Lifetime residents of Maine tend to look askance at people who are "from away," an epithet reserved for transplants, summer vacationers, and college students. Such people might mean well, the thinking goes, but ultimately they do not belong.
Bowdoin College, a 220-year-old institution in Brunswick, Me., takes a similarly protective view of its curriculum. At a time when online education has blurred campus borders—and institutions face growing pressure to train students for specific jobs—Bowdoin and many other liberal arts colleges have held the line. When I matriculated there, a decade ago, Bowdoin didn't even have online course registration. (The college finally added it last year.)
So it was a significant move last week when Bowdoin decided to offer, in the spring, a partly online course in financial accounting led by a professor at Dartmouth College's business school.
As many as 50 Bowdoin students will take the course, for credit, from the Maine campus. The Dartmouth professor, Phillip C. Stocken, will teach largely from his post in New Hampshire, holding weekly class sessions and office hours online. Meanwhile, an economics professor at Bowdoin will lead weekly face-to-face sessions on its campus. Bowdoin will pay $60,000 for the course—significantly less than it would cost to develop a course "of this quality" from scratch, according to Scott Hood, a spokesman.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/at-liberal-arts-colleges-debate-about-online-courses-is-really-about-outsourcing/55151