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It's a Matter of Time
167 Plays1 month ago
In this episode of "Online Education Across the Atlantic," we delve into the findings of the UK’s Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey, revealing a split in satisfaction between international and UK students. The discussion expands to explore the challenges and benefits of online education, such as program flexibility, student engagement, and the pivotal role of faculty involvement. The episode also examines the effects of COVID-19 on educational expectations, the balance between cohort-based learning and flexibility, and the potential for AI to personalize learning. As the episode closes, the speakers share their holiday traditions, university financial challenges, and critique of the educational rankings, setting the stage for thoughtful considerations as they prepare to reunite in the new year.
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Transcript
00:00:03
Speaker
a
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Online Education Across the Atlantic. It's our last episode of 2024. We'll see if we actually complete recording and put it out in 2024, but at least it's the last time for the three of us to be virtually together for the year. So it's great seeing you guys. Are you guys ready to shut down for the holidays or at least quasi shut down?
00:00:34
Speaker
I'm ready. There was a decent proportion, a decent amount, a portion of mince pies that entered the house yesterday. So, you know, we're, we're getting to the stage of being well stocked up and ready for, you know, consuming mince pies and relaxing and all that kind of stuff and not thinking about online learning for a bit.
00:00:53
Speaker
I only managed to eat six mince pies when I was in the yeah UK in November, which I feel like I failed on on so many levels. I should have eaten more. well i mean you guess out of How many days though? How many days were you there? um One, two, three, four.
00:01:10
Speaker
um'm sorry That's pretty impressive. It's also a case of which ones you tried so my father-in-law there's a consumer organization called I think it's called which which that does every year kind of rates the best mince pies from a certain supermarket or whatever so you you kind of got a You got to see the one that's got the most highest rating in the year and acquire those ones That's his kind of strategy around mince pies.
00:01:36
Speaker
Well, Morgan loves her quality, but I will note that she's an aficionado of gas station donuts when traveling in the States. So I'm not sure how that translates to mince pies in the UK. Basically, at this point, any mince pie is good because it's it's better than no mince pie, which is my other thing. And I wouldn't make the mince pies, except that my spouse hates them.
00:01:59
Speaker
And so if I made mince pies, I would eat all of them, which is actually not not far off the truth for most things. yeah We need to get our act together here because Thanksgiving has become our big family holiday or even more so than before. So all of the cooking and who's going to bake what and who's making this and getting everything ahead of time, that's all Thanksgiving thanksgiving that we're done with. And I'm just realizing Christmas is less than a week away and we haven't even thought about what food we're going to get. So got some got some stuff to do this weekend, some grocery shopping.
00:02:38
Speaker
So ah as we look at the year end of news, I will note i was ah today as I was um just lazily browsing the news, I do have quite a few tabs open of news items coming out. One thing I would notice, and it sort of aligns with a lot of what we're ah talking about in different areas, particularly, well, in the US, s but you guys have a different angle of it in the UK, is Morgan, did you see the thing about Brown University um that they are they have a $90 million dollars budget hole. I didn't see that. I saw that they were going to be limiting some graduate admissions, especially in PhD programs. but Yeah.
00:03:23
Speaker
but the thing that strikes me, and I haven't read the full article, I mean, this is a highly selective university with a large endowment, and it really sort of gets to the point of even where enrollment's going up, budgets for institutions are just a real, real challenge. I mean, if Brown if brown has a $90 million dollars budget gap they have to fill,
00:03:49
Speaker
My goodness, I mean, it just sort of puts a face on what we're up against. It's not just enrollment, it's institutional finances. Yeah, I mean that's a big theme over here at the moment. There was something in Times Higher Education today around not, there's been a lot of talk of deficits and staff cuts and redundancies, but one of the things that they were covering today was around um the the ah maturing of debt that universities have taken on and that's going to be ah another big thing to hit them next year especially, I think. so
00:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, definitely very um relevant to what's happening over here, that kind of thing. And they've formed some sort of working group to look at costs in higher ed in the UK, is that right? did i i I mean, higher education does enjoy setting up a working group, so that would not surprise me. I've not seen that ah yet. It's not come across me course my desk, so to speak, but um that would not surprise me.
