Mitigating Program & Campus Closure with Course Sharing

Across higher education, we’re seeing tough headlines about campuses closing or programs being cut. It’s a challenging time for higher ed, and learners are often the ones most affected.

In this post, our partners at Parchment by Instructure share how course sharing can help institutions work together to expand access, sustain programs, and keep campuses open. Through this collaborative approach, students can take the courses they need, when and where they need them, without the added hurdles of transferring or reapplying.

The California Community Colleges System and its California Virtual Campus offer an inspiring example of what’s possible. Their work, which recently earned a WCET WOW Award, shows how course sharing can support students and institutions.

Enjoy the read,
Lindsey Downs, WCET

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Higher education systems are facing unprecedented challenges due to funding uncertainty, drops in enrollment, and increased scrutiny around the value of a college degree.

As a result of these challenges, many higher education leaders are facing difficult decisions regarding campus operations and degree programs. No doubt you have read about campuses closing their doors or system offices shuttering degree programs. Unfortunately, the impact of these decisions is often felt by learners, who have fewer choices and fewer pathways to pursue their degree.

An Alternative Solution

What if there was an alternative? What if there was a way to preserve academic diversity, optimize system resources, and create sustainability during such turbulent times? Fortunately, there is.

Course sharing is defined as a strategy where two or more institutions collaborate to make their courses available to each other’s students, allowing them to count for credit at their home institution.

Learners can take courses from multiple institutions without having to apply or transfer. By providing learners with more opportunities to access the required courses they need, when they need them, systems can have a dramatic impact on persistence and completion.

But by offering shared courses across institutions, your system can do more than expand access and improve learner success. Course sharing can help you optimize resources across institutions to sustain low-enrollment courses, programs, and potentially even institutions that might otherwise be shuttered.

California Community Colleges

One such example of a system implementing course sharing effectively is the California Community Colleges System (CCCS) through their utilization of California Virtual Campus (CVC). With 114 of the state’s community colleges participating and more than 100,000 course sections available online, learners can take a course that isn’t offered at their community college or find an option that better fits their schedule. 

The result? For learners, they gain access to a wider range of courses to continue on their pathway without interruption. For institutions, underenrolled programs are no longer viewed as expendable, but rather as shared assets that serve a broader range of learners across the state.

Dr. Marina Aminy, Executive Director of California Virtual Campus, and Christina Hinkle, Executive Dean of Humanities & Social Sciences at Saddleback College,  shared the value of course sharing as part of a recent WCET webcast, which provided a look into their 2025 WOW Award-winning work leveraging technology to transform access and completion.

Dr. Aminy described the value of course sharing for learners by saying, “Students are not finding the class they need in many cases…through course sharing they have access to a bigger portfolio of classes so that they can complete their educational goals in a timely manner.” For colleges, course sharing is saving programs that otherwise would have been cut. Christina described the impact by saying, “Before, we were talking about how we were going to lay people off. These are gut-wrenching conversations to have but we’ve been able to turn things around through the California Virtual Campus and the online consortium. It has meant the difference between canceling and continuing these programs.”

If you’d like to learn more about how California has successfully expanded access to academic opportunity and optimized resources with course sharing, you can watch the webcast, or read the California Virtual Campus Case Study. The case study, Using Course Sharing to Remove Barriers to Completion Across the California Community Colleges System, focuses on how learners can access the courses they need when they need them. The case study explores the challenges facing learners when it comes to scheduling needed courses, reviews the California Community Colleges course-sharing initiative, and presents several significant results.

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