By Daniel Wiser, The Daily Tar Heel
Woodward recommended that campuses fit new programs within the mold of their teaching missions and utilize online courses to cut costs. His report also identified the inefficiencies of online education as a set of programs ripe for consolidation. “What he really highlighted was all the barriers that we’ve created, because we haven’t had any system (guidelines) across our campuses,” Gage said. Students who might need to take a course to graduate — no longer offered on their campus because of budget cuts — find it almost impossible to wade through the bureaucratic morass of other universities’ admissions departments, she said. Online education also has the added benefit of reducing costs for stand-alone schools, such as the use of video-conference technology at satellite campuses of UNC’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy, she said. “I want to invest more in faculty and people,” she said. “If we can curb the need for bricks and mortar, and use technology to help us do that, then we can pay and retain the brightest and best faculty — which is what we’ve got to do.”
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