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I took all the blows and did it my way
297 Plays2 years ago
Phil, Neil, and Morgan discuss the prospects and issues involved in colleges and universities being able to create and successfully run online programs with internal resources.
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Transcript
Intro: Ed Tech and Enrollment Crisis
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello and welcome back. This is Phil Hill and I'm here with Glenda Morgan and Neil Mosley again as we're discussing online education across the Atlantic. And even though we're heading into the holidays, life continues to be quite busy in the ed tech world, trying to keep track of all the different news items that are coming out, online education, enrollment,
00:00:26
Speaker
So another full, full episode for us, I suspect right now. But welcome both of you and Morgan, take it away.
US vs UK Enrollment Challenges
00:00:35
Speaker
Thanks, Phil. I think top of mind for me lately has been the enrollment crisis that we're seeing at a lot of institutions. Both of us have written in the last couple of weeks about some of the struggles with some institutions facing an enrollment challenge and making some severe cuts, all of which seem to be too little too late. And yesterday when I opened my email, I saw that Font Bonne University in St. Louis. I hope I'm pronouncing it right.
00:01:04
Speaker
is similarly it's it's enrollment has halved over the last couple of years or 10 years and now they're looking at making severe cuts again it seems like too little too late but I'm interested in what Neil is seeing perhaps you know for some perspective across the Atlantic in terms of enrollment challenges but I'm especially interested in how institutions are responding to that and are we missing a story in terms of institutions that that aren't making the news that are actually heading it off
00:01:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, there are definitely enrollment challenges over here.
UK Universities' Financial Struggles
00:01:41
Speaker
I don't think it's quite of the same nature as what's happening where you guys are. I think it's not necessarily driven by maybe more of a kind of steady decline. It's enrollment challenges because
00:01:58
Speaker
of the way in which inflation has made the student fees that universities receive kind of reducing value by about a third. And so it's not necessarily that the trend line is going downwards around enrollments and that causing an existential challenge. It's just that enrollment is so important to universities and HCI's financial sustainability that if institutions don't meet targets,
00:02:25
Speaker
then that puts them in a really challenging position. So I think that's the bigger narrative in the UK.
00:02:33
Speaker
you will see institutions who maybe haven't met targets, laying off staff, and there's been different examples of that. I think University of Aberdeen cut their modern languages department, which is kind of a separate story, but it probably speaks maybe to some of the financial challenges and decisions that universities have to make.
00:02:55
Speaker
It is an issue over here. It's an issue that impacts on universities' financial sustainability, but it's because they're squeezed financially rather than the enrollment trends themselves being on a kind of downward trajectory, if that makes sense. But it sounds like it's, are you also saying it's not existential?
US Enrollment Existential Crisis
00:03:17
Speaker
You know, it's cuts, it's management.
00:03:19
Speaker
Whereas in the US, so many, particularly of the small schools, we're talking about how can we even survive? And we're, you know, I don't subscribe to the Clayton Christensen original forecast of, you know, huge percentage of schools going out of business, but there certainly are schools where this is very existential. Are you not seeing that?
00:03:41
Speaker
Yeah, definitely, definitely. Like, not on a wide scale, I don't think. I mean, there's data published about universities' balance sheets, and I think last time that was published in the press that what it highlighted is lots of kind of deficits there, I mean, increasing deficits. And for some institutions, they're definitely
00:04:04
Speaker
financially, there are some existential issues amongst a smaller bunch of universities. So yeah, we're definitely seeing that happening. I tend to see the differences from what I hear in the US.
00:04:21
Speaker
being much more of an existential issue around the progressive decline whereas I think like I say for the UK I think it's more about the financial squeeze but yeah we you know in short Phil yeah absolutely there are existential issues around universities and there's been talk around universities certain universities going on there for a while but there tends to be not like a whole bunch of transparency around that
00:04:47
Speaker
Yeah, I remember those articles from a few years ago, especially about, yeah, somewhere really deep in the hole financially.
Demographic Shifts Impacting Enrollment
00:04:53
Speaker
Yeah and you know I think because of the the the worry of worrying students those things don't quite come to the surface often you know sometimes it's a case of an open secret sometimes you're not quite sure which institutions being being talked about I guess. So we win for drama that's how I'm taking this out to make it a dramatic situation you asked for the win. Absolutely absolutely yeah we we're just far more reserved Phil that's what it is.
