The rise of the non-traditional "traditional" student?

Some of the articles and books that I've been reading contend that more and more students want that "consumer-friendly" variety of course offerings that allow them more convenience and flexibility. On-line, low-residency, and once-a-week night courses all fit that bill, even now for traditional on-campus students. I personally haven't seen too much evidence of that desire at a place like JBU, but perhaps that's mostly because we're so rural and our student population is so heavily (and increasingly so) residential.

But if we were to leverage that approach, what might it look like for our sort of institution, and how might we get there? A reasonable first step might be to develop some of our existing "elective modules" into more standardized courses that could be offered in more systematic ways. That step could be leveraged as follows.

1) Offered in a low-residency format (in addition to our existing on-line Core courses) so that students from around the state could have access since their numbers aren't always concentrated in just one area.

2) Offered to students who don't yet meet our existing work and age requirements (coupled, perhaps, with changing those requirements to emphasize work experience or completing a certain number of these JBU modules and removing the age requirement).

3) Offered to on-campus students as well as an alternative delivery mechanism that could run year round? We might then have both on-line and low-residency Core/Electives available to all of our PS and TUG undergrad students.

3A) These combined student populations would likely entail some careful calibration between TUG and PS. Differential pricing might become an issue, for example, but we'd probably just do what we do now with the on-line courses and charge traditional undergrads their full rate (except in the summer, in which case we use the summer rates) because what they're really paying for with their extra tuition dollars is the on-campus experience, and they're still getting that even if the course delivery in this case is different. Faculty teaching these courses, however, would probably need to continue teaching them as overload/adjuncts for cost reasons and to be consistent with the Advance model. To assure compatibility and quality with the on-campus program, we'd likely need to include some type of pre and post tests as well, an idea we might want to consider for our existing courses also (if we want to buttress Dick's concept that these are programs are "comparable" to TUG and if we want to make that case to the government and to accreditating agencies).

4) Eventually perhaps offered in both low residency and on-line formats as a package Associates Degree that would largely replicate our existing Core Curriculum. So, in addition to supporting our current PS and TUG students, this program might eventually draw in students on its own basis as well as potentially feeding students into our various PS degrees and TUG majors.

We'll see if anything comes of these ideas, but they certainly seem to be effective approaches at other institutions.