eCore®—short for electronic core curriculum—allows University System of Georgia students the opportunity to complete their first two years (the “core” curriculum) of their collegiate careers in an online environment. While originally designed for the non-traditional student, many currently enrolled students find eCore® presents an opportunity for increasing flexibility and convenience in their course load management. eCore® consists of online freshman- and sophomore-level courses designed, developed, taught, and supported by faculty and staff from the University System of Georgia. eCore® offers courses in English, mathematics, science, history, and the social sciences. Courses comply with ADA standards to meet the needs of students with disabilities or special needs.
Published in Chapter:
Asynchronous Online Foreign Language Courses
Leticia L. McGrath (Georgia Southern University, USA) and Mark Johnson (University System of Georgia, USA)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-198-8.ch018
Abstract
In 1999, the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia (USG), in collaboration with a number of its member institutions, began developing a fully online set of courses that allows a student to complete a core curriculum that is transferable across the USG. The result of this effort is the USG’s eCore® Program, developed by the Advanced Learning Technologies (ALT) unit of the USG. The eCore® Courses were created using a collaborative course development process that engaged teams of USG faculty, technical support and an instructional designer from ALT. The collaborative course development process was utilized in order to take full advantage of the expertise of the team members and to incorporate multiple perspectives of the content into the courses. In addition, a set of guidelines for the development of eCore® courses was established to ensure the courses were of the highest quality possible. The eCore® course array was developed over a period of seven years. While many of the courses were well suited to the asynchronous online approach, there were content areas that were more controversial, such as physics, chemistry and foreign languages, due to the highly specific requirements in each of these disciplines.