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wiu712
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Letter to the Editor: "WIU-QC meets our needs".
From The Quad-City Times:
https://qctimes.com/opinion/letters/let ... 9c927.html
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sealhall74
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Acri calling for WIU to surrender the QC campus is the headline story in the print edition of QC Times today. New President is now caught between a rock and a hard place. I wonder if he was even aware of the QC campus issues when he was seeking and transitioning to the job. My guess is nobody bothered to inform him. It is high time for the state legislature to intervene and create a single education "umbrella" system to deal with issues like this. How are taxpayer dollars best utilized to educate the populace? There comes a time when some things have to close. Other things have to move. Status quo is not working for the state as a whole.
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leatherneckcountry
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If somebody else wants the headache give it to them.
wiu712
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As referenced above by Seal Hall ..............

Moline mayor: Time has run out for Western Illinois University.
From The Quad-City Times:
https://qctimes.com/news/local/moline-m ... 46ad7.html
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Neckfansince71
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Seal, He was made well aware of the QuadCities situation and spoke about it during his interview process. But he is taking his time and gathering data in an effort to solve the QC problem. The mayor and Chamber were just paying him lip service the first time they met, giving him an ultimatum. I really think that JR blew smoke up everyone's cloaca when he started talking about it's own identity. I still think that the whole idea of the QC was that of a "completer" school and not a 4 year institution. Upper level undergraduate and post graduates with engineering, supply chain manangement, advanced nursing etc. The foot print is way to small for anything else in my opinion. If I am president, it's steady as you go as he works to develop role and strategy's to fulfill that role. I don't see the state stepping in or WIU stepping out until Huang has a go at it. ;) jc
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sealhall74
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Neckfansince71 wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 1:56 pm Seal, He was made well aware of the QuadCities situation and spoke about it during his interview process. But he is taking his time and gathering data in an effort to solve the QC problem. The mayor and Chamber were just paying him lip service the first time they met, giving him an ultimatum. I really think that JR blew smoke up everyone's cloaca when he started talking about it's own identity. I still think that the whole idea of the QC was that of a "completer" school and not a 4 year institution. Upper level undergraduate and post graduates with engineering, supply chain manangement, advanced nursing etc. The foot print is way to small for anything else in my opinion. If I am president, it's steady as you go as he works to develop role and strategy's to fulfill that role. I don't see the state stepping in or WIU stepping out until Huang has a go at it. ;) jc
If you are going to keep, at least get some Osher Lifelong Learning courses up and running there. I guarantee you will get more than 4 new students showing up this semester. I might be one of them. lol
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ST_Lawson
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Here's the thing to keep in mind about the "It has enrolled only 168 students ("with just four freshmen") for the spring semester." comment...

A lot of courses that would normally be "in-person" have gone online this school year because of COVID. If a student takes most of their classes as online classes, they're counted as an "extension" student (these numbers: http://wiu.edu/IRP/enrollments/2021/spring/tdse_ext.php), not a QC student (these numbers: http://wiu.edu/IRP/enrollments/2021/spring/tdse_qc.php) even if they take a class or two in-person on the QC campus.

It's rather disingenuous to say that the QC campus is that low in a year when so many classes have had to go online. Yes, there were only 4 new freshmen counted as QC students this year, but that means there's only 4 new freshmen for whom the majority of their classes are in-person on the QC campus. It's likely that there's quite a few more students that would be QC students, but have chosen to either wait a year to enroll or to take their classes online or mostly online.

If you look at Spring 2020 to Spring 2021 student enrollment:
Macomb went from 4,355 to 1,746
QC went from 355 to 121
but Extension (mostly "online" students) went from 635 to 3,231
which is why total enrollment only dropped a little bit

That doesn't change the fact that the QC campus is way down from what they said it should be, but outside of Dr. Rives leadership, I don't think you can put much of that blame on WIU. Just about all the state universities outside of U of I (Champaign/Urbana), U of I Chicago, and Illinois State have dropped significantly over the last 10 years, including the campuses that I'd bet the Moline mayor is thinking of when she says she wants another university to step in. U of I Springfield is down ~20% in the last 10 years and SIU-E is down ~9% in the time (nearly all of those drops in the last 5 years)...which means it's a statewide problem and a U of Illinois - QC or a NIU-QC would have had similar enrollment issues.
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sealhall74
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ST_Lawson wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 4:11 pm Here's the thing to keep in mind about the "It has enrolled only 168 students ("with just four freshmen") for the spring semester." comment...

A lot of courses that would normally be "in-person" have gone online this school year because of COVID. If a student takes most of their classes as online classes, they're counted as an "extension" student (these numbers: http://wiu.edu/IRP/enrollments/2021/spring/tdse_ext.php), not a QC student (these numbers: http://wiu.edu/IRP/enrollments/2021/spring/tdse_qc.php) even if they take a class or two in-person on the QC campus.

It's rather disingenuous to say that the QC campus is that low in a year when so many classes have had to go online. Yes, there were only 4 new freshmen counted as QC students this year, but that means there's only 4 new freshmen for whom the majority of their classes are in-person on the QC campus. It's likely that there's quite a few more students that would be QC students, but have chosen to either wait a year to enroll or to take their classes online or mostly online.

If you look at Spring 2020 to Spring 2021 student enrollment:
Macomb went from 4,355 to 1,746
QC went from 355 to 121
but Extension (mostly "online" students) went from 635 to 3,231
which is why total enrollment only dropped a little bit

That doesn't change the fact that the QC campus is way down from what they said it should be, but outside of Dr. Rives leadership, I don't think you can put much of that blame on WIU. Just about all the state universities outside of U of I (Champaign/Urbana), U of I Chicago, and Illinois State have dropped significantly over the last 10 years, including the campuses that I'd bet the Moline mayor is thinking of when she says she wants another university to step in. U of I Springfield is down ~20% in the last 10 years and SIU-E is down ~9% in the time (nearly all of those drops in the last 5 years)...which means it's a statewide problem and a U of Illinois - QC or a NIU-QC would have had similar enrollment issues.
Does WIU have their own server farm for dealing with all of the online stuff or are they contracting that out? If they do, where is it located?
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ST_Lawson
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sealhall74 wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 6:17 pmDoes WIU have their own server farm for dealing with all of the online stuff or are they contracting that out? If they do, where is it located?
We use Desire2Learn (D2L, https://www.d2l.com/) for WesternOnline. It looks like the actual servers hosting it are Amazon AC2 servers (us-east-1 datacenter in northern Virginia, technically). At least, that's what's coming up when I look it up online. I'd have to ask someone at work tomorrow to know for sure though.
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wiu712
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Western Illinois University responds to Mayor Acri’s letter.
From KWQC-TV, Davenport:
https://www.kwqc.com/2021/03/05/western ... is-letter/
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