Posts Tagged ‘Higher Education’

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A Historical Perspective and Look Forward at the e-Learning Industry

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Written by:  Stephen Gatlin

E-learning is one of the fastest growing fields, and it has been a dynamic process that has dramatically changed traditional teaching by eliminating many challenges. The evolution of the Internet has brought simplicity to education providers by creating a virtual learning environment that allows us to standardize quality and implement superior training methodologies- all while reaching a world of students simultaneously. With the development of e-learning, education is now more convenient than ever, leaving countless online education opportunities for the future.

When I started in higher education, I provided career training to adults in a classroom setting as the Internet had not yet been adopted as a learning platform. There are special challenges unique to providing education through brick-and-mortar schools that have been eliminated by the development of the Internet. The logistics, specifically finding and reserving a location, hiring good instructors, and negotiating facility costs all translated to wasted time and lower profit margins due to duplication of efforts. Another challenge was that the target audience for adult career training is part of a social network that finds the ability to meet in traditional classrooms at specific times difficult if not impossible. This demographic might include stay-at-home mothers who want to get back into the workforce, homebound job-seekers with disabilities, or working professionals who want to make a career switch but can’t find the time due to their current positions. In the early 1990s, the Internet presented itself as an opportunity to reach these groups with the career training they needed, at the time and place of their own choosing.

It was very evident to me that I could eliminate time-consuming and costly duplication of efforts while eliminating the variance in the quality of instruction if I made the transition to the Internet. In 1995, I took our travel agent training program that was being taught in colleges and universities and developed it for online distribution. The course became successful due to its quality and simplicity, and it made me aware of the countless advantages of providing education online. E-learning made a student’s home his or her personal classroom, providing state-of-the-art curriculum, the necessary course materials, and the best professional instructors at the touch of a button. Through Web-based delivery, all students receive the same information of the same quality across the globe, and there is no difference in teaching styles, as is the case when hiring local faculty for classroom education. In this way, distance education allows us to provide the best instructors to all students worldwide, ensuring that all parts of the curriculum are covered with the same emphasis and value. Before distance e-learning, students in rural education districts were often at a great disadvantage when it came to subjects being offered because smaller colleges don’t always have the resources to attract teachers who are in high demand. Now, instead of having multiple instructors with varying quality, all students get a high standard of instruction no matter their location. As this educational equality is possible through general distance learning, there is a key advantage offered exclusively by e-learning: the student-mentor relationship. With e-learning, mentors can interact with students via e-mail, live chat, and discussion boards- something that is essential to a student’s grasp of course information, which had been a missing component of correspondence learning.

It’s safe to say that around 70% of the world’s population is comfortable learning online, and this is made increasingly evident each year as more and more adults are completing their education on the Internet. The need for effective and quality programs is not only being noticed in higher educational institutions but in corporate training departments as well, and we will see e-learning solutions more and more for MBA and doctorate-level degrees. As an early adopter and industry old-time, I saw a need to have a one-stop solution for online career training and have partnered my company with content providers, corporations, governments, and colleges and universities worldwide to provide options for adults to improve their education and career development skills. We created TheeLearningCenter.com, a worldwide initiative to provide the largest and most comprehensive collection of online continuing education programs, where students in Naples, Los Angeles or Beijing can begin learning with a few clicks of a mouse. With over 7,000 courses from many of the world’s top authors and companies, The eLearning Center has become, in 2 short years, the largest single marketplace for online courses. It has concentrated on continuing education in fields as diverse as finance, healthcare, and automotive repair with course prices as low as $12.00.

Yet, there is so much more to be achieved with e-learning, and the tools to provide a state-of-the-art education are available for us. Soon, the entire learning spectrum will be revolutionized, and e-learning will be available for every type of education, from the prekindergarten level through grade school and MBA degree levels, even making it possible to obtain a doctorate through online education. On the international level, the industry will continue as practitioners expand their worldwide efforts. Advanced countries such as the United States with greater income and Internet progression will see the most e-learning growth because of the acceptance of its structure. This is the single greatest factor today in the sales and distribution of content to adult populations. As the individuals responsible for driving the industry to new heights, we must keep improving on our e-learning products and concepts, as they are wide and varying, and students now look online for the support, convenience, and the most cutting-edge learning content available to improve every aspect of their lives from personal to professional skills.

