George Fox Digital: Benefits and Drawbacks of Online Classes
Illustration by Breanna Newburn
Article by Lea Olivares Raudes
NEWBERG, Ore. – George Fox University (GFU) offers online classes to students through George Fox Digital (GFD). While initial options used to only be semester-long, Cornerstone-centred classes, GFD has begun to offer accelerated eight week programs for efficiency and availability.
Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition, Holly Shelton, is one of the professors working with GFD courses. Her insight on GFD is that of necessity as the university expands.
“For George Fox Digital, there's a push towards giving people options for completing Cornerstone classes and more flexibility,” Shelton said. “As we grow in population size…there can be constraints around available classroom space and some students prefer the flexibility of not having to be in person.”
GFD launched in the Fall of 2020 and offered general education classes to undergraduates. It has expanded and become fundamental to students' education. This school year was the first to implement accelerated courses. There was a big push to get students involved with online classes, with most students taking one–three per semester.
With the use of the videography team, professors such as Shelton and others have been put at the face of specific online courses while a secondary adjunct instructor runs the class.
“The content creating instructors are no longer the ones teaching those courses. They’re facilitated and run by adjunct instructors who are not full time employees,” said Shelton. “I think some of the implementation has been about calibration. Do [students] know what they're getting into when they sign up for the courses? How well can someone else plan a course that’s been created by someone else?”
Some question the usefulness of the accelerated courses. Since GFD is taking 15-week long courses and condensing the same amount of content into half the time, struggles of brevity, intensity and interpersonal connection arise.
These concerns reflect the experiences of some students, such as sophomore Malia Baker, who struggled with the condensed timeline. During Fall of 2025, Baker was enrolled in five in-person major specific classes as well as two GFD courses: The Modern and Postmodern World and Surprised by Math.
“With math you have to go through this website and do [math] problems everyday or every other day,” said Baker. “It's a class where you cannot wait at all to start doing work because the work builds up quick.”
Baker decided to withdraw from both GFD classes and plans to retake them in-person later in her college career.
GFU is working to evaluate if this course switch creates effective education compared to the traditional, in-person option. Shelton explained that student work in online and in-person classes is compared using shared rubrics to ensure consistency across formats.
“We track the Cornerstone outcomes. Those are usually tied to the rubrics that are on the assignments,” Shelton said. “We try to maintain about 70% parity between all sections of courses being offered. By seeing how students are scoring in their online classes and their in-person classes, we can see how successfully they are achieving the outcomes of the course.”
Alongside academic performance, GFD pays attention to other broad indicators of student success, such as retention and participation. End of term student feedback revealed how online classes create flexibility to a number of GFU students.
This flexibility is created at the sacrifice of face-to-face relational learning, an aspect that some students such as Baker, prefer and know is more helpful to her learning. “It would have been easier if I knew the people I took it with,” said Baker, “To have someone that's like, ‘Hey, did you know this was coming up?’ or ‘Have you seen this?’”
For some students, this trade-off is beneficial. According to Shelton, a significant number of students enrolled in GFD courses are student-athletes, whose schedules are structured around daily practices and travel commitments.
“They have a more constrained schedule,” Shelton said. “If their course material is available at the beginning of the term, they can complete the work around their sports schedule.”
As GFD expands their accelerated courses, the challenge will be balancing efficiency and accessibility with the depth of learning and connection students expect from their college experience. With Cornerstone courses among the most populated and showing strong retention, the online format is becoming a significant part of how students navigate their education.
