blended Professional Master's Degrees
eCornell provides infrastructure, expertise, and capacity to help Cornell’s academic units develop and offer top-tier, financially sustainable professional master’s degrees in a blended (mostly online) format. This partnership allows Cornell’s colleges and programs to provide Cornell-quality, master’s-level education to new segments of students — primarily working professionals — whose life and career circumstances prevent them from pursuing a full-time degree. Like professional master’s degrees offered on campus, each of Cornell’s blended master’s is designed, reviewed, managed, and offered by an academic unit with oversight by its graduate faculty and the relevant educational policy committee, academic areas, departments, or programs. Online and blended degrees undergo the same rigorous internal and external proposal review and approval process as on-campus degrees, but with an additional form or two.
eCornell’s role in the partnership is to provide capacity and expertise to support the academic unit in:
- Market research, proposal, and planning of the degree
- Instructional design and development of its online courses
- Integrated digital marketing of the degree to working professionals
- High-touch communication with and pre-screening of potential applicants to the program
- Deployment, delivery, and instruction of the online courses, including a round-the-clock HelpDesk for the program’s students, faculty, and TAs.
There are many forms and variations a blended professional master’s degree can take, but a typical one is a 30-to-36 credit degree that unfolds over 20 months (5 terms), with students taking between 6 and 8 credits per term, spending 18-20 hours per week on their studies.
Online courses in these programs may be offered asynchronously with occasional scheduled online live sessions, or fully synchronously (typically two 90-minute evening meetings per week).
Usually there are two or three one-week residency sessions on campus where students meet their faculty members and one another in person and take some intensive-format classes. Degrees usually include a significant capstone project worth between 2 and 6 credits, which students complete in stages as they work through their degree, often culminating in a major written submission and project presentation at the end of the program.
Get Involved
If you would like to learn more about possibilities for offering a Cornell master’s degree to working professionals or others unable to study full time on campus, please contact Joe Ellis at joe.ellis@cornell.edu.
Frequently Asked Questions
The academic unit collects the tuition revenue and reimburses eCornell for its direct and marginal costs of delivering and supporting the program. Upon completion of each cohort, the academic unit’s direct and marginal costs of instructing and managing the program are used to calculate the program’s residual net revenue, which is split between the unit and eCornell, 70/30. The residual revenue is used to cover overhead expenses.
In many cases, eCornell covers the course development expenses under a dual-use model, where the course material we develop for the master’s degree can also be offered separately as professional certificate programs. These certificate programs would be expected to generate additional royalties for the academic unit. In other cases, the costs to develop some courses may be recovered from the net proceeds from the program, prior to computing the residual net revenue.
The academic unit is responsible for all academic aspects of the program:
- Designing, approving, and reviewing curriculum and assigning faculty
- Determining application requirements and making admission decisions
- Teaching and grading
- Accreditation
- Student academic support
- Supporting marketing efforts with messaging and branding standards
eCornell provides support for:
- Assisting the program’s or unit’s academic leadership in conducting research and analysis of the competitive landscape and market opportunity
- Preparing models to assess the financial feasibility and sustainability of a new program
- Assisting faculty with online synchronous, asynchronous, or blended course design, production, and deployment
- Technical infrastructure, HelpDesk, and support for program students and faculty
- Marketing and recruitment: market research, landing pages, nurture campaigns, ads, paid campaigns, videos, tracking and reporting cost and efficiency metrics
- Enrollment advisors to provide high-touch engagement with, and pre-screening of, interested prospects, and to support strong candidates to the point of submitting complete, high quality applications
- Outreach to enterprise and corporate partners who may wish to sponsor their employees in pursuing a Cornell master’s degree.