Sharing Online Courses: New Mexico SUN PATH

In a large, mostly rural state like New Mexico, geographic access to higher education can be a challenge. Sometimes colleges struggle to ensure that programs with workforce relevance are available in remote areas. Other times, colleges need options to make sure that students across the state have access to the courses they need to progress and graduate.

A consortium of 11 New Mexico community colleges and regional public universities received a Round 4 TAACCCT grant with a strategy to address these issues. In addition to other aspects of the grant, the New Mexico Skill Up Network: Pathways Acceleration in Technology and Health Care (New Mexico SUN PATH) grant included a strategy to create a course-sharing hub among member institutions known as SUN Online, making online courses available to residents across the state no matter which institution in the consortium they attended.

Rather than starting from scratch, the SUN Online initiative brought some of the colleges’ strongest, most valuable courses together in one hub in a way that benefited all consortium members.

SUN Online provided students with the opportunity to take courses that may not have been offered when they needed it in order to graduate expediently. For example, if a student at Santa Fe Community College needed an advanced IT course to graduate on time, but spots were all full at their home campus, that student’s advisor or a faculty member could consult the SUN Online course catalog to see that Central New Mexico Community College offered the same course and had a seat available. The Santa Fe student could enroll online and pay tuition to their home institution, while making use of the timeliness of the CNM course to stay on track. Before SUN Online, such course-sharing opportunities did not exist among these institutions.

The SUN Online initiative enabled each participating institution to offer some of their most sought-after courses and programs to students in far-flung areas of the state who otherwise would not have been able to enroll. Two in every three undergraduates enroll within just 25 miles of their home, and this is true for an even higher share of community college students.¹ This increased access to high-quality programs provides additional value by helping students access the courses they need when they need them.

In 2017, the SUN Online consortium collaborated with the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) to strengthen the initiative and ensure continued support through WICHE’s Online Course Exchange. SUN Online continued to determine its own business rules including the cost structure for course enrollment, how students were charged, and how the revenue was split. Since the end of the TAACCCT grant, additional New Mexico colleges have joined the SUN Online consortium, while others have stepped back. With state budget cuts looming, institutions may find it difficult to sustain their contribution to SUN Online. Additional resources at a time like this could go a long way in ensuring New Mexicans can continue to access these courses and programs.

As colleges continue to improve their new, online offerings in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the SUN Online consortium can provide lessons for how they can collaborate rather than offer every class themselves. If one college has expertise in offering a particular class or program online, there is no need for every college in the state to recreate it. Instead, colleges can share course content in a way that will benefit all institutions and students.