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Tennessee Tech will help students feeling financial pressure from the pandemic, by waiving online and off-site fees for most courses in the Spring 2021 semester.
Academic Affairs Provost and Vice President Lori Mann Bruce said the exception will be for students in online only programs. She said students knew before hand that the classes would only be available in that format.
Bruce said even if students are going in-person, fees should be waived if they take a course that’s converted to online.
“If we needed to convert a course to online, like a general course like Biology 1010 or History 2010, and those are not a core part of some online program,” Bruce said. “Even though that course is being converted to online, it will not have an online fee charged to it.”
Bruce said students taking off-site courses at community colleges or places like Oak Ridge National Lab will not be charged alternate delivery fees. She said these courses are important to students living in remote areas.
“Those courses can have some extra fees because of added cost for us to deliver that remotely. Even though it’s not technically online,” Bruce said. “Some of those courses have the same fee as if we had offered it online, but we’re waiving those as well.”
For example, programs like a Master’s of Accountancy or Master of Science and Nursing will still have their online fees. However, she said students in online only programs can take online electives, out of their program.
“Let’s say someone in that program takes an elective in Civil Engineering and that Civil Engineering course is online, but anybody can be in that course,” Bruce said. “That’s just a regular Civil Engineering course, it just happens to be online, they would not have a fee.”
According to TTU the online graduate and undergraduate programs that are part of TNecampus cannot have their fees waived. The school said they cannot waive those fees due to state consortium rules.