00:05:24
Speaker
You'll walk it off. You'll walk it off. I think there's also more pain in the future, just not to dwell on this too long. But I saw some interesting data this week. One was it was the state of West Virginia, which is like ground central for a lot of this. And 90% of all analyses seem to be about the state of West Virginia right now. But the percentage of high school students who go on to tertiary education has gone down by 10% in the last few years.
00:05:54
Speaker
And also nationally, the number of Hispanic students that are interested in going on to university has dropped substantially. And in some ways, going back to the Nathan Graw work, a lot of people are bidding the farm on
00:06:10
Speaker
on essentially a resurgence of Hispanic students coming to college because they're first in college. So that was bad.
Why Not Focus on Retention?
00:06:19
Speaker
It also is perplexing to me, why don't schools really double down on retention? Like keep the students you already have, especially some of the weaker schools where retention rates are pretty bad. Why is this not, it always should have been a hair on fire emergency and why is it not? I saw another interesting statistic yesterday.
00:06:40
Speaker
more than a hundred institutions in the United States who don't graduate a single student in four years, not one. Yeah, I think that there's been, in US higher education, there's been too much of, this happens in a lot of areas, where we take something that's a doomsaying, like a Clayton Christensen prediction or Nathan Graw,
00:07:03
Speaker
And then people poke holes in it saying, hey, it's overstated. And some of that criticism is very valid. But then higher education is very good to now. Now we can protect ourselves and not deal with the reality. So part of what I see is like what you're describing. And I'm glad you mentioned Nathan DeGraw's work with a demographic
00:07:22
Speaker
It's not just there are fewer students. It's the mix of students and how many go to college. I think colleges and universities aren't really dealing with that. And what you're seeing with COVID has made it worse. And the chronic absenteeism with our high school students in the US, that's on top of all the demographic changes.
00:07:46
Speaker
So I definitely see that as something we haven't fully dealt with in this country, and it's going to make enrollment challenges and financial health even more difficult moving forward. So yeah, I see a lot of two things. One is circling the wagons, you know, like, okay, so, you know, this has happened, but we can still protect what we've got here.
00:08:09
Speaker
And I also still see a lot of magical thinking. Years ago, I was at a college and really a college where there were some real enrollment challenges. And remember trying to talk the composition department into enlarging the size of classes from 19 to 20.
00:08:29
Speaker
And they absolutely dug their heels in and said, no way, absolutely not. And they were very proud of themselves because it was like they were giving sticking it to the man, you know, without understanding the larger picture. And it just drives me up the wall or understanding in the long term, they are the man.
00:08:47
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. Well, before we do the next topic, I do want to add your point about why aren't we doubling down on retention. I was talking to one of the main ed tech vendors, one of the key executives there, who was I was just asking about how business is going. And one of the comments was we really thought coming out of the pandemic that schools would really start investing much more in student success initiatives.
00:09:14
Speaker
and how to engage, you know, retain them, etc. And he's just like, we're not seeing that. Like, very surprised how little attention and money is being spent to try to improve retention and success. So, a doom saying, wait, this goes to get your New Year's Eve, your New Year's resolution. It's only, I believe, December 6. So I've still got another 25 days of doom.
International Students and UK Policies
00:09:42
Speaker
Okay.
00:09:43
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, the other sort of side of this is the international students. And, you know, I know things are looking okay in the US in some ways, but with some bad signs in terms of the number of students from India going up and they tend to be less lucrative for schools if that's the way you're looking at it. But I know things are looking bumpy over there in the UK. Yeah, I mean,
00:10:11
Speaker
You know, going back to my earlier point, that kind of financial squeeze has meant a greater focus and a greater dependency on international students in the UK. And, you know, one of the challenges here in the UK is the debate around immigration and migration. So we had some figures that when the government and other commenters thought were too high in terms of net migration,
00:10:38
Speaker
in the UK and so with an election coming up you know that's a big election issue that government isn't in control of migration and inevitably that kind of challenge on the way that that's framed feeds its way down into higher education so we've had measures from government around restricting dependence to being able to come to the UK when they're coming to study and now the government's reviewing
00:11:06
Speaker
kind of graduate route, which is basically, you know, the ability for students to stay, international students to stay in the UK after they study for a certain period of time without certain conditions. So they're kind of reviewing that side of things. And so, you know, it's that kind of classic thing, isn't it, where you just
00:11:28
Speaker
the political kind of narrative and expedience of it just seems to fly against, you know, sensible decision making around higher education and the economy and all those kind of things. And so, you know, that's another challenge and another squeeze for universities if international students coming to UK becomes less attractive. That's a squeeze on their finances even further.
