WESTFIELD – Westfield State University was ranked fourth out of 160 schools named to U.S. News & World Report’s Top Online Education Program rankings in the Bachelor’s degree category. Westfield State’s online bachelor’s degree completion programs were ranked in three different categories: faculty credentials and training (#1), student services and technology (#16), and teaching practices and student engagement (#42).
Westfield State offers five online bachelor’s degree completion programs in business, criminal justice, liberal studies, history, and sociology. A psychology degree will launch online for fall 2013. The university has offered online classes since 2002. Westfield State is the only public university in Massachusetts in the top 100.
“One of our goals is to meet students where they are in life. Online education fulfills a very important need for individuals by providing options for those who did not think a college education was within their reach,” said Westfield State University President Evan S. Dobelle.
These rankings were created in response to today’s high demand for education provided in a flexible manner. With many distractions to detract from schooling, online education has become increasingly popular due to its flexibility.
“Keys to our success is faculty training, which focuses on technology and pedagogy, and experience in this space,” said Kimberly Tobin, Dean of Graduate and Continuing Education. “We have an advantage over other programs because we have been offering online courses for over ten years, which has given us the opportunity to hone the quality and depth of our offerings as well as the experience to help prepare students for this non-traditional approach to education.”
While U.S. News has applied some of its rankings standards used for traditional schools, many new measures have been developed and were used to evaluate online programs. In order to be considered for the rankings, online degree programs needed to have at least 80 percent of their course content available online.
To compute the Best Online Bachelor’s Programs rankings, responses to the statistical questionnaire were linked to different possible achievable point values, which were then summed into overall scores for each eligible school. The highest overall score a school could possibly achieve if it performed strongest in every single ranking indicator was 100. Westfield State received a score of 61, less than 10 points lower than the number one ranked school.
Numerical rankings were determined by sorting the programs’ weighted overall scores in descending order, with the highest scoring school ranked No. 1. No two schools share a rank because although U.S. News rounds overall scores to one decimal place for display purposes on the website, the rankings themselves are based on longer unrounded scores that are all unique. Overall scores were determined by student engagement (50%), faculty credentials and training (25%), and student services and technology (25%).
Data was collected from both for-profit and not-for-profit schools. For more information about the rankings methodology, please go to http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/edupdfs/
For more information on the U.S. News Top Online Education Program rankings, please visit http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education or find U.S. News on Facebook or Twitter.
For more information about Westfield State’s online bachelor’s degree programs, please visit www.westfieldontheweb.net