00:04:46
Speaker
Well, there might be a white paper in your future that will solve the budget problems in the UK ah with some nice formatted bullet points. yeah Possibly. Yeah, possibly. I think yeah, it reminds me years ago, I used to be in a women's anti apartheid organization South African, we should tell a joke about ourselves, which was sort of self deprecating, but not really accurate. But it's how many women from this organization does it take to change a light bulb? The answer being none, because we'd form a committee and workshop a paper on how to cope with darkness.
00:05:17
Speaker
um Well, there you go. Any other big news items striking you guys here at the end of the year? I mean, I think a couple of things for me. I've noticed a few a little flurry of announcements of partnerships with OPMs and other companies over here. I think that's you know, I think just reflected on the year. We have definitely seen even with the the falling off of some partnerships kind of another net increase in the number of universities with those kind of partnerships.
00:05:50
Speaker
Um, and yeah, the other one was the times online learning rankings, which i've feel like I feel like i've spoken about a lot but just a real disappointment I think is probably the Yeah, both of you guys are fans of that ah horrendous ranking that they came out with. you It seemed to me that both of you, your challenge was how can you look at something that's just horrible and what it's done, but try to find the possible future benefits of it. There must have been a struggle for both of you.
00:06:22
Speaker
I feel like Morgan was dealing with it far more seriously than me. I don't know if it's the kind of end of year but I just it was a little bit too many jokes too little time for me when I was writing about it recently and I just thought no I need to kind of like be a bit more serious about this.
00:06:38
Speaker
i yeah yeah I did see a post on LinkedIn today ah ah putting it forward as a triumph of of awesomeness. So it it took every bit of self-control. I had to not jump in with a really snarky comment.
00:06:55
Speaker
Admittedly, it was from one of the people quoted in the pieces. But this is but this is this is the thing with rankings, right? This just makes them, like I said, when we discussed it way back when, they're kind of doomed to succeed because, you know, the PR machine gets going and, you know, the people that might look at these things online are the sort of people that are going to listen to us about it in the methodology. So it's kind of, yeah, it's ah like, yeah, I don't see it going away.
00:07:24
Speaker
Years ago, I used to work in an institution that one year was ranked as one of the top 10 up and coming universities by US News and World Report. So they put these banners on everything all over the university, you know one of the top 10 up and coming universities, um and which caused enormous hilarity on campus. yeah Lots of snarky comments about coming from where, um yeah that sort of thing.
00:07:48
Speaker
Well, I live in Arizona, so with once you get near Tempe, you know it's almost like the Roman Forum trying to get through all of the banners and the chariots coming through with with all of their rankings that they have. So, um hey, well, let's get to our topic today, which is really looking at inflexibility or challenges with flexibility in online programs, in particular,
00:08:15
Speaker
you know, flexibility in terms of actually serving learner needs and being aware of what their needs are. um But with that, I'd love to turn it over to Neil, and I know you've got some interesting information to set up the discussion. Yes.
00:08:31
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Always appreciated. No, I think one of the stimuluses for me sort of thinking about flexibility was there's an annual survey in the UK called the Postgraduate Tour Experience Survey, and it's run by a body over here. And it's one of the rare sort of examples of getting feedback on um postgraduates. And so it was released pretty recently. It there was around 84,000 responses, which that's about 12% of all kind of graduate students in US s lingo um studying over here. and ah and a so there's ah there's ah There's a relatively small subset um of those that are studying online. I think I calculated that it's probably in the region of maybe 7,000.
00:09:18
Speaker
online post-graduates that are included in that number um and there's kind of various things to kind of draw out of it so relatively speaking um the satisfaction with programs was was pretty high um across the board. I think one of the interesting findings of that report was that um international students in general were more satisfied than UK students um And you know a higher proportion of UK students had thought about leaving during their their course. And I think one of the main factors behind that was um an increase in those that were kind of citing you know financial pressures around that kind of thing.
00:10:00
Speaker
um And that wasn't just higher satisfaction for international students. There's like a clear trend going up for international students, whereas the UK students were more of a flat other than COVID. So it seemed like it was a trend and a tire as well.
