Momentum: Lehman Online

For well over a decade, Lehman College has been increasing its digital footprint. Offerings that illustrate this include an expanded and improved website, online courses and fully-online degrees, and digital resources for students, faculty, and staff. Together they make up a growing ecosystem of online education at Lehman. Why? For both students and faculty, digital education creates opportunities for new modes of instruction, learning, and intellectual engagement.

Online Education at Lehman

In a few short weeks, summer sessions will begin, with students enrolled in nearly 400 online courses. Those students are not unusual. During their college career, a typical Lehman student will take a combination of face-to-face, fully online (asynchronous), and hybrid courses. Online and hybrid courses allow students more flexibility when it comes to schedules, commuting to campus, and job and family responsibilities. In 2018, nearly 60% of all Lehman students enrolled in courses that were entirely or partially online, taught by over half of Lehman’s faculty. Next fall, more than 570 courses will offer the flexibility and creative learning experiences that online education at Lehman offers. In fact, Lehman leads the CUNY system in the percentage of online and hybrid courses offered.

Lehman also offers a number of fully-online degree and certificate programs, including a bachelor of science in nursing (also known as the RN-to-BS program), and a master of arts degree in health education and promotion. Several existing master’s programs are working toward establishing fully-online alternatives by 2020. Two online master’s programs will launch in fall 2019: business with a concentration in human resource management, and organizational leadership. Our growing portfolio of distinctive online degree and certificate programs is one strategy Lehman is using to work toward the college’s ambitious goal of granting 90,000 degrees and certificates by 2030.


Online Student

Teaching and Learning

Online education involves much more than asynchronous course and degree offerings, or uploading digitized course readings to a website. Effective online education depends on careful planning by invested faculty, innovative approaches to course creation, and thoughtful uses of technology. The Office of Online Education at Lehman supports faculty development in educational technologies and course design. By taking advantage of what technology and digital environments make possible, faculty members can create powerful tools for teaching and learning. Last year, nearly one-third of Lehman faculty participated in professional development training—including an online exemplary course institute—offered by the Office of Online Education. Twenty-eight courses were totally redesigned for a digital environment.

“Zero textbook cost” courses and degrees are increasing in popularity at institutions across the nation. In line with CUNY’s own zero textbook cost initiative, Lehman is encouraging the use and creation of open educational resources, known as OERs. The Leonard Lief Library has taken the lead in supporting faculty as they replace print materials with high quality, freely accessible, no-cost digital materials. OERs present a major benefit to many students, who may no longer need to choose between expensive science textbooks, for example, and putting food on the table.

Online Student

The benefits of OERs extend beyond economic considerations to teaching and learning. Using digital resources, faculty can create course websites that feature a variety of media, including video, images, and sound. Innovative web-based tools and apps even enable faculty to compile and publish their own course “textbooks” from public-domain sources. The library also provides students with information literacy tutorials and creates digital teaching and learning materials, such as research guides, for use in online or face-to-face instruction.

The flexibility offered by online education is complemented by the unique learning experiences it affords. A web-based course can transform standard activities like reading and writing. For example, students can participate in collaborative learning activities, such as social annotation—which enables them to comment individually and provide feedback on a shared digital text. With a course on the web, blogging becomes an effective format for rich student writing; student contributors can include links to resources elsewhere on the web and respond to each other’s ideas. Online, an entire class can learn together by creating a multimedia group project. Courses designed around OERs and digital materials not only encourage active engagement, but they also position students as creators of knowledge. In addition, online tools help faculty collaborate in novel ways with colleagues in a digital space, whether they are both on campus or separated by a continent.  All in all, OERs and digital tools have the power to transform teaching, learning, and scholarship at Lehman.

Supporting Students

Additionally, online tools can help faculty make courses more accessible to students with disabilities. Students with vision impairments, for example, can use software to read course texts and materials on accessibly-designed websites. When a laptop or iPad can contain a semester’s worth of course readings, a student with mobility or motor control problems doesn’t need to carry or maneuver printed matter.

Online Students