“I don’t really like asynchronous or online classes. Yes, it’s convenient for me, but it’s not convenient for my learning,” Chase said. “It’s not conducive to any learning.”
Chase is currently taking a statistics class asynchronously with recorded lectures from Zoom and optional lab sections with a graduate student instructor. He feels these lab sections are helpful, but ultimately wished that his statistics lectures could also be in-person.
Chase doesn’t seek out online classes because he feels the opportunity to ask his professor questions is lost. He said although online lectures have benefits, including being able to rewind, edit and speed up lectures, he ultimately feels that interaction with classmates during lectures is more valuable for his learning.
“Sometimes a few things might slip that I can’t hear the teacher saying that I can’t get back, but I’m willing to sacrifice like a sentence or two for just a general overall interaction,” Chase said.
Despite the downsides of asynchronous learning, Chase does enjoy completing homework and exams online because he feels less pressure and is more comfortable. The flexibility in completing assignments on his own time and in a place of preference is an aspect of online class that Chase appreciates.
Ultimately, he doesn’t prefer online classes because he learns best in an in-person environment. Chase expressed the value in talking to and collaborating with a variety of classmates on problems.
“I get better understanding, especially when I’m mixing with my peers to ask for help. When everyone is separated, there’s no creativity, there’s no new ideas,” Chase said. “When everyone’s together mingling, that’s the spark of new ideas, new creations.”
From complex general education requirements to early application deadlines, transferring from community college to California State University, Northridge proved to be a confusing process for Vanessa Rivera. Now, as a graduate intern at the Los Angeles Pierce College transfer center, Rivera works to support other students on their paths to the CSU system.
“I was a lost college student, and I was really intimidated to seek help,” Rivera said. “This led me to a career path in counseling, (for the) ability to benefit lost college students like I once was.”
With hopes of helping ease the transfer process for students like Rivera, the CSU system opened its new online CSU Transfer Planner for all California community college students in January.
“A large gap exists between the number of students who intend to transfer, and those who do,” said April Grommo, assistant vice chancellor of strategic enrollment management at the CSU Chancellor’s Office.
A complicating factor has been the lack of standards between systems. For example, the University of California has not had a systemwide transfer guarantee for community college students, and students considering transferring to Cal State have separate and different requirements for that system.
According to an August 2023 report from the Public Policy Institute of California, only 19% of community college students who intended to transfer did so within four years, and only 10% did so within two years. Grommo said she hopes the new transfer portal will help bridge that gap.
“The CSU Transfer Planner was designed to create a more efficient and accessible pathway for students to transfer to the CSU,” Grommo said.
The planner allows students to map out their coursework and general education requirements, enter test scores, view articulation agreements, explore program offerings and check if their GPA meets the requirements at their target campuses.
According to Grommo, the tool is tailored to help students figure out their individual paths so they don’t waste time and money taking unnecessary courses.
“With the CSU Transfer Planner, community college students can directly connect to their future CSU campus of choice early in their educational journey, and ultimately minimize credit-loss and maximize time-to-degree completion,” Grommo said.
As of the end of February — less than three months after the portal launched — more than 9,500 students had created Transfer Planner accounts, according to Grommo.
The planner is a great tool for students but has yet to see widespread use because of how new it is, according to Sunday Salter, the transfer center director at Pierce College and a member of the CSU Transfer Planner implementation committee.
“We want students to have some certainty,” Salter said. “A lot of students feel unsure in the transfer process. Our hope is that this tool will help them feel really confident in what is expected of them.”
Samantha Watanabe, a third-year liberal studies major who recently transferred from Cuesta College to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, said a program like this would have really helped her while she was transferring.
“My last semester, I had to take seven classes just to get into Cal Poly because I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t really know that there were other requirements for Cal Poly. So I think a program like (the transfer planner) would have definitely aided me,” Watanabe said.
Navigating transfer requirements is a difficult task for students across the nation. In Virginia, a new dual-admission program is working to address this problem and might ultimately serve as a model for California’s university systems.
The CSU and UC systems also have recently launched dual-admission programs. First-time freshmen entering a community college can apply for the CSU Transfer Success Pathway program through the transfer portal.