00:10:19
Speaker
Yeah, and it's interesting. I mean, one of the caveats that you always get in the UK when it comes to international students' responses to surveys is this sense that they maybe have a disposition to kind of not be too critical, which, I don't know, feels a bit too simplistic, but there's probably something in it. um So that's kind of something that was kind of caveated there. I think the few things that were interesting um for me were areas of importance like um the importance that postgraduate students placed on things like international interactions with other students, and both kind of within and without ah with within and outside the course. And that was kind of through, I think, mainly the open comments there. um you know I think inevitably this group, given the kind of nature of the audience, is always going to present different challenges around balancing commitments.
00:11:18
Speaker
um But there was there was kind of quite a high proportion of online students that had thought about leaving. um So i think I think it was 35%, whereas I think it was 18% overall um in terms of thought about leaving.
00:11:34
Speaker
um And I guess to kind of set it up, it was really interesting the way that they drew out some quotes from the rap report. So these were kind of a few quotes that were interesting to me. yeah This is first one, it seemed like a flexible well thought out program with part-time students in mind. However, that is not the case. Faculty shrug their shoulders and do not work with you to accommodate your work slash care commitment issues.
00:12:00
Speaker
um And just another one, more understanding from staff around part-time students and what we need to make it work, timetables further in advance, more scope to be flexible, consideration around examinations and assessment and assignment deadlines. so you know And that's not actually the first time this year I've seen things that feel quite alarming in terms of lack of flexibility and that being kind of aligned with What you know about the students that are making those comments and talking about the commitments that they have and the responsibilities that have and just how Out of whack those are with the way that programs delivered, you know, there was a an office for students kind of boots on the ground investigation of universities earlier on this year and you you'd see stuff like
00:12:50
Speaker
we're We're still having three-hour lectures. One of the other comments were the there faculty have decided to stop recording lectures because they were working on the basis that that was a pandemic-based practice that they don't need to continue anymore. um So, you know, there's all these kind of different um examples bubbling up. So I'm really interested in in kind of us exploring that kind of lack of flexibility angle but I think there's also and another interesting angle to flexibility on the other end of the spectrum around what it might do for retention and continuation so maybe maybe we could as explore that but I'm just interested in
00:13:29
Speaker
You know, getting getting your guy's sense of how much that that kind of feedback chimes to your context and why you think it is, if that's the case, that universities struggle around flexibility for these for online degrees still. Morgan, I'll let you start. I've got i've got comments just loaded up. but Let me... Oh, you're on mute.
00:13:57
Speaker
Oh, I don't mean to add dog barking issues. I don't mean to upset the sort of conversation. So I sort of think of flexibility in two sort of lumps. So there's the one ah kind of thing in terms of sort of accommodations for students, you know, so understanding that they've got family commitments and that part-time and things like that. And then there's things like shortened terms um and multiple starts and and and sort of things like that. And I sort of, I think of flexibility in both of those kinds of of ah ah ways of thinking about them. ah So, you know, I think it might be interesting to to tease out both both aspects of that. But Phil, why don't you
00:14:43
Speaker
Well, the thing that jumped out of me was sort of the former of the two that you mentioned. And and the and I will say before I get into this, the fact that the report ah had such a good usage of quotes, obviously with a survey of so many thousands and thousands of students, it's hard to pull out things that are representative, but I thought the report did a good job.
00:15:06
Speaker
You have to trust them. Listener, you should know that Phil loves a quote from a survey. He loves yeah open-ended responses. i Yeah, I hate closed-ended things that you can actually yeah wrap up tidy. So that is true. And by the way, whenever I do that with clients, it always makes them so uncomfortable doing open-ended questions like this. So that's part of the reason I love this survey. They went with it. But it hit you so much, like, ah where let's let's get right down to it.
00:15:35
Speaker
faculty not but being part of the problem in terms of flexibility. Faculty, despite how the course, the program is designed or marketed, it's not happening in reality is a lot of what I got from this report.
00:15:52
Speaker
And to your question, you know, does that translate? Yes. ah Obviously not naming names, but recently it had a discussion about online programs and in some courses and specifically with some faculty, ah it was taking, they might take two or three weeks for faculty to send back ah grades or marks or respond to discussions.
