eLearning Roadtrip

Are YOU the Chief Online Education Officer at your Institution?

If so, we'd like to ask you to invite you to participate in a survey research project.

For the third year, WCET is partnering with the Campus Computing Project to conduct the Managing Online Education survey.  The survey focuses on the instructional, operational, and technology infrastructure of online education programs of institutions throughout the U.S. and Canada.

My colleague, Russ Poulin, has written an eloquent post on the WCET Frontiers blog, encouraging your particitation in this survey. To save you the hassle of clicking all the way through, I have excerpted part of his message, below. Please click here for the full post.

YOUR INSTITUTION NEEDS TO RESPOND TO THE SURVEY.

 <Sorry for yelling at you>

To avoid confusion, we would like one response from each institution. Given that some institutions are centralized, some are decentralized, and some laugh at the notion of organization, it is often difficult to know who is the correct person to invite to take the survey. There is no common position of “chief elearning officer” like there is with a CIO.

How Do You Participate?

Review the 2011 Managing Online Education survey to see what questions are being asked. If you are not what passes for a “chief Elearning officer,” ask around at your institution to see if someone has received an invitation and is completing the survey.  If you need an invitation or have other questions about the survey, contact Casey Green at[email protected].  He will help you out and get you access to the survey.  Survey responses must be submitted through the online survey software and not by completing the .pdf linked earlier in this paragraph.

I’m looking forward to your participation, seeing the results, and sharing them with you!  NOTE:  THE SURVEY DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO DECEMBER 16.

Thanks!!

Lessons Revisited: RADAR, Pearl Harbor and Paying Attention to Evidence

One of our Sage Road Solutions LLC clients, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, is holding its biannual meeting at the BYU Hawaii campus on the island of Oahu this week. Having spent the past several days in Denver hosting the annual meeting of the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications, known as WCET), I'm still running on Mountain time. I woke up early, so I decided to take advantage of being in this glorious location to take a walk along the beach.

About 200 yards from the hotel an historical marker notes the location of the Opana mobile RADAR site. The story accompanying the marker offers an interesting object lesson for those of us trying to bring innovative applications of technology to the learning technology metaverse.

According to Wikipedia the term RADAR was coined in 1940 by the U.S. Navy standing for radio detection and ranging. It was brand new technology, showing enough promise that pilot programs were launched to test its utility. In 1941, a number of mobile radar trucks were deployed on Oahu to keep an eye on the skies near Hickam Field.

 

Early on the morning of December 7, 1941, two soldiers stationed at the mobile radar site near Opana Point saw electronic blips of what looked like many planes approaching the island. Reporting their findings, they were told that what they were seeing were *probably* planes expected from California, and not to worry about it.  Consequently this information was never reported to those in command. Shortly thereafter, the Japanese planes detected by the RADAR bombed Hickam Field and Pearl Harbor, destroying US ships and planes, leading to the US's declaration of war on Japan and igniting US involvement in World War II.

The historical information was certainly interesting in its own right. The narrative that accompanied the marker, however, was particularly striking:

"The failure to warn the Army or Navy command in Hawaii was not a failure of the technology as much as it was a failure of organization. While the technology of RADAR functioned as intended and detected the incoming planes, there was no way to accurately assess the information and communicate this knowledge to those in command." 

So, let's fast forward to October, 2011. On Thursday of this past week the WCET team working on our Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework project revealed some of the first findings from our ground-breaking big data project. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the descriptive, inferential and predictive techniques being applied to this massive data set are providing some eye-opening perspectives on variables affecting student loss and momentum. As noted in a Forbes.com online article featuring Phil Ice, our project's principal investigator (who, by the way, really hates being called "the other Dr. Phil"...so please don't) these results are going to rock the way that educational decision-makers think about everything from college admissions, student services, technology investments and even "best practices" for online learning. 

Still, I have a feeling that these "big data" results will go through a period of being pooh-poohed by decision-makers who will have a hard time letting go of null hypothesis research methods. Traditional researchers' disdain for the so-called data mining techniques associated with pattern strategy and business intelligence used in other sectors are likely to get in the way. For many traditional researchers, educational data mining is a little bit like a stupid pet trick - even though these same folks really seem to like the convenience of Amazon shopping recomendations, Netflix movie recommendations and Pandora music recommendations.

I can't help but wonder if the findings about student loss and momentum that the cracker-jack research crew are sharing will be disregarded very much in the same way that Army and Navy command dismissed the evidence that Pearl Harbor was in harm's way because the techniques are too new to be taken seriously. I just hope that we can figure out how to help people pay attention to evidence before it is too late.

 

Big Data Comes to US Higher Education

WCET, the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, today announced the successful federation of datasets from the six institutions participating in the PAR (Predictive Analytics Reporting) Framework proof of concept project, just four months after the project’s early June launch. The goal of the PAR Framework is to identify variables that influence student retention and progression and to determine the impact of various demographic data on factors influencing loss and momentum. The data will be used to explore patterns that emerge when the datasets from considerably different institutions are analyzed as a single, unified sample. 

The dataset includes over 640,000 anonymized student records and over 3 million course level records, focusing on 33 common variables. The institutions represent public/private, two-year/four-year, and publicly-funded and proprietary institutions. 

“We have been using analytics as a tool for improving student retention and progression for several years,” said Dr. Phil Ice, vice president, research & development, American Public University System, and principal investigator of the PAR Framework Project. “Unifying records from multiple schools has the potential to expose generalizable patterns that can provide guidance to institutions across the board, regardless of their internal level of analytics expertise.” Ice continued, “In higher education, no predictive analytics project has been able to use a multi-institutional sample of this size. As a researcher, having a sample size of this number changes everything.” 

The WCET member institutions engaged in the PAR Framework project include American Public University System, Colorado Community College System, Rio Salado College, University of Hawaii System, University of Illinois Springfield, and the University of Phoenix. Each institution obtained IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval. All data was anonymized and encrypted to ensure that no data are personally identifiable. 

“We had been warned that we could never find six schools willing to collaborate on something as sensitive as an institutional student and course level data federation project,” noted Ellen Wagner, WCET Executive Director. “It’s exciting to see how forward-thinking WCET member institutions are bringing the power of “big data” to post-secondary education in the US. The magnitude of the data set unprecedented and the diversity of the participating institutions will provide us granular insight into similarities and differences across higher education institutions in the for profit, public and community college segments.” 

A summary of first findings are scheduled for presentations at the 23rd Annual WCET Conference in Denver, Colorado October 27th (https://wcetconference.wiche.edu/).

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.