I just saw that Brookdale's online summer course enrollment is up almost 30 percent compared to last summer. These are the classes that are done 100 percent online. There's also a big jump in enrollment in what's called "blended" classes. That's doing half the required class time online and half in an actual classroom.

In the summer, of course, a lot of the enrollment surge may be attributed to students from other universities who come home to Monmouth County and pick up a class or two at Brookdale to save money or keep busy or whatever. And yes, many of these classes can be done online.

I wonder about how students like these online classes--either 100 percent or blended. Give us your good, your bad, and your ugly.

BCC almost never gets positive press like Ocean CC does. Our website is a joke, our publications have more errors, typos, poor grammer & factual errors than anyone could count. What type of image does that reflect?

I recently discovered a great way to way ahead of the game on your required reading. It's digital audio books.

Simple tips to help college students pass their exams and take control of their grade point averages. These are some tips that I used to make it through college and go on to pass my real estate exam, they really work.

You hear all of the negative perceptions about going to a community college from high school kids: that it's grade 13, that it's for the ones who didn't study or pay attention.
But then, 38 percent of the County's high school grads wind up coming here. Does that mean that they're all "settling" and not going to the college of their choice?
Brookdale's 500 NJ STARS students don't feel like they're "settling." They're among the top 15 percent academic achievers of the County's high school students.
Neither do most of the students who wind up spending a semester or two here and realize that Brookdale is "Number One" for good reason.
Some of the students we talk to tell us that the whole "stigma" Brookdale has is in it's name. If we called ourselves, "Brookdale College" and dropped the "community," a lot of people coming here would feel a whole lot better.
What do you think?

Brookdale is one of the nation's 1,200 comprehensive community colleges. One of the key aspects of our kind of college is that we offer "open door access" to anyone who wants to go to college. This is regardless of their prior academic record or even their skill level.

Even though the door is open to everyone, that doesn't guarantee success in college. Once students are admitted, they take placement tests to figure out whether they will need to take basic-skills classes in order to prepare them for more advanced college work.

Some people across the country are questioning the value of the "open door." They say that community colleges need to focus their dwindling resources only on students who have a chance to "benefit from college." They say that letting everyone in isn't fair--not to the ones who "belong" there and also not to the ones whose skill levels are so low that, for all practical purposes, they really have "no chance of ever succeeding."

What do you think?

What are the benefits of online degrees through online classes over traditional classes.

This is a dilemma that a lot of us face about cell phones.

Some professors tell students to turn their cell phones off during class. Others say that leaving your phone on "vibrate" is OK.

From a College standpoint, we think it's OK for students to keep their cell phones on--set to vibrate--in case of an emergency. In fact, if you check out the bottom of the Brookdale home page, there's an icon for getting students and staff to register their cell phones for emergency text-messaging. There's currently about 2,000 people on the list. The idea is that if we need to send an emergency text message, we're hoping that enough of our students have their cell phones on to receive the message, even if they're in class.

What's your opinion on this? If you're a student, are you encountering any resistance from your profs?
If you're a prof, are you insisting that your students turn off their phones? That having the phone set to vibrate isn't good enough?

Hmmm.

Curious.

We're not trying to be insulting. We just want to know if you're a "working adult." More than half of Brookdale's students are holding down a job while getting a college degree. How many of you are in the same boat? Is there some way we can make your life easier? One suggestion we heard is to cut our 15-week classes down to 7 weeks and then include an in-class session and an on-line session each week. Somebody else said maybe we do a split over 15 weeks, with students meeting the professor in class one week and then on-line the following.

Well?