Religious Studies News

Undergraduate interest in religious studies remains very strong at Arizona State University. Overall enrollments in undergraduate courses continue to increase. This is evident as well in the newest institutional component of Arizona State University, ASU Online. Beginning last spring, a distinct administrative unit was established and administers all fully-online degrees. Students enrolled in these degree programs may only register for courses offered through ASU Online (face-to-face students cannot register for these courses, but can enroll in the numerous icourses [online courses] offered by many academic units). At present, another campus at Arizona State University is offering a good number of courses in religious studies for ASU Online, enrolling approximately 400–500 students per term. Our faculty has decided to offer a fully-online degree in religious studies beginning next fall. The challenges of adding these courses to our existing offerings and supervising these majors will significantly increase our responsibilities. But one positive impact of this initiative is that highly skilled course designers employed by ASU Online will guide our faculty in creating these offerings. In some ways these courses should have a more consistent quality than the existing online offerings not developed with such guidance. All this is to say that, while we have been committed to high quality undergraduate instruction, many local institutional as well as broader national and international factors continue to challenge our achievement of this goal. 

All in all, religious studies is doing well at Arizona State University in terms of exposing numerous students to the vital contribution that studying religion makes to advancing the understanding of numerous and complex issues. But we wonder with what degree of sophistication most students grasp these contributions that often are more implicit than explicit. In what ways the growth of online education, even when overseen by design experts, further shapes these outcomes is yet to be seen. We remain confident of our place in the academy and continue to strengthen existing undertakings; e.g., certificate programs, participation in centers, cross-listing courses, and developing new initiatives to enhance the contributions of research and the study of religion. We have made overt on our web page and in our conversations with students, faculty colleagues, and administrators the larger themes and multiple interconnections our discipline has to offer. The explicit articulation of such themes and interconnections should be replicable by colleagues in religious studies at other academic institutions. Pursuing this approach should in most cases help to underscore how religious studies is distinctive, and not disposable, in American higher education of the twenty-first century.