Each week, “Pop Quiz” features an interview with a member of Greater Houston’s education community. To suggest someone we should interview with an interesting story to tell, email us at education@houstonlanding.org.
Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic forced higher education institutions to pivot to makeshift virtual formats for most classes, San Jacinto College leaders are launching a fully virtual campus for more students to complete their courseloads online.
Leaders hope that the creation of “San Jac Online” scaling up their online offerings over the next few years will boost enrollment, increase the number of credentials students complete and make community college more accessible. With the move, the southeast Houston college joins the ranks of others across the country dedicating more resources to fully virtual program options.
For example, Houston Community College also will launch their Global Online College in the fall, which aims to attract students from not just Houston, but all over the globe. Both colleges note that local students’ ability to take online classes from any institution across the country is leading them to compete harder for virtual learners.
“We’re behind the game,” said Georges Detiveaux, San Jacinto’s Director of Online Quality. “We want to make sure we are on par with our peer institutions out there.”
Online education has remained popular at San Jacinto since the pandemic. In the fall 2024 semester, 34 percent of students took classes entirely face-to-face, while the remaining share of students took online classes or a combination of online and in person.
Meet the interviewee
We talked to Georges Detiveaux, San Jacinto’s Director of Online Quality, about what to expect from the new virtual college and the trends driving these changes.
Q: Give me a rundown of what the launch of San Jac Online entails, because I know that you do offer online classes. So how does this differ?
San Jac has offered online classes for quite some time now, and those classes have been offered from the various brick-and-mortar campuses. We are taking those classes in phases from the brick-and-mortar campuses and rolling them out through San Jac Online instead. For lots of reasons, we are going to be able to provide a more focused, intentional design to the courses. So as to kind of move away from different kinds of navigation experiences that students have had from course to course, to provide a more consistent learning experience for our students.
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board has a list of standards of best practices for online design and teaching, and the Department of Education has the same and we also want to make sure that we, you know, not just meet those expectations, but surpass them. And with a centralized, dedicated team of people who can do that, it makes it easier.
Q: What trends are driving this shift?
Lots of things. So there’s been a major shift since the pandemic, right? The pandemic was really when people discovered how much easier it is to incorporate an education in their day-to-day lives by taking fully online courses. There was a huge doorway that opened up, of traffic, for any institution to handle. So being able to streamline the courses and handle the traffic better and have more students who meet the outcomes of these courses and produce people who are prepared for the workforce is a big goal.
I should also point out, by the way, that a lot of what happened online during the pandemic wasn’t necessarily traditional online course design. A lot of it was called emergency remote instruction, right? So a lot of things happened as if they would happen in the physical classroom, over Zoom, instead of asynchronous coursework that’s been planned out differently. So that’s something that every institution across the nation has been working at moving away from, as well. Moving away from the idea of emergency remote instruction — which was just kind of a stopgap during the pandemic when we couldn’t do anything else — towards more intentional design in courses and yeah.
We also want to maximize the resources that we have available at the institution. So students who take face-to-face courses usually know that they have access to all kinds of services — tutoring, counseling, career services, the library, etc. And we want to make sure that our online students get channeled to virtual versions of those. So being able to connect with the tutor online, being able to connect with the library online, being able to have library instruction as part of their classes, etc. We want to make sure that our online students have equal access to the same kinds of things that face-to-face students have access to.
Q: With creating a more robust online presence, is there any thought that y’all might be able to attract people who don’t live in San Jacinto’s service area, but live in other places?
Principally, our goal is to serve our community, first and foremost. So the folks who live in our community, who pay property taxes, who fund our bond issues, those are our customers. And we want to make sure that whatever we’re doing is with them in mind first. But yes, there are opportunities in the future for us to connect with organizations that allow students from other institutions to take courses through us. That’s actually already happening in certain cases.
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board has a course-sharing initiative, and we share some of our courses with them. So not only can faculty from other institutions use some of our courses, but also it allows students from other institutions in Texas to take courses through San Jac. There may be an instance when some nursing course or chemistry course or whatever it is, is that one thing that some student in El Paso needs to graduate in eight weeks. So you can see how advantageous it would be for that student to be able to take that course in the time that they have, and not have to wait for their home institution to offer it according to their schedule.
Q: Colleges always tell me, especially in this post-pandemic moment, that there’s a sense of competition now that virtual courses are so ramped up. A student living in your community could feasibly go anywhere. Do you all feel that?
We’re behind the game. Yeah. We want to make sure we are on par with our peer institutions out there. For example, Lone Star College System and HCC already have an online entity for online courses, right? Their functions vary from place to place. But we’re a little bit behind in terms of getting together and coming together and being more intentional about our online offerings.
Q: Is the college hiring more online professors to offer more classes this way?
We’re kicking off our fall semester with 52 founding faculty members for San Jac Online, and those are faculty who have elected to come over to SJO from our brick-and-mortar campuses. These are folks who are super excited about online teaching already. It’s something that they found works for them and their lives. It’s something they found a passion for, that they enjoy doing, that they’ve met certain success with in their careers. We’re moving those 52 over for phase one.
A lot of the courses will be taught by these folks, but they can’t cover everything that we’re offering. So in that case, the faculty at the other campuses will be filling in and teaching there as part of their regular duties, maybe as an overload for them. And then we’ll also have adjunct instructors teaching, as well. That’s going to replicate from year to year as we bring in more and more courses.
Miranda Dunlap covers Houston’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus. Despite roughly half of Houston’s higher-education students attending community colleges, there hasn’t been much news covering these systems or students — until now. Her reporting holds institutions accountable, highlights barriers faced by students and helps them navigate their opportunities. Reach Miranda at miranda@houstonlanding.org or on Twitter and Instagram.