctored exam protocol.

Elluminate web-conferencing is a synchronous virtual classroom environment designed to enhance communication and collaboration in fully online courses. Research in distance learning continues to emphasize the importance of interaction for effective learning and teaching. Virtual classroom software, such as Elluminate, provides real-time interaction between students and instructors. Synchronous communication features in Elluminate like the interactive white board, desktop and application sharing, live audio, video and chat add the value of real-time interaction to the convenience and flexibility of asynchronous online learning environments.

What UWF Offers

UWF offers 24 fully online degree and certificate programs with over 300 fully online course sections each semester. This translates to almost 24,000 online course enrollments annually (AY 07-08) and represents approximately 23% of all UWF course enrollments. Additionally, over 5000 students a year complete only online courses at UWF and many of these (approx. 33%) live outside the states of Florida and Alabama.