Rize is a consortium of colleges, including SNC, through which institutions can quickly and cost-effectively expand their current academic program offerings to include evolving fields of study that reflect students’ educational and career interests.
As a member of the consortium, St. Norbert College can offer majors, minors and other paths of study in which our students continue to take the majority of their courses in on-campus classrooms with SNC faculty, supplemented by specialized online courses developed by subject-matter experts and delivered by faculty from other institutions. For instance, students in our Rize-supported supply chain management major will take all of their core accounting, business, economics and other courses and several electives on campus, while taking more specialized courses in areas like sourcing and forecasting through Rize, online.
Rize-supported programs at SNC:
Students can engage with the material at any time, so they can integrate Rize courses easily with their on-campus class schedule. Rize instructors also offer live online office hours, so students can engage with them directly in real time.
With participation structured this way, SNC students have an even broader network of classmates with unique perspectives and insights.
There is a rigorous process in place that begins with courses designed by subject-matter experts in partnership with an instructional design team. Courses are then subject to faculty review at numerous consortium colleges. Once courses are approved and introduced, evaluations are gathered every semester – as is student feedback – to ensure continuous improvement.
Rize 3-credit-hour courses require approximately nine hours of work per week, where at least three of those hours are contact hours represented by instructor-student interaction through synchronous online classes, recorded video review, mediated discussion boards, question forums, messaging, or other forms of distance instructor interaction.
Rize courses stipulate that the lowest-cost materials possible should be used that still achieve strong student outcomes. This is done to ensure that needlessly expensive course materials are not assigned to students when an Open Education Resource or lower-cost materials would yield the same (or better) learning outcomes.
Assessing advanced learning outcomes (for example, those related to behavior and creativity) is better done via richer assignments; requiring original work helps ensure academic integrity; properly constructed project work improves engagement; and projects have the potential to become impactful parts of a student’s portfolio when entering the job market.
In addition to the ongoing support SNC students can expect from their on-campus faculty, advisors and student-success professionals, Rize-powered courses provide additional support that includes monitoring of student performance at early, middle and end points of each course.
For students who need accommodations for disabilities, SNC staff work with Rize Student Support to determine the best course of action to meet a student’s needs.
Students pay the same tuition to their home institution that they would for any other class on campus; they pay no fees to Rize. Please note that students may have to buy a textbook or similar resource as they would with any other class.