Transfer center counselor Ashley Brackett at Allan Hancock College said she is excited about the planner, noting that it provides a huge opportunity for students.
“I’m stoked that they finally have created something similar to what the UC has already had for a really long time,” Brackett said.
The University of California system has a similar online planner for community college students to track their progress and requirements for admission to a UC.
The UC Transfer Admission Planner is connected to the UC application, allowing students to keep track of their progress and apply for their school of choice all in one place, according to the UC admissions page.
The CSU planner will eventually be connected to the CSU application just like the UC planner is connected to its application, according to Grommo.
As the planner continues to develop, Salter said the Pierce transfer center will host events to introduce it to students who apply for the next CSU admission cycle, which will begin in October.
“I’m really excited that the Cal States have done this,” Salter said. “It centralizes communication between the universities and the students, and I’m looking forward to watching it expand.”
Ashley Bolter is a fourth-year journalism student minoring in French and ethnic studies at Cal Poly. Delilah Brumer is a sophomore at Los Angeles Pierce College majoring in journalism and political science. Both are members of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.
Ricardo Alcaraz is taking three of his five courses online this semester at Santa Ana College: an anthropology class, business calculus and business law. It’s a course schedule that reflects a new reality and shift toward distance learning across California’s community colleges, largely sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Taking classes online, though, isn’t ideal for Alcaraz, who is majoring in business administration and plans to transfer to Cal State Fullerton this fall. He enjoys in-person classes because he likes to arrive early and ask questions of his professors. His online classes, on the other hand, are asynchronous, meaning there’s no live instruction, and he has to direct his questions via email.
But like hundreds of thousands of other students in California, Alcaraz opts to enroll in many online classes because they fit better into his schedule. While enrolled at Santa Ana, he has worked up to 20 hours a week at the college’s Undocu-Scholars Center, a resource center for the college’s undocumented students. He’s also the student trustee for the Rancho Santiago Community College District, requiring him to be at board meetings and many campus events.
“It’s been hard to adapt to online classes. But due to how busy I’ve been and needing to be present in different areas, I feel like it’s been very helpful in a way,” he said.
During the pandemic five years ago, a significant majority of California community classes shifted online. Despite some early confusion and bumps in adapting to online education, distance education has firmly taken hold in the years since.
More than 40% of community college classes remain online statewide as of this year, about double what it was before the pandemic, and a much higher rate of remote education than exists at the state’s four-year universities. That includes hybrid classes, which mix online and some required in-person instruction. Some colleges also offer HyFlex courses, which give students the option of attending online or in person. The vast majority of the system’s online classes, however, are taught fully online and asynchronously.
Many campuses also have no choice but to cater to students to stabilize their enrollments and finances. Enrollment across the state plummeted during the pandemic — dropping 19% statewide — and is still below pre-pandemic levels.
College leaders and instructors say online education has proven an effective enough teaching and learning method, especially for general education classes, the lower-level coursework students take before diving into much of their major studies. Statewide, students pass both synchronous and asynchronous online courses at only a slightly lower rate than students pass in-person courses.
Still, officials acknowledge that many students benefit from face-to-face instruction and social interactions with their peers. Such interactions are less common now than they were pre-pandemic, with many campuses quieter and noticeably less crowded. Some colleges have begun to consider how they can entice students to return to campus.
“For a lot of students and a lot of instructors, the preference is to be in the classroom,” said John Hetts, executive vice chancellor for the statewide community college system. “That regular personal contact matters. I think a lot of students feel it, but the challenge we have as a system is that the vast majority of our students work.
“So how do we balance that? I think that’s going to be the challenge for our institutions, to support students getting what they need to thrive, but also what they need to be able to work,” he added.
Los Angeles City College
Just prior to the pandemic,21% of community college classes were online. That rate ballooned to nearly 70% of classes in 2020-21.
Some hands-on programs, like respiratory care and other health programs, were taught in person even during the pandemic because they met the state’s definition of essential education. Beyond those, most community colleges required other classes to be held online throughout the 2020-21 academic year. The next year, colleges began reopening in-person classes, with vaccine mandates in place.