00:16:19
Speaker
And then in other cases, they're with it throughout the week and things feel more engaged. And the difference is not the system or that what they're marketing, it's the individual faculty and we leave it up to them to do this. And it was dramatic, the differences that we saw. Now it's not, and all of it is not a faculty issue because there was also an accommodation issue in terms of like certain disability accommodations or or time commitment accommodations, taking a couple of weeks to get into place. Well, with a part-time online course, it's almost too late. I've missed way too much of the content. So I've heard this in the past month, very similar anecdotes that line up strongly with what the report described. And
00:17:16
Speaker
I think it sort of points us to an issue of, you know, we always talk about academic freedom and quality, and there's sort of a communist assumption that the copy and paste online programs where you try to make things very consistent tend to be lower quality because you're not really leveraging the individual faculty design things.
00:17:40
Speaker
And so much of what we see in online is sort of the opposite. It's that if we give faculty too much flexibility in terms of ah engagement and what the responsibilities are, and it really harms the quality of the program. So maybe I'm jumping into conclusions, but the long-winded way to say, I definitely see similar aspects here.
00:18:04
Speaker
And i mean I think the challenge here is is online, teaching presence is is different than in the classroom and that much difficult to communicate. So we need sort of different expectations around faculty engagement in the course.
00:18:20
Speaker
Sorry, yeah, no, no, I think that's really interesting. I mean, I think the way I think about it, based on what you guys were saying, is almost kind of, there's two aspects of it, isn't there? There's kind of what you might describe as a sort of disposition or the kind of more reactive elements of engaging students in a program. And then there's kind of something that's more structural in terms of design.
00:18:40
Speaker
And I think the disposition area is really interesting. And I think what you were saying, Morgan, really chimes with me because I know just I think about in my own work, especially when I was in universities, the one thing that was really hard to get across to faculty around online teaching was the asynchronous element, not just what you do and how that works, but just how much of a paradigm shift that is um on campus having these kind of these set piece of events where and then students are kind of essentially doing homework in but in between and that's just a really different paradigm for them to understand um but I just wonder I mean like I guess
00:19:26
Speaker
In one sense, you could sort of point to um and be quite critical of faculty and their disposition. But I just wonder what other factors play into this. you know Is it they have too much on their plates? Is it the role of and the importance of research? you know what What are the drivers for some of the problems that more land on the plate of faculty that you see? Well, and just to be clear, I'm not ah I mean, you have issues all over the place. ah It's not so much a faculty. It is your fault. It is more a matter of our faculty consistently doing the things that online students need. Now that is structural in nature. So for example, empathy. If how many of these faculty teaching these courses have gone through an asynchronous course and seen good engagement and poor engagement,
00:20:24
Speaker
if they did, they would probably understand that paradigm shift that you're describing. oh And I'm not a fan of training per se is is a phrasing, but I mean like, what's the experience of faculty? Have we given these people or helped them understand the paradigm shift that you're describing? Because I'd be willing to bet that if we, the better job that is done with instructors getting this paradigm shift just by itself. I think you would get higher quality because they would get it. They don't want to do poor engagement by and large. So, so I guess I'm saying it's not a faculty fault, but it is, it comes through the faculty experience. And one of the biggest things is what experience do they have in the exact same environment? And do they get that paradigm shift that the two of you are describing?
00:21:18
Speaker
Last week i I listened to several interviews with Virginia Fox and and Phil is is echoing Virginia Fox a little bit who hates the word. ah She's of course the the was the ranking or the the the head of the Education Committee in Congress. She hates the word training. She said dogs are trained, people are educated.
00:21:36
Speaker
um That's heavier than what I think. I certainly get that point. Yeah, I might use that. yeah i mean it's um I think there are a a decent number of people that would advocate for experience and experiencing an online course as a as ah as a solution to some of the challenges that we're but that we're kind of discussing rather than a sort of training session and I think definitely in the UK I've seen examples of that. the The Open University put out a course about teaching online and I know that certain universities have kind of put their faculty through that kind of program. um I know in a way you could say it's sort of half half it's still training but I think that's a really valuable
00:22:23
Speaker
valuable experience. I also wonder whether there's like kind of an audience element of this, if I can put it in those terms. like This is a bit of a generalisation, but I kind of feel like if you're used to teaching mainly young adults,
00:22:37
Speaker
um i I have a bit of a hunch that that's a that's a more malleable audience. That's an audience that have come through school who have not necessarily had experience in the wider world, such that the lack of accommodations or the design of the structural things, you know they're not necessarily going to be as savvy or as critical a consumer of those things. And if you're just experiencing teaching that audience all the time,
00:23:07
Speaker
then you know to what extent are you attund really attuned to understanding the kind of needs of a different audience, if I can put it that way? it' So sort of the audience, ah you know the more of the adult working adult audience that often does online learning, they're saying, come on, I've done some of this stuff. My company does a better job than what you guys are doing.
