By Ruby Dilts
For decades, nearly all OBU students have participated in J-term. What J-term offers varied throughout the years, but its existence remained. Adjustments to the 2024-2025 academic calendar changed that, though.
The 2024-2025 academic calendar bears a resemblance to previous calendars, particularly during the fall semester. Spring and summer, though, look fairly different with the elimination of J-term and changes to the summer timeframe.
“We created a J-term task force…made up of chairs from the undergraduate side and some program directors from the graduate side to see if [J-term] is the best thing moving forward or if we could get a more effective calendar for what we’re doing right now,” Associate Dean for Online, Nontraditional and Graduate Education, Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Online BA in Christian Studies Dr. Micah Meek said.
A number of factors were considered as the task force looked to make a decision, including student success, summer opportunities, finances, more.
“We really did try to be student-focused on this decision,” Co-Provost, Chief Academic Officer, Dean of Business, Health, Science and Education and Professor of Education Dr. Larinee Dennis said. “We were trying to help our students get out into the workforce and [the world of summer internships] sooner. We also heard a number of students saying the j-term break was too long and they were ready to come back.”
The task force also gleaned insight from other university calendars.
“We looked at around 15 different institutions to see what their calendars looked like. We looked heavily at Oklahoma institutions…and also Christian schools within our CCCU network,” Meek said.
OBU was one of very few universities still including a J-term in the academic calendar.
Students will begin the 2025 spring semester during early January as opposed to the usual late January start following J-term. This new start date means that spring commencement will take place sooner than it has in previous years. An earlier start to the spring semester, followed by an earlier graduation allows students and graduates to consider a wider range of opportunities for summer commitment and job start dates.
“So many students would say things like ‘I need to take my finals early because otherwise I can’t get to my summer camp training,’” Dennis said.
The expansion of the summer break is another notable shift in the new academic calendar. This change allows for online and graduate programs to better optimize summer courses.
“Before, we had probably 13 weeks in the summer,” Meek said. “Our online and graduate programs offer eight-week courses so if you have 13 weeks, you can only do one course…and that was concerning.”
Now, graduate and online students can participate in two eight-week courses during the summer. Previously, graduate and online programs offered five sessions throughout the year. With six sessions being offered in the new academic calendar, graduate and online students can complete coursework and obtain degrees sooner.
“We all came to the consensus of ‘let’s expand summer to get two eight-week sessions there,’” Meek said. “That will allow us to offer a lot more courses there…So that in combination with lowering the summer tuition rate to $350 a credit hour, we really hope students will pick up any additional credits or do any kind of retakes that they need to stay in the OBU system [rather than enroll elsewhere during the summer],” Meek said.
As OBU offers an increasing number of integrated programs, cohesion within academic calendars became imperative.
“A lot of the discussion was ‘how do we make sure…students can get ahead and do integrated [programs] and graduate with master’s level credit,’ especially as we look to the future of doing more of that,” Meek said.
Implementing one academic calendar serving the needs of a number of student populations simplifies the student experience as well as the administrative role.
“Having one [calendar] that meets everyone’s needs [including undergraduate, graduate, and online populations] is a value-add for the university related to administrative functions,” Dennis said. “That is not at all why we did it…but it is a positive outcome of not having to manage different calendars for different populations.”
These changes will be implemented on June 1, 2024.