Taylor Squires, a second-year technical theater arts student at Saddleback College in Orange County, takes as many of her general education classes online as possible, and sometimes other courses too. This past fall, her entire course load was online.
“It depends on the semester, but the reasoning is pretty much the same: it frees up time in my day to go do other things,” Squires said.
The state’s four-year university systems are also offering more classes online now than they did pre-pandemic. They offer them at a lower rate than the community colleges, but many of their students take at least one class online every semester or quarter. At the University of California’s nineundergraduate campuses, 6.4% of course sections were fully online in 2023-24, up from 1.8% in the year leading up to the pandemic. That percentage does not include hybrid classes.
Before the pandemic, online classes were a rarity at the 23-campus California State University. More than 90% of course sections were taught in person in each school year between 2016-17 and 2018-19. Then, the start of the pandemic supercharged what had been a gradual trend toward virtual learning.
Cal State campuses have not fully reverted to the pre-pandemic norm now that their campuses are no longer subject to restrictions on in-person gatherings. In the 2023-24 school year, 73% of course sections were taught face-to-face, and 75% of students took at least one course online. The percentage of courses offered in a hybrid format has more than doubled between 2016-17 and 2023-24.
At community colleges, some hands-on classes and programs need to be taught face-to-face because of the nature of the work, like science labs or trade programs such as welding or construction.
Otherwise, most community colleges and their academic departments decide on instructional delivery methods based on what will bring the most enrollments. At the state’s largest district, the nine-college Los Angeles Community College District, between 40% and 50% of classes are now taught online each semester. Before the pandemic, between 10% and 15% of classes were taught online.
“Based on our assumption of student demand, we may plan that 40% of our classes need to be online and 60% need to be in person. And if that 60% doesn’t materialize, we may shift some of that to online to give students more time to enroll,” said Nicole Albo-Lopez, the district’s deputy chancellor.
At the communication and media studies department at Folsom Lake College, department chair Paula Cardwell said the “North Star” is to offer classes the way students want them.
Cardwell has been teaching online classes since 2007, much longer than most, and said she finds it can be done “really, really well.” She said students in her public speaking classes tend to give each other even better feedback in Zoom chats than they do in person because they are less worried about hurting one another’s feelings.
Cardwell added, however, that there are challenges, especially with the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the likelihood of students using it to write their assignments. “So we are rethinking which classes we teach online or how we teach them because of that,” Cardwell said.
Foothill College in Santa Clara County has also been rethinking its approach, hoping to ease isolation and improve student mental health. The college, where about half of the classes were remote even before the pandemic and 55% remain online, is actually seeing face-to-face enrollment increase at a faster rate than courses taught online. This quarter, enrollment is up about 19% for in-person classes, said Kristina Whalen, the college’s president.
The college has opened new in-person facilities, including a wellness lounge where students can relax in massage chairs, meditate or talk to staff about getting connected to mental health services.
“Students are looking for that social interaction and the services that a campus affords,” Whalen said.
But Foothill still relies heavily on distance education and is constantly trying to refine its online instruction, Whalen said. The college this year began requiring additional training to ensure faculty teaching online are still engaging with students, such as by providing prompt and personalized feedback on student coursework.
“Up and down the state, I think colleges are asking and answering that question about how they are monitoring their online instruction to ensure that it’s of a quality that matches our on-ground instruction,” Whalen said.
Hetts, the executive vice chancellor for the community college system, noted that the chancellor’s office provides a rubric to ensure online classes are high quality. But he added that much of the training and review of those classes happens locally.
At the Los Angeles district, faculty are required to be certified to teach online as part of their union contract. Most faculty opt in to additional training, such as one focused on using artificial intelligence in the classroom, said Albo-Lopez. Faculty are regularly looking to build new skills because they know distance education is their new normal, she added.
“It’s here to stay because it’s created a new niche of flexibility both for our students, but also for our workforce,” she said. “And I think that that’s something that is going to be really difficult to change back.”
EdSource staff writer Amy DiPierro contributed reporting to this article.Abby Offenhauser, a member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps, also contributed reporting.