00:23:33
Speaker
i don't have and I don't have time for this. I'm fitting you into my life. And you need to do a better job. So I definitely think you're right that there's a different audience aspect. I mean, I just, you know, if I kind of equate that to myself, I'm going to be a much trickier customer doing an online master's degree than, you know, an 18 year old fresh out of school, probably um in terms of what what I'm looking for. And, um you know, particularly the accommodations around some of the stuff that you were talking around Morgan and some of the stuff that the kind of feedback gave out.
00:24:05
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, I mean, I also want us to make sure that in in a way, we're talking just about teaching and about the need for expectations around certain kinds of things. um You know, just thinking back to my own PhD program, i I had two courses that stick in my mind. One, we walked in, we sat down seminar PhD program, sat down The faculty member didn't say anything for almost an hour and a half, and eventually people started getting up and walking out, but she felt that it was her pedagogy not to lead the discussion, so she wasn't going to start talking.
00:24:41
Speaker
oh And and ed you would be in big trouble. yeah Apparently I left, but you she had some other kinds of things. Another one said that it wasn't his job to produce a syllabus.
00:24:53
Speaker
so we had no syllabus i also left that one um you know but i think there's a need for expectations those are sort of outliers in a way but in ah in a way it was 20 percent of my graduate program so But, Morgan, did you get a sense from looking at this study, and this might be a U.K.-U.S. difference, or maybe I'm being generous here, but they seem to be more, like you mentioned, the it's not my job to do a syllabus. I think in the U.S., ah you don't get as much, or at least I didn't, I got the sense that in the U.K., there was a lot more feedback on there's no live discussion set up, no syllabus, nothing here set up, and there was no structure ahead of time.
00:25:36
Speaker
And it felt like, well, those things have improved in the U.S. for online education. Face to face, I still think you get some weird stuff that you're saying. But online, I think that we might be further along in terms of there are some basic definitional requirements and set up of some basics.
00:25:56
Speaker
I think so, especially in in better programs where they have established, you know, and and you're working with some sort of an instructional designer or something that says the course has to have this, that and the other thing, you know, and it's less of an ad hoc thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I i think um I would, I think I can go with that as well. I mean, I think, you know, the thing that I always wanted to be able to delve into in terms of the online side of things is I would love to have known You know what programs they're talking about are which institutions because i think one of the things that plays into what you guys are saying is. You know if you're at the open university where all of the infrastructure works in this way all of the processes work in this way.
00:26:35
Speaker
You know, that's a world of difference from Faculty X that have got two online programs that they just launched and everything else works for on campus. So that that was the thing that I was really fascinated to to kind of understand, to add another dimension to some of the feedback and obviously that's not possible. but that, in a way, what I was mentioning around the OFS side of things, that you are more able to link an institution's profile and standing in online, although they weren't exclusively for online with with that kind of thing. So um I think that's the thing that would have been really fascinating. But I think on the whole, you know to to to your point around comparison,
00:27:17
Speaker
I think there are more institutions in the U.S. that are attuned to that difference than there are in the U.K. I think that's changing, but I think that's a big factor. Which probably gets to the fact that we've been much more and we've been much earlier in the U.S. on post-secondary online programs. We have a lot more experience and the U.K. in particular seems like it's and Not including the big for-profit surge in the 2000s, but it's it's like at least five to ten years behind in terms of adoption. So that's part of how I interpret it. And you guys are following along in terms of adoption, and you're not to the same place in terms of, well, at least we need to have this structure set up. And that's not universal. It just feels like
00:28:10
Speaker
this report captured more of what I felt in online education, maybe five or 10 years ago in the US, not in terms of the engagement, I still think that's very consistent. But in terms of the, hey, can you at least set this stuff up ahead of time and let me know and give some structure to this course. And I'm critical of maturity models, for a bunch of reasons. But in a way, they describe a reality, you know, like you you start off with these ad hoc sort of things of Department's putting up programs and it becomes more centralized and you get more of that structure So I think it captures some of that journey down that path Yeah, yeah, and I think I think in a way if you quite need to the discussion about where the UK is that the UK would probably benefit with those kind of guardrails um around some of the practice I think at the moment and I think you know to your point Phil actually had a conversation with someone in the US recently and and describing the kind of UK landscape and they were kind of saying something very similar to you in that this is all familiar but from a few years ago rather than um how things stand now. I still think in general and I'd be interested to know what you guys think, I still think in general although this is a ah good survey that provides good insight, it's not a survey coming from a university and I still think that
00:29:26
Speaker
you know, whether it's um on the basis of just kind of ah evaluating student experience so or even just evaluating programs, I think universities could be so much better at, um you know, systematically adding that into their processes around hearing from students to be able to kind of calibrate stuff. You know, we're relying on this third party to deliver something.
