Kristin Shorb has built up an impressive academic resume at Allen Community College, maintaining a 3.75 grade-point average, working part time for her father and balancing her never-ending duties of motherhood — all from 100 miles away.
Shorb, a 30-year-old mother of two living in Topeka, is among Allen’s fastest-growing student segment: its online population.
While enrollment at ACC’s Iola campus and its outreach center in Burlingame has grown modestly over the past few years, the college’s online population has continued to explode.
The online growth has been so steady — between 12 and 20 percent annually — that college administrators have taken the next step, completed earlier this spring when the Higher Learning Commission approved ACC to offer all of its degree programs online.
No longer are students bound by geography or other constraints.
Some, such as Shorb, will earn their degrees without setting foot on campus or talking in person to an instructor or classmate.
For Shorb, the online courses have given her a head start on her plan to resume college. She’d taken a few semester of college about 10 years ago, but gave up college in order to start a family.
“I just figured I’d go back when my children were old enough to go to school,” she said.
And with her younger child only a year old at the time, Shorb had given little thought about taking college classes so soon until seeing a billboard in Topeka touting ACCC’s online program.
“I figure that billboard gave me a two-year head start,” said Shorb, who will earn a general studies degree in May before transferring to Washburn University in the fall in search of a degree in elementary education. “The online courses are perfect for me.”
Shorb’s class load is significantly smaller this semester — she needs only a single class in order to earn her ACC degree, a significant difference from semesters past, when she carried a full-time schedule of classes: at least 12 hours a week.
Such a routine required Shorb to employ time management and self-motivation.
She typically focused on classwork twice a day: in the afternoons when her children napped, and then in the evenings when they were in bed for the night.
“I’ve always been a good self-motivator, so it wasn’t much of a problem,” she said.
The Allen instructors helped her take it from there.
The classes are designed so students can work at their own schedule, as long as assignment deadlines were met, Shorb noted.
