In brief...

If you are a matriculated online student in the Reading Department, you contact your advisor and obtain a CPN (Course Permission Number) for your online courses. If you don't follow through and register, your seat may be released (but we'll post the date this will occur)

If you are not in our online program (that is, if you are a matriculated student in one of our oncampus programs, or another department's), you can ONLY register for our online courses if there are seats, on a first-come, first-served basis. Trudy Walp maintains waitlists for online courses. See the new policy on how to get onto a waitlist here.

More details...

Our Reading online courses are reserved for our Online Reading Students.  Their program is part-time and courses are distributed to them so they will be able graduate within a reasonable time frame.

However, at times we do offer online courses for both online and on campus students.

You can see what courses and when they are being offered by checking the Reading Course Schedule on our Department website (www.albany.edu/reading ) these course will be clearly marked for on campus and online students.

Our online instructors do not have the authority to allow a student in an online course, only the online program manager (Trudy Walp) can do this, so please don’t contact instructors or the deaprtment secretaries. 

If you are an on campus student, you should be planning your program with on campus courses every semester.  However, if you are able to find a course being offered online to on campus students, and it fits into your program plan, you can take advantage of that.

If you have a scheduling conflict or you need to fulfill your program requirement, please plan to do so, with on campus courses.  If a course if not available to you in any given semester, you may need to take that course in the next semester, or speak with your advisor about possibly selecting another course in place of the course that you are looking for or possibly taking the course elsewhere and transferring the credits into your program .  Due to the number of students in our online program, the Reading Department cannot simply allow on campus students to take online courses because of personal or scheduling conflicts.

If you have checked the UA website and it appears that there are many open seats in our online courses, this is deceiving.   Online students can hold their permission number until close to the beginning of the semester before they actually register for their course.  (This is why what appears to be, actually is not, when looking into online courses)

Do online courses ever become available to on campus students? 

Yes, in two instances. One is when an online course is designated as open to on campus and online students (see Reading Department Course Schedules). The other is when the Department opens an online course to on campus students. This will happen only close to the beginning of a semester, and only if there are empty seats. Typically, very few are available.  However, if online seats do become available, Trudy Walp will give seats to on campus students, selecting them from the waitlists, starting from the top.