00:29:51
Speaker
But are there good examples in the US that you feel like people out are doing that, that are kind of a bit more proactive around you know understanding students' needs and doing something about it in their programs?
00:30:06
Speaker
I've seen some good stuff, but a lot of times it's private. um it's It's going to be done within a university that is not meant to be distributed. There are some, like there's ah Florida got into online, but it also got into the usage of about open educational resources. Do you have your course materials on day one? So it had sort of a broader fit, which was good.
00:30:31
Speaker
And that was public. I'd have to go look it up. but There were some good Florida survey data. But again, that was more of a broad-based look. But and some of the best I've seen are private. And part of the reason is the online program, if you want to encourage honest and even very critical feedback, part of the safer way to do it is say, we're only keeping that within the university so that we have a feedback mechanism.
00:30:58
Speaker
But unfortunately, we're not going to have the results available for other people to learn from. So I i do think there is quite a bit in the U.S. and like I guess I can't mention examples because they're done internally and not meant to be shared.
00:31:12
Speaker
And to be fair, one thing also going on there is is the darned IRB. Well, spell that out for our institutional review board. So if you want to make research public, you have to go through a series of hoop jumping um that is often kind of ridiculous. ah It's not that that I have an opinion here, but um but if you're doing something just to improve a product or improvement service, then you don't need to do that. You can use that out, but you just need to keep the results internally. i Some years ago I was doing some research for EDUCAUSE and I failed the IRB at one institution because in the instructions to the survey I wrote the results will be very helpful and I had to redo the whole application taking the word very out.
00:32:02
Speaker
and Well, that sounds like editing for some newsletter posts, too. Yes. We have a quicker process. I'm equally equally ah well-disposed towards the editor of the newsletter.
00:32:14
Speaker
can i Can I just, I'm adding IRB onto my Morgan Triggers list. The very large book of Morgan Triggers. Yes. Yeah. That's in volume two, by the way, just in case you're wondering. There was one other thing I will call out, since we're talking sort of on a maturity level and providing guardrails and moving along.
00:32:41
Speaker
But I also read in this report, and in particular for international students, ah this whole engagement expectation. And I think a lot of that Not all of it, but I think things have changed since COVID. I think there's a much even greater desire for connection with peer students, with faculty. with So human-to-human interaction, even in an online setting. And we don't have time to go through all the sociological issues of COVID.
00:33:13
Speaker
other than just accept it's a much greater need. So, for example, one of the what if things I've been pushing is this assumption that online needs to be completely asynchronous to meet students' you know flexibility needs misses the point that there are new opportunities for synchronous elements of a course to directly address the engagement. And I look at some of the quotes in this report,
00:33:40
Speaker
I had no opportunity to work with peers. I felt like I was on my own. All I had was email. And there's a desire by students for more engagement, which quite often, not always, but quite often can be addressed with synchronous methods that are just not being done. And some of that is we have a pre-COVID mentality of what asynchronous ah should mean.