Innovative and emerging communication technologies have brought pivotal changes to the educational landscape, transforming both the depth and range of learning in the past decade. The adoption of e-learning is most advanced in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe but is growing in all parts of the world, allowing great development in the higher education and corporate development sectors. Our industry is an indispensable resource for individuals to access education on demand, and it will continue to grow in the future.

Distance Learning Volume 5 Issue 1 March 15, 2008.

From Survival to Sustainability

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Inside Higher Ed

You may think things are bad now — and you’re right, they are. But today’s economic concerns are obscuring what may prove to be even bigger strategic challenges ahead for higher education.

Everyone knows that we’ve entered a period of profound anxiety and uncertainty. Everywhere we look — from this publication’s own headlines, to university cabinets’ strategy sessions, to our now more thinly attended professional association meetings — we see people devoting tremendous amounts of energy to the work of decoding the economic predicament in which we find ourselves. We’re working feverishly to understand what this economic downturn will portend for everything from bond financing to financial aid to endowment management to enrollment performance, and much else besides. In many respects, our key focus right now is survival. We are striving to protect the core of our colleges and universities. And we are hoping that higher education may yet again prove to be counter-cyclical to prevailing market conditions – a rare winner in the economic lottery.

Beyond survival, however, higher education has to be thinking about its own sustainability. Even as we struggle with present conditions, a number of farsighted universities are working hard at decoding the future, too — because change is certainly coming. Demographics are shifting. Competition for talent is global. And the very financial structures that have supported higher education for the past 40-plus years may now be at risk.

In our current circumstances, these forward-looking universities read signs that the old ways of doing things may be approaching obsolescence. As a senior executive at one large, private university recently said to me, “We’re not persuaded that the business model or the economics of higher education are sustainable. We’re asking the question, ‘What if we were to start from scratch?’ ”

In short, now more than ever, we in higher education need to rethink our place in the economy and how we deliver value. What markets will we serve? What programs and credentials should we offer? How will they be delivered? How should we define success?

Faced with these questions, many of us will retreat to our intellectual comfort zones — those familiar ideas supported by anecdote as often as by evidence. “Why should higher education change?” some of us will ask. “We’re doing just fine.” Others will be certain that we should follow this or that path — stick to our knitting, or reinvent ourselves completely. But it pays to spend some time with these questions before rushing off to whatever answers may be nearest at hand. As former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin once observed, “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” In transitional and uncertain times such as these, we should be cautious of following the lead of those who peddle certainty, those who know exactly what they think.

“It’s much harder psychologically to be unsure than it is to be sure,” wrote the investment guru Seth Klarman recently. “But uncertainty also motivates diligence, as one pursues the unattainable goal of eliminating all doubt.”

Diligence is critical to evaluating not only the challenges that higher education faces today, but also the opportunities. In a number of respects, this is a best-of-times/worst-of-times moment in higher education. For example, President Obama has asked “every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training.” The Lumina Foundation and others have called upon the higher education community to produce 16 million additional degrees by 2025. And old industries — energy among them — are about to become new again.

At the same time, we may at last be reaching the tuition ceiling for many parents, and there is the very real prospect of enrollments drifting toward less expensive institutions. Shrinking endowments are creating significant challenges for managing university operations. And a business model based on exclusivity does not scale; it limits the potential for impact — whether intellectual or economic.

Growing numbers of universities see this special moment as a unique opportunity to reassess their business strategies. Developing a strategy, of course, involves not only deciding what you will offer and how you will serve the market, but also — and just as importantly — what you will not do. Many higher education institutions suffer from trying to be too many things to too many people — a very risky strategy for any enterprise. If we are going to successfully protect the core, and also plan for the new realities awaiting us in the future, then we are going to have to focus our investments of time, money, and human capital.

Because higher education in the U.S. involves so many diverse types of institutions serving so many diverse markets, the choices we face as a system of higher education are myriad. But among the choices that college and university leaders must face are these: by what means can a quality institution be simultaneously selective and open? Should the institution strive to be “global” in reach or regional? Will it continue to prioritize so-called “traditional” students or adjust its operations to better serve working adults and employers? Will it emphasize a unique, place-bound experience at a single campus or the delivery education services through multiple and widely dispersed sites and online? Will it prioritize research or teaching? Will it be a leader in emerging industries? Fundamentally, what form of value will the institution create?

