Consider Whether to Take an Online Course at Community College

For professionals who want to gain new workplace skills without the time investment of a degree program, online community college courses can provide an affordable and accessible option.

Whether it's the best option, though, depends greatly on an employee's needs.

Though experts say the way employers view community college learning is improving, it can vary by industry. And research suggests community college students get less return from online courses than face-to-face offerings, even though online students are generally more motivated and academically prepared than their on-ground counterparts.

[Learn how community colleges are expanding online.]

Still, with the flexibility to enroll in a single course or even a specialized industry certification program, the benefits of online community college classes may outweigh the risk.

"If you do it just to increase your pay and increase your position, I think that's not sustaining," says Lorrie Ranck, dean of the learning resources division at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. Instead, online community college students need to have strong internal motivation, she adds.

That's not to say employers will automatically discredit learning occurring in an online course from a two-year school. Industries with quickly evolving practices may actually prioritize it, says Judy Baker, the dean of online learning at Foothill College just outside of San Jose, California.

"Employers in Silicon Valley seem to value the skills acquired in community college online courses just as much as in for-profit or four-year institutions," says Baker. "In some ways, community colleges are able to be more agile and responsive to quickly changing workforce training needs." That's partly because the process to approve new courses can be less involved at two-year schools, she says.

The business, childhood education, accounting, and computer science fields are experiencing the greatest growth in online course enrollment at Foothill College, Baker adds.

At 60,000-student Rio Salado College in Tempe, Arizona, vice president of academic affairs Jennifer McGrath says computer technology, energy systems and health care continue to be growing online learning fields.

Like those at a lot of two-year schools, most of the certification programs at Rio Salado are approved by industry associations, says McGrath.

For students only taking individual courses, McGrath suggests selling their merits to an employer based on the quality of a course's instructor.

"I would do some digging as to who their subject matter experts are, who their faculty are," she says. "If they have faculty that are practitioners in the field, for example, that's going to add a lot of credibility to the program."

[Find out how to convince an employer to pay for an online degree.]

Even if an online course appears credible to an employer, that doesn't mean it will satisfy a student's learning needs. A research overview published in 2013 from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College stated that recent research shows student performance in online community college courses lags behind face-to-face courses.

In follow-up interviews, online community college students have consistently complained of a lack of student interaction in their courses, says Di Xu, a postdoctoral research associate at the research center.

That could be enough to influence some students to choose online courses from a four-year institution instead, Xu says, though she has not done any research directly comparing them with online community college offerings.

"My suspicion would be that four-year universities (courses) might be much better," Xu says. Four-year students may be better prepared to navigate the potential pitfalls of an online course, while four-year institutions may also have professors who have devoted more time to learning effective online teaching methods, she says.

Even so, with the comparatively low cost of community colleges, students wading back into academic waters after a long absence may find starting at a two-year institution a more manageable risk.

That was true for Nicki Schillhahn-Amos, who had gone nearly four decades without taking a college course when she enrolled in Rio Salado's retail management certification program.

[Explore how to get four-year credits with online community college classes.]

Already an operations manager at Fry's Food, a division of Kroger, she began cautiously in 2009 before diving more heavily into her studies in the fall of 2010 and completing her certification at Paradise Valley Community College in 2012.

She's now pursuing her bachelors online in food industry management at Arizona State University.

"I kind of took one class at a time and thought, 'Well that one worked OK, so me see what else I can do with my schedule and life,'" says Schillhahn-Amos, who has worked in food retail for 35 years. "I'm not a person that likes to fail at anything I do, so I wanted to make sure I was going to be able to get through it unfazed."

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