00:34:08
Speaker
I think that's a really interesting point and that's kind of I think that takes me into an area that I also wanted to discuss which is on the other end of the spectrum because in a way I feel like some of the things that we talked about around flexibility we've sort of we've maybe kind of tagged with institutions who maybe is not not as mature maybe in the online space maybe partially but I think the other thing that I'm really interested in exploring is the the institutions that maybe are more advanced and they're doing things like, you know, things that I've seen is like, there's more, you know there's always traditionally been, particularly in OPM side of things, you know, multiple entry dates across the year, four, five, six entry dates. I'm now seeing open enrollments. You know, there's more emphasis on step on, step off and more kind of personalized routes. But I'm really interested in getting a sense of,
00:35:01
Speaker
the extent to which higher levels of flexibility actually cost you later down the line because they might lead you down more of that individual pathway that you're talking about Phil where you don't engage with students as much and to what extent does the cohort pull you through um yeah and one of the things I saw recently which was perfect because this is on my mind is a company a learning design company working with a university around cohort based courses which that terminology makes it sound like it's a new idea and of course it's not but it does cut across that movement towards high flexibility and have you guys seen any of that deliberate differentiation in online where
00:35:48
Speaker
You have, you're nothing. Or else I've got the palsy or something. but yes i' I'm seeing that differentiation in in terms of yeah cohort. you know and There's something to be said for cohorts. you know And I think it's understanding that learning is a social thing as well.
00:36:06
Speaker
and And that sort of becomes the instantiation of that. um you know And and ah just going back to personalization, Joel Podolny from Honor Education has a lovely phrase about, you know, so much emphasize in personalization is about personalization of content and not about personalization of interaction. And we need much more interrupt of that sort of personalization of interaction to make actually make it meaningful and to to enable that those social ones. One of my favorite books ever was was um John Celie Brown's The Social Life of Information, which talks in a really accessible way about the way that that learning is social and you need those kinds of things.
00:36:50
Speaker
I would argue that I've absolutely seen that cohort basis. And you could argue you go back 15 years and we saw it in the US with 2U. Pre edX 2U was, I mean, they had the greatest slogan and they really were designed towards no back row.
00:37:14
Speaker
And you got to look at so they really came into being in the late 2000s, 2008 through 10, getting the program set up at USC. So it was in the early 2010s as they really went out there. And they had a very unique position in the marketplace back then. At the time, you certainly had um more of the mid-range online nursing programs. You had the for-profits. You had all this other stuff. And you did have a lot of asynchronous design.
00:37:44
Speaker
And two of you came in saying, we're for the elite schools. And one of the messages to give that comfort to them, and I don't think it was artificial comfort, it was, no, this is cohort-based. And not, is it just cohort-based? It's 19 students or fewer in a class. So it's going to be- With the expectation of synchronous activity at some point.
00:38:06
Speaker
Yeah, synchronous activity but a cohort of 19 in any one course so students will get to know each other, they will interact and the whole design, pedagogical design but on how they came out was based on cohorts. And that, I think, was a major factor and got a lot of elite ah nonprofit institutions saying we can do online. Now, the world's different 15 years later, but I guess I'm just going back to your question, Neil. Have we seen it? I'd say, yeah, we saw it 15 years ago. We need to see more of it. And in particular, post-COVID, we need to see more
00:38:47
Speaker
um designs that take advantage of new synchronous technologies, but not just synchronous, there's a lot of really clever asynchronous back-and-forth technologies that can really improve engagement. So we need to see a lot more of it now that we're in a post-COVID world. There's a lot more possibilities here than are being taken advantage of. Yeah, and I wonder about that because I i think there's, um I agree with you, and I think there's maybe a couple of different thoughts that i have on the back of that there's there's there's one thing that says we need to have more of that within existing programs we need to kind of imbue existing programs with more of that because they're a deficit and there's become too much of an orthodoxy around asynchronous and no synchronous in there but i think the other dimension that's interesting to me is the extent to which you differentiate and you have that option you have an option of a cohort base versus something that's more asynchronous because i
00:39:43
Speaker
I think i've definitely I've definitely seen research, although in this survey they it talks about the high value of interaction, I've definitely seen research out there that says, look, I didn't want to engage in the forums, I just wanted to get on um and, you know, ah given our past, I'm sure if Donald Clark was here, he would say exactly the same thing. Maybe he's not the best sample, but I just wonder whether we will see or if you guys have got any examples where you can choose a coht cohort based route or you can choose an asynchronous route.
