eLearning Roadtrip

My "10 Commandments" for Online Learning

Just imagine how online learning might evolve if we ever-so-engaged online learning professionals inscribed the following "commandments" somewhere on one of our personal digital tablets:

• Thou shall provide prospective students with respectful responses to expressions of interest. Listen before you preach.
• Thou shalt not use a one-size-fits all approach to admissions. Personalize your advice.
• Thou shall use data to inform decisions. There is no excuse for not using the information we have in hand to improve programs and practices and experiences. Deal with it.
• Thou shall offer degrees and certificates offering up-to-date curricula that make your graduates competitive and relevant in todays' evolving workplace. Snap.
• Thou shall be mindful of student demographics, and consider advisement, programs and support that is relevant for interests, circumstances and motivations. Extend.
• Thou shall respect online learning faculty as knowledgeable contributors to professional practice. Respect. Let me say that again. Respect.
• Thou shall raise the bar high, for students and instructors alike. Expect big things.
• Thou shalt not subject students to "that's the way it has always been done" thinking. Unless you really believe your brand is so mighty that you can afford NOT to think about being proactive, forward thinking, and focused on student success. Stretch.
• Thou shall leverage technology in exemplary, innovative ways. Shine.
• Thou shalt not embarrass your students by being part of a cheesey institution that nobody respects. To be a school that embarasses its students is truly an abomination. Seriously. Knock it off.

 

 

 

 

 

The "Dirty Little Secret" of Online Learning

The University Professional Continuing Education Association and the Association for Continuing Higher Education recently convened a summit of education leaders to talk about the phenomenon of online learning, described in summit literature as "the biggest thing to ever hit higher education."

These days, online learning has come to the attention of presidents looking to find new student markets and to replace state dollars that many institutions have lost in recent years. These presidents see publicly traded companies running institutions like APUS and the University of Phoenix competing for student market share via online programs.  They see innovative public community colleges such as Rio Salado College and the Colorado Community College Online enrolling massive numbers of students via online programs.They see flagship institutions like the University of California - Berkeley gingerly dip their toes into the online learning space. And so they want to know what they can do about online learning, too.

Online learning has moved from margins to mission-critical, representing a higher profile in institutional strategic imperatives. This is all making continuing education professionals both happy and anxious. The cash-funded basis of operation that set them apart from their centrally funded colleagues is now, institutionally, a very good thing that central staff are being asked to emulate.

Except that maybe the cash is going to be someone else's cash. Students have turned in significant measure to non-traditional, for-profit providers of education programs and degrees for the flexible adult serving programs they offer. Hundreds and thousands of students, paying millions and millions in tuition, much of it funded through publicly sponsored financial aid programs.

It is not an exaggeration to say that public and private not-for-profit insitutions are seriously offended that publicly traded businesses have stepped into their space. They don't quite know what to do about competition. They hate that there is so much money involved. Quality is a huge concern. Loss of market share is making them nuts.  

And so there is fomenting about quality and interstate commerce, and railing against the bad actors whose recruitment techniques are evil and whose SEO investments are obscene and whose students drop out in great nunbers and default on student loans. On purpose.

Wait. Market share? Competition?

Why yes.

Here is the dirty little secret of online learning: Everyone is in online learning for the money. We are all competing for market share.

Think about it. Everyone who considers adopting online learning as a learning delivery option thinks about both extending reach AND generating revenue. We have to. Even open online learning has to figure out how to operate these days. WCET's Managing Online Education 2010 survey with the Campus Computing Project shows this very clearly.  It doesn't matter if you are a "for-profit" institution, run as a business -  or if you are a state-funded institution, focused on common good. Revenue is not the only reason for offering online programs. But it's becoming an increasingly important consideration, across the post-secondary ecosystem. 

So maybe this is a great moment to celebrate. Online learning has tipped into mainstream consciousness. Yes it has. It matters enough that people will pay for it. Let's celebrate the fact that there is demand for high quality, online learning programs. And let's all finally admit that we are ALL in it for the money, one way or another. These days, we have to be. It's the only way our programs will thrive.

OKAY?? DONE!

With that out of the way, perhaps we can quit worrying about our respective bases of institutional funding and we can ALL focus on raising the bar on quality and giving a lot more people a shot at achieving the dream of a college education. Time to own the secret that we all need to think about what it takes to pay our way and delight our stakeholders. Time to move on to things that matter.

