After a pilot year of the Semester Online program, the SON consortium has decided to discontinue the program, according to an email from Provost Dan Linzer.
The online courses planned for this summer will still be offered, but online courses will not be offered afterward because some faculty “expressed significant concerns” and because the university “found a significant number of challenges in working within a consortium to offer these courses.”
The program was a part of an online learning experiment in which Northwestern and a group of other universities agreed to participate. The universities created a set of undergraduate courses for fall, spring and summer.
According to the email, the goals of this experiment were “to give faculty and students new opportunities – new teaching tools and methods for faculty, and additional curricular breadth and scheduling flexibility for students.”