00:40:17
Speaker
well i am so Not cohort-based. I think it's a great idea. And I think when I look at internal survey data for individual institutions that we've helped with the surveys or even done the surveys for them, you do see both extremes. Some people are like, i would I need a cohort. I need more interaction. But you also see another set of people are saying,
00:40:41
Speaker
No way. And typically, I would say for fully online programs, I'd say the majority are in the, we don't want a cohort. I just need that flexibility. I don't want it. So 60% in one institution.
00:40:57
Speaker
Whereas 30 to 40% said, no, I need connections with other people. So I think you need that flexibility of, hey, choose your experience, which way do you go? I see individual courses where you get a choice between do you want any synchronous offerings or not. If you look at University of Central Florida and their modality, they have, I think, five or six different definitions of modalities. like You could almost think of it as across a spectrum on how much asynchronous, how much synchronous, what are the requirements. And so at the course level, I think that we see some choose your adventure, if you want to put it that way. But I think
00:41:41
Speaker
I don't have a good view, at least off of the top of my head, of good a lot of good examples of choose your program. And keep in mind, we have different terminology here and in the UK. Program in the US s is more your whole multi-course, multi-year set of courses. So no, I don't see a whole lot of it. I could argue that the choice of competency base is sort of a choice to avoid that quite often.
00:42:10
Speaker
But I see it much more at the course level. Yeah. And I wonder if there's maybe, I mean, I i haven't seen a lot of it in the UK. I mentioned the example of and maybe a more mature kind of university looking at it. But I haven't seen any examples over here yet at the moment. But I wonder whether, because over here, the regulator and the kind of conditions that universities have to meet for students continuing and completing their courses, that's a big regulatory um kind of dark cloud that's hanging over that the UK if I can put it in those terms. So I know that institutions and online providers who've maybe struggled with retention, this is sometimes where my mind goes without knowing the details. you know To what extent is their commercial drivers
00:42:57
Speaker
that enable people to enroll whenever they want or enroll at six times a year. To what extent do those things actually affect you negatively down the line? um And I also wonder, you know, quite apart from that kind of retention and completion pressure, sort of wonder whether AI might influence some of the more individual routes and may have a role to play in um universities looking at Not the cohort base, but something that's you know More efficient and more individual because of AI you can't introduce AI as a topic with two minutes left in our discussion i kind kind of rules here Well, look, I mean it was just that was the last thing on my bingo card so I had to get in there last big go over here I want to sneak one thing in here, you know, talking about students, the 60% who don't want the synchronous stuff, just thinking, you know, i've coming out of conferences, and I wonder if some of the synchronous stuff in courses is similar to the need for interaction and conference sessions, you know, people don't have
00:44:05
Speaker
enough good ideas about how to foster that. So you get a lot of just talk to your neighbor and then report out kind of thing. And and certainly I saw that in the active classroom movement. you know Faculty didn't know how to make the transition from a lecture to an active classroom always. They needed help. And I wonder if the same sort of thing with synchronous, they're just putting bad synchronous stuff in there and they need help to to do better.
00:44:29
Speaker
And this gets back to another one of the volume one of Morgan Triggers, ah where you have an active discussion and then you go in and all the chairs are bolted to the floor and are immovable. Yes.
00:44:44
Speaker
Well, good. Well, listen, ah this surprisingly good report and thoughts coming out of it, there I have to say there are several reports. Either you're really good at finding them, Neil, and you, Morgan, you guys really dig these up, or just the UK is actually quite good at pulling up some reports to make you think about them things.
00:45:05
Speaker
This was another one because it gets to a lot of the topics we think about, but especially their usage of open-ended quotes. That's why. um It really brings it home on where the need is and where we need more flexibility, but we got to think deeply about what that is.
00:45:23
Speaker
So appreciate the time today. ah Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. Are you guys doing anything fun over the next couple of weeks other than taking less work, hopefully? I'm headed to Iowa. i Not much commentary there. I'm staying put and just, yeah, just kicking back and relaxing, hopefully.
00:45:49
Speaker
Okay, well hopefully you the three of us will all have a relaxing holiday season. And for all of our listeners, hopefully you'll be getting this right before Christmas. Have a great time and we'll be back in the saddle once we get into January. Great talking to you guys.