In conversation with university presidents, provosts, and other academic leaders over the last six months, I’ve often asked what higher education can do to avoid the classic investor error of buying high and selling low. Jack Wilson, the president of the University of Massachusetts, responded to this question by saying that he anticipated a return to “value investing” in higher education — something akin to the longstanding investor practice of buying stocks in companies that are trading below their intrinsic value. “The last few decades, people have not thought about higher education as a place to look for value,” Jack said. “But now, they’re going to be looking for quality institutions that offer a great experience, and a great value at a great price. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on higher education institutions to get their value propositions in place.”

This is what’s coming down the track at us. We have to protect core. We have to survive. We have to stay in business. And yet at the same time, we have to create more value and become more competitive. We have to develop a focused strategy and choose from among numerous competing opportunities. And if that weren’t enough, we have to achieve all of this in a period of tremendous demographic transition.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2007, 37 percent of the U.S. population over the age of 25 had earned an associate degree or higher. That doesn’t sound altogether bad, but degree attainment rates within the U.S. have been relatively flat for decades while countries such as Canada, Japan, and Korea have advanced beyond 50 percent of their adult populations earning the equivalent of an associate degree or higher. Reading the economic tea leaves and sensing where this growing asymmetry may leave us, the Lumina Foundation has set out what it characterizes as an “audacious” goal of ensuring that 60 percent of the adult U.S. population possesses an associate degree or higher by 2025.

There are numerous challenges associated with meeting this very laudable goal. First, it represents a roughly 50 percent increase in our annual degree productivity on an annual basis for the next 16 years, and would require an effort several times the scale of the post-WWII G.I. Bill. Second, if we were to achieve it, we would have to accomplish it under circumstances in which the demography of the college age population is shifting dramatically.

Today, 29 percent of U.S. adults aged 25 to 29 possesses a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. If we disaggregate this figure by race/ethnicity, however, we see that 32 percent of whites, 19 percent of blacks, and 13 percent of Hispanics in this age group has a bachelor’s degree or higher. What makes this especially significant is that Hispanics and blacks are among the fastest growing populations within the U.S.

According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, in 1980, whites accounted for 82 percent of our population. In 2020, this figure is projected to be 63 percent. Over the same 40 year period, the proportion of Hispanics in our population is projected to have increased from 6 percent to 17 percent, and the proportion of blacks is projected to have increased from 10 percent to 13 percent. In a paper published in 2005, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education goes on to argue that if current racial and ethnic enrollment gaps remain, the net result would be a projected 2 percent decline in per capita income over the period from 2000 to 2020. That may not sound like much, but consider that per capita income grew by 41 percent from 1980 to 2000. If higher education leaders don’t attend to these challenges now, the result in another 10 years’ time may well be a shrinking tax base and a weakened competitive position on the global stage.

Such an outcome would represent a more subtle but potentially longer-lasting economic downturn — a quieter crisis, but perhaps more profound.

Changing markets call for a change in strategy. Even if it doesn’t prove necessary for most colleges and universities to “start from scratch” to respond effectively to our changing demographic profile or to global competition for the best students, it will be vital for us to move beyond our comfort zones and question some of our basic assumptions about how higher education is financed and managed — and fundamentally reexamine which challenges and opportunities each of our thousands of colleges and universities is best positioned to address.

Now is the time to reflect on our strategic objectives, our missions, and our success measures. The institutions that are among the future leaders of U.S. higher education are likely to be those who embrace these challenges and reflect upon these questions most seriously. It may well be that we need to do something truly audacious to generate lasting value – for our institutions, our students, and our economic health.

Think about it.

Iraqi Academe, How Can We Help?

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Inside Higher Ed

WASHINGTON — Iraqi American academics gathered this weekend to discuss “How can we help Iraqi academia?” and “How can we help in reforming curriculum and teaching methodologies at Iraqi universities?”

In panel discussions on those two topics Saturday, scholars offered a variety of perspectives on steps forward — with many questioning the wisdom of a government plan, announced last May, to send 10,000 Iraqi students on scholarships overseas (a third and final panel Saturday focused on the secondary question of which specialties should be supported).

