Sharing a Course
Penn State has a long history of multi-campus collaboration, including campuses and colleges sharing courses across the campuses of Penn State. Since 2003 the Digital Learning Cooperative (DLC) has been providing a central resource for course sharing. A description of the Digital Learning Cooperative is available on the Weblearning @ Penn State page.
Visit the Digital Learning Cooperative (DLC) »
The Digital Learning Cooperative is a course-sharing system designed to help residential students complete a baccalaureate degree at the campuses within four years. The DLC enables campuses to collaborate and to utilize shared resources in order to offer a robust slate of courses/programs to its residential students. It is designed to help residential students complete a baccalaureate degree at the campuses within four years.
The Cooperative is designed to:
- Support key strategic programs that benefit multiple campuses
- Deliver strategic courses that enhance the curriculum for residential students
- Deliver strategic courses that allow students to make progress in their major and resolve out-of-sequence situations
- Provide students with access to minors or electives within their majors in their programs
Types of Course Sharing Initiatives
Individual Course Sharing Efforts
Campuses and other scheduling units (including departments at University Park) may share individual courses as there is a desire to share capacity, or if there is a short term request on the part of other locations. This type of sharing often occurs to support enrollment challenges that are the result of curricular changes, short term enrollment pattern changes, limited run courses, or when a hard to offer specialized course is needed.
Course Sharing Initiatives
Course sharing initiatives include a wide range of multi-semester course offering plans. These initiatives may include multi-location partnerships around increasing the number and variety of courses that are available to students across Penn State locations. These efforts have leveraged specialized expertise by faculty at the delivering location, or may be part of a strategic effort to serve regional course demand. It is recommended that a course sharing agreement be established for course sharing efforts that span more than two academic semesters.
Shared Programs
Shared programs are programs that have been designed to be delivered as a consortia across locations, in addition to the originally sponsoring college or campus. Details about how programs are approved and the principles of joint partnership or consortia programs can be found in the Academic Administrative Policies and Procedures Manual. A formal Memorandum of Understanding between partner locations is required when developing a shared program.
Shared Academic Programs:
- Leverage centrally-support resources to allow for program-level consistencies in course design and faculty development.
- Provide resident students a broader range of curricular options and richer experiences as they engage with students and faculty from at least one campus outside of their home campus.
- Combine online, resident, and hybrid courses into a flexible, cohesive, intentional curriculum developed and delivered by faculty.
A successful shared academic degree program operates as one program across academic partners and is delivered across geographic locations. The curriculum is evaluated based on standards applied to all academic programs, and learning outcomes are the same for shared and stand-alone programs.
Course Sharing Schedules
Course sharing plans are to be reviewed each Fall for the upcoming academic year. It is recommended that a two year sharing plan, or a multi-year course sharing rotation be developed by the consortia.
- Program Coordinators work with the consortia Chief Academic Officers and local Registrars or department schedulers to finalize the course sharing schedule.
- Course schedules are to be determined advance of the course schedule due date established by the Office of the University Registrar.
- Courses shared between campuses must be entered into the Digital Learning Cooperative in order to manage the seat reservation process.