Registration began Monday for online courses, and enrollment numbers for the summer semester are expected to rise, Director of MU Direct Linda Cupp said. More than 40 courses will be newly available for the 2011 summer semester.

MU Direct offers online courses that follow the traditional semester schedule.

In 2010, MU Direct had 9,961 enrollments, up from 8,704 in 2009, interim Director of Marketing Stacy Snow said. Of these, 1,031 enrollments were for the 2009 summer semester, and 1,529 were for the 2010 summer semester.

“Typically, summer numbers have been increasing because the ability to take online courses has allowed students to leave campus and take online courses wherever they go for the summer,” Snow said.

Online courses cost the same as in-person, on-campus classes, contain the same course material and follow the same calendar schedule. The faculty who teach during the fall or spring academic semesters also develop the online courses.

“Course (material) comes from the school or college,” Snow said. “It’s their course and their faculty. We just administer the course and help them get it online.”

This summer, students will have more than 90 courses to choose from that are offered in the semester-based, instructor-led format and approximately 140 courses in the online independent study format, Snow said.

Cupp said 40 of these courses are new for the summer semester.

“The movement to increase summer offerings for MU students that started a few years ago resulted in more online courses becoming available,” she said. “MU wanted to increase the opportunity for residential students to be able to continue their studies during the summer if they left Columbia to work or travel or return to their permanent homes.”

Students can register for online courses at online.missouri.edu where they can choose from both independent study courses and semester-based online courses, Snow said.

“By making more of the courses available online, students have more options for working towards graduation requirements,” Snow said.

Freshman Stephanie Kinney said she is thinking about taking a political science course online this summer.

“It’s one of the requirements that I still haven’t gotten for the journalism school,“ she said. “I just wanted to get it out of the way, and I might as well do it on my own time,” she said.

Kinney said she plans to map out the classes that she still needs to take to complete her general classes before she makes final decision.