A. Hadi Al Khalili, the cultural attaché for the Embassy of Iraq in Washington, which sponsored the conference, described the five-year fellowship program as “very ambitious and very useful as an investment in the future of Iraq.” But several others worried about brain drain. “We can’t use failed policies again and again and again,” said Qais Al-Awqati, a professor of medicine at Columbia University. “What will happen is what happened here. Which is that we’re all here, basically.”

Attendees gathered here (at the National Academy of Sciences headquarters)to discuss what’s happening there — and how to connect the two places. Iraqi university leaders are in fact eager to collaborate. A delegation of seven Iraqi university presidents visited the United States in February with partnerships, for research and faculty exchange, in mind.

However, “a common theme” of that visit, and another one involving Iraqi education leaders, was: “We’re not connecting with U.S. universities. … How are we able to connect universities, institutes, associations, societies, between the United States and Iraq?” asked Karim Altaii, a professor of integrated science and technology at James Madison University and a fellow at the U.S. State Department. “Should we start with university consortiums?… Should we start a brand-new NGO that is completely dedicated to Iraqi higher education?”

“How would the Ministry of Higher Education get in the picture?” Altaii asked, pointing out that Iraq’s higher education system is centralized whereas the United States’ is decentralized.

Muthanna H. Al-Dahhan, professor and chair of chemical and biological engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, offered a long list of ideas for discussion. “Everything will help, no matter how simple and how easy,” Al-Dahhan said.

For faculty, he suggested collaborating on opportunities for sabbaticals and, for students, he posed the idea of organizing training programs for standardized tests needed for entry to foreign universities (like the Graduate Record Examination and the Test of English as a Foreign Language). He also described sending American faculty to Iraq for short but intense workshops. “The first important thing is substantial funding, funding and funding,” Al-Dahhan said. “Without resources given to universities and colleges, nothing will happen.”

Another idea was to conduct department-level reviews of Iraqi institutions and, more specifically, to send all-star teams of scientists to evaluate Iraq’s medical colleges. “Look at the department, recommend what needs to be done and hopefully the government there can help set up or take in these recommendations,” said Salih J. Wakil, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Baylor College of Medicine.

He continued: “You can bring in here the 10,000 students. That’s good. I’m not quite sure that I would do that. What I would recommend is — yes, we could bring some students. But more importantly I’d like to take people from here to go there and teach … give them an appointment.”

“The best thing we can do is do science there.”

The structure of the two-day conference was such that Saturday’s schedule featured the series of three panels and Sunday’s involved “action working groups.” Many were raring to get right to the action part. During the Saturday of speeches, some expressed their restlessness in the form of written questions on index cards.

It fell to the moderator of the panel on curriculum to read the anonymous inquiries aloud. “One of them begins ‘speeches, speeches and more speeches.’ And the other says, ‘Can we move from theory to 1, 2, 3 … implementation plan?’”

Some panelists were similarly action-oriented. Ihsan A. Al-Shehbaz said they cannot hope for others to revive Iraqi higher education but must do it themselves. He cited a laundry list of ails in need of attention.

“We lack, I should have said just one word — everything,” said Al-Shehbaz, an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and head of the Department of Asian Botany at the Missouri Botanical Garden. “No new foreign graduates, no latest texts, library materials, latest informatics, modern labs, research funds, supporting staff, international exposure, workshops, international collaboration, incentives, competition. But most importantly, we lack diversity. My colleagues who teach in my field translated books 30 years ago, 35 years ago, and they continue to use the same books over and over again. ”

As for him, “I will arrive home just before midnight Sunday and Monday morning I’m going to Iraq,” Al-Shehbaz said Saturday. He’s visiting as part of a project on the country’s flora. “I sent 40 copies, free, of a book authored by four friends of mine, the latest in my field. And we’re going to give them to professors and top graduate students for free. I’m going to give two seminars and we’re planning to give intensive courses in my field.”

The goal of mutual exchange was a major theme of the conference, one complicated by another theme that kept coming up — the difficulty Iraqi students and scholars face in obtaining visas to come to the United States.

“I think we should all just make an official request to the State Department to facilitate visas for academics, to stop placing these obstacles in their way,” said Zainab Bahrani, a professor of ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology and director of graduate studies at Columbia. “Because they say that they want to help Iraqi academia and this is a place where they can just make it easier. So let’s ask them officially, all of us as a group. Let’s just ask them to make this easier.”

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