Integrated Online Courses for Dual Enrollment Programs

Grant Greenwood & Vance H. Fried

Since the fall of 2022, McMurry University and TEL Education have partnered to provide dual enrollment courses to students throughout the state of Texas. McMurry is a private university located in Abilene, Texas, while TEL is an online learning platform designed for dual enrollment. The results of this partnership have been highly positive.

Launched with only one participating high school, the McMurry Dual Credit Academy has quickly grown to include 170 public and private high schools across the state of Texas. As a result, McMurry has experienced two consecutive years of record enrollments, both in online and oncampus students.

More importantly, students at participating high schools have achieved strong academic success through the program. Some students have already earned an associate’s degree while in high school . But it’s not just top tier students who have been successful . For example 350 academically below average (by standardized test scores) students in the Galena Park public school district achieved a 96 percent pass rate in Contemporary Math.

Success at this level is made possible by the use of Integrated Online courses. These courses integrate McMurry online courses with the support system of the participating high school.

Online vs. Face-to-Face (F2F)

Dual enrollment courses are delivered through four primary methods:

1. High School Taught by Credentialed High School Teachers – A high school teacher who has been credentialed by the college as an adjunct instructor teaches the course on the high school campus. This is the most common approach but comes with challenges related to inconsistent quality, high cost, and limited scalability.
2. High School Taught by College Faculty – A college faculty member travels to the high school to deliver the course. This method has the same challenges as high school taught by credentialed high school teachers.
3. College Campus with Empty Seat Enrollment – High school students enroll in a traditional college course, filling available empty seats. While this provides an authentic college experience, it is the least common method due to logistical challenges, such as requiring students to commute to campus and the availability of open seats.
4. Online Dual Enrollment – Students take college courses online, which eliminates travel barriers, expands course offerings, and allows for consistent instructional quality. The challenges to online are limited student engagement and lack of student-to-student social interaction.

A major challenge across all four delivery models is the systemic friction between high schools and colleges. Systemic friction doesn’t refer to tensions between workers at the high school and college. Rather it is caused by the system the college is using to provide dual. There are often issues in enrolling students and passing student information from high school to college, and grades from college to high school. Further high schools often struggle to schedule students for dual enrollment courses because course availability is limited and dictated by the college, making planning difficult. In addition, the college course is a black box to the high school—schools receive little to no insight into how their students are performing until final grades are issued at the end of the semester. As a result, the high school can do nothing to help their students who may be struggling in the course. Even if they know a student is struggling, there is little they can do to help.

Integrated Delivery

Integrated delivery of online courses offers the benefits of online learning—cost efficiency and instructional consistency—while addressing the key challenges of low engagement and weak communication between high schools and colleges. The integrated model blends the personal touch of local high school staff with the consistent quality and cost-effectiveness of online courses.

The college provides the Instructor of Record (IOR) to deliver high-quality content and manage subject-specific questions, while high school teachers or counselors serve as facilitators. These facilitators focus on ensuring accountability, encouraging engagement, and supporting students through the learning process. The facilitators do not have to be subject matter experts. This approach allows colleges to maintain scalable and efficient operations while ensuring that students benefit from local, personalized support. By combining global course quality with a local presence, the integrated model offers the best of both worlds.

Further, by combining online coursework with structured high school support and real-time data sharing, integrated delivery ensures high school administrators and counselors have visibility into student progress throughout the semester, eliminating the black box problem. Systemic friction in scheduling is eliminated by making all the courses available to any high school in any term without enrollment minimums. Friction is further reduced by the integrating platform providing a smooth mechanism for the high school to communicate with the college’s student information system.

Benefits of Online Learning for Students

1. Consistent Quality
   • Online courses, when “engineered for learning,” deliver consistent quality across schools. Expertly designed content and platforms ensure that all students receive the same high-quality instruction, regardless of location. In contrast, F2F courses can suffer from radical inconsistency due to multiple instructors teaching the same course in different ways. This variability can lead to significant differences in quality and, in some cases, poorly executed courses. Students from rural, urban, or suburban areas all receive the same curriculum and instructional materials in an online setting, eliminating these disparities in educational quality.
2. Convenience
   • Online courses allow students to complete work at their own pace and on their own schedule. This flexibility is invaluable for students juggling extracurricular activities, jobs, or family responsibilities. Online education also ensures that students in the smallest high schools gain access to the same courses at the same cost as those in larger schools. Students at small high schools can even earn a full associate degree through online programs, which would be impossible with F2F models.
3. Lower Opportunity Costs
   • Online courses eliminate the need to travel to a college campus, saving time and money. Additionally, students can schedule coursework around their high school classes and extracurricular activities, maximizing productivity.
4. Benefits of Online Learning for Colleges
   • Easier to Scale
     • Colleges offering online dual enrollment courses can serve more students without the constraints of classroom space or minimum enrollment numbers. They are not limited by the need for a qualified Instructor of Record (IOR) to be physically present in each high school.
   • Lower Instructional Delivery Costs
     • Online courses eliminate the need for individual instructors at every high school. Colleges can leverage one instructor to oversee multiple online sections, supported by teaching assistants or AI tools to provide timely feedback and grading. This allows one Instructor of Record (IOR) to cover hundreds of students, compared to F2F courses, which typically run with class sizes of 30 or fewer. This scalability reduces operational costs, enabling colleges to pass on savings to students through lower tuition.

Addressing the Negatives of Online Learning

Critics often cite a lack of engagement and social interaction as drawbacks to online education. However, these concerns are less significant in the context of dual enrollment, particularly when an integrated delivery model is used:

1. Online Students Don’t Engage
   • This is a valid concern for adult learners, but high school students enrolled in dual enrollment courses have built-in support systems, including counselors, teachers, and peers. o Example: A high school counselor can monitor a student’s progress and intervene if they fall behind or fail to engage.
2. Lack of Social Interaction
   • While traditional college students may miss the social aspect of F2F courses, dual enrollment students experience robust social interaction daily with their high school peers. Online courses complement their existing school life without disrupting it.

Conclusion

While traditional F2F dual enrollment remains an option, its limitations in cost, quality, and scalability severely limit widespread implementation. Integrated Online offers superior benefits in quality, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. Integrated Online not only resolves the inconsistency and cost challenges of F2F instruction but also addresses systemic friction and eliminates the black box problem, ensuring a better learning experience for the student. Integrated online enables the rapid expansion of dual enrollment, allowing students everywhere to have access to affordable, high-quality college courses while still in high school.

About the Authors

Grant Greenwood is Vice President of Enrollment Management and Chief Operating Officer at McMurry University. Earlier in his career he was Director of Dual Enrollment Programs for Cisco College. Greenwood has an Ed.D. in Higher Education from Texas Tech University, and an MBA and BBA in Economics from Abilene Christian University.

Vance H. Fried is Founder and Executive Director at TEL Education. He spent 30 years on the faculty of Oklahoma State University holding endowed professorships in both Management and Entrepreneurship, and is recognized as an expert on affordable education. Fried has a J.D. from the University of Michigan, a post-doctorate in Strategic Management and Research Methods as well as a B.S. in Finance from Oklahoma State University. He is also a C.P.A.