What Learning Professionals Can Learn from "Moneyball"

Today is the premiere of "Moneyball", the long anticipated movie starring Brad Pitt. Based on the book by the same name, this is a story of how the Oakland Athletics baseball team actively leveraged player statistics as business intelligence, and how this allowed them to successfully compete against the huge payroll differentials among just about every other Major League Baseball team. In spite of the fact that they had significantly less money to pay the players they hoped to recruit, the Oakland A's developed the art of winning into a science, and changed baseball in the process.

Bucking the long accepted, "know 'em when you see 'em" approach to player recruitment used pretty much by everyone in baseball, Manager Billy Beane and his team of MBAs figured out how to use broadly available player statistics to find and recruit the highest performing prospects as reported by their statistics, not by the usual folk wisdom favored by scouts. In many cases, the statistical high performers were complete unknowns, not necessarily looking anything like the standard kind of player scouts tended to favor. By virtue of their unknown status, the A's were able to sign them at salaries the team could actually afford to pay. They were able to keep them long enough to foster talents. And while many an Oakland A team member would go on to great big huge contracts with other teams, they did so after mastering ther craft while wearing an A's uniform.

I was so captivated by the analytics possibilities from the movie buzz (yes, I know. I'm a nerd) that I went out and bought a copy of the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis at my local bookstore over the weekend. It just seemed like there are things that education types could learn about using stats as part of a decision strategy. It was a fast compelling read. I have to tell you, there are many things that those of us starting to think about using analytics to improve our practice can learn from this story.

Without spending a lot of time on the details I thought this one quote might resonate a bit with those among us who are up to our eyeballs in making the case for analytics:

"Baseball keeps copious records, and people talk about them and argue about them and think about them a great deal. Why doesn't anybody use them? Why doesn't anybody say, in the face of this contention or that, "Prove it'?"

Which of course is exactly what the A's went off and did.

Now. What if we substituted the words "postsecondary education" for "baseball"?

In education we would need be content with demonstrating tenability at a particular level of significance...but still.

There is a lot to learn here. Things like, letting evidence speak more loudly than opinions. Giving less well funded, smaller competitors a shot at a level playing field by using information as intelligence. Using the information we have at hand to help us compete and succeed.

What? Let the evidence speak for itself? Madness.

Of course, the prospect that Brad Pitt is going to (1) make statistics sexy by (2) showing a real-world example of (3) using data-driven decision-making to (4) completely transform a well respected American institution is making this little ol' quant research analyst do the happy dance.

When I Think of the Future of Online Learning

I am attending a Summit later this week. The University Professional and Continuing Educational Association and the Association for Continuing Higher Education are co-hosting a sold out invitational meeting to consider the Future of Online Learning. Many dozens of learning leaders will be in attendence. I am looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say.

As a long-time online learning / elearning / distance learning / teletraining kinda gal, these kinds of events please me in an odd, parental sort of way. It is quite satisfying to see how over the past more than 25 years of grinding their way into teaching practice, learning technologies now routinely extend the reach of the traditional classroom. Online learning has tipped into mainstream consciousness, even if mainstream exceptance continues to be somewhat elusive. 

Since I DO have some skin in this online learning game, let me tell you some of the things I hope we will hear about during the next few days:

• I hope we will hear that it is time to move past online learning as a technological analog of the traditional college classroom.
• I want us to talk openly about getting serious about high quality, online learning experiences that scale.
• I want to hear how more students will have the opportunity to achieve the dream of a college education.
• I want to hear more about the $10,000 degree. Or the $5,000 degree. Either one.
• I want to hear how we will make sure that online students can quit being ashamed to say they got their degree from an online school.
• I want to revisit how adult learners demonstrate that the knowledge they have accrued outside the classroom is a legitimate part of competency certification.  
• I want to hear how the campus learning portal / LMS is being deployed in new and innovative ways, 
• I want to hear how online learning professionals are going to use descriptive, inferential and predictive analysis of de-identified student records to better predict when students might benefit from a bit of extra help to stay on academic track.
• I want to hear how institutions are going to make online learning experiences more compelling,  engaging, personalized and professionally relevant.
• I want to hear that there is room for informal collaborative learning moments in every student's program of study.
• I want to see more attention paid to interactive digital learning content - PDFs and digital textbooks, apps and learning objects - that students produce and publish.
• I want to understand how OER will sustain itself.
• I want to understand how mobility is changing the online learning game, and how social media bring real-time interpersonal interactivity to our conversations.
• I want to see the use of game mechanics and gamification extend our thinking about how to motivate and engage learners without turning games into the next generation of crappy elearning.

From everything I can see on that horizon these issues are all going to be part of the future of online learning. With respect, they are already part of the present. IMHO, it's time to make dealing with these issues part of our practice. Looking forward to what comes next.