00:11:54
Speaker
and you'd think that the government might want to support higher education in this. So it's really frustrating in the UK around that kind of thing, that there's not that engagement with the nuance around this kind of thing.
00:12:09
Speaker
the government really supporting higher education because, you know, things are really tough. Things are really tough in UK higher education. A quick question for you, though, Neil, is is this a potential problem or are you already seeing the political immigration policies impacting enrollment or is this something we expect to see it? Yeah, I think it's better both. So there's definitely been conversations I've had around international student numbers.
00:12:38
Speaker
going down and kind of challenges around that in terms of the perception of the UK as a good place for them to come and study and issues around the dependency side of things. So that's definitely played out here in the UK, but then this just feels like another layer of government hitting higher education over the head in its time of need around international students. So there's, yeah, there's some now and there's some not yet, but coming.
00:13:07
Speaker
So one meta comment, because we're joking about your New Year's resolution, which if we start taking bets on how long that lasts, I know what my number is. But really what we're talking about is even though there's a small uptick in enrollment in the US in this fault, the overall environment, these macro environments,
00:13:31
Speaker
are presenting an environment where the ed tech, the online education, the things that we deal with, it's a very clear, it's a matter of how do you deal with these macro changes? How do you deal with financial pressures, enrollment pressures, student success?
00:13:50
Speaker
And so I know that we're talking a lot about these things that seem like they're outside of technology, per se, or outside of online, but it just reinforces that's the environment we're in an ed tech and online education. So much of it is to deal with the massive macro changes that we're undergoing right now. So just sharing a meta thought that I'm having.
EdTech Solutions for Retention
00:14:14
Speaker
Yeah. And I think I think that's interesting in terms of
00:14:17
Speaker
the ways in which EdTech can support the real challenges. Because I guess sometimes some of the criticism you can lay at the door of some EdTech products if they're kind of addressing their sort of solutions looking for problems sometimes. And I think to the point you made around retention, I mean, I think firstly for university, there's probably a lot that they could learn from the very best in terms of online education around student success and retention.
00:14:47
Speaker
But in what ways can technology or the features within technology, and I guess I'm thinking a little bit around AI perhaps, in what way can that support things like retention and some of the problems that we talked about?
00:15:02
Speaker
Well, one positive aspect for me over the years is it used to be that if you looked at online education that was, and who's making decisions around that? So often it's like, that's the continuing education department and a few isolated programs that have chosen to go online. And for various reasons, that's fine, but that's not us as an institution.
00:15:26
Speaker
And today, it's raised up to the provost, to the president. It's a very strategic issue. And I don't say that that's good in terms of, oh, good, everything should be about technology. But I think it leads for a healthier environment that you're talking about. And let's get away from the solution that's looking for a problem. Let's actually solve real problems.
00:15:50
Speaker
Well, the good news is we have real problems that need to be addressed. So let's really, in this space, online and ed tech should be addressing real things. So maybe it's the end of the year, but I'm reflecting a lot on why we're covering a lot of on the surface non-technology issues.
00:16:11
Speaker
Just reflecting on that point, Phil, around online. Online has always had the challenges around retention and continuation. I often kind of take this line of argument, actually, but again, I think there's actually lots that universities can learn from.
00:16:33
Speaker
those areas which potentially they haven't thought about as core areas. And to the point that I made earlier, the best of online education programs that really understand and really put in place strategies around retention and continuation, that's where universities can draw insight and valuable help that might inform
00:16:59
Speaker
changes that they might make more generally. And I think maybe we'll go on to talk about this. But if we're thinking about an existential crisis for higher education, then there's also kind of what needs to change in terms of who we're trying to reach and the ways in which we're trying to reach them.
Degrees at Scale Conference Insights
00:17:17
Speaker
And you mentioned continuing education departments. But that's another
00:17:21
Speaker
component of the university that probably has, well, almost certainly has, you know, a different experience and a different type of insight that can help feed into addressing some of the challenges that universities face in other areas, I think. So, not to say that, you know, everything is contained within, but there's, you know, a whole bunch of areas within the university that I think could be brought in to help address particular challenges and have got something to offer around that.
00:17:48
Speaker
Absolutely. On changing the changing things up a little bit, I just attended the degrees at scale conference at Georgia Tech, I did it virtually. And there's some pluses and minus, which I'll talk about later there. But
00:18:04
Speaker
I've always sort of liked that conference because I always like learn a lot from the sessions, like in terms of actual facts of things. And they wanted us to follow Chatham House rules. So I can't name names particularly, but I can talk in the general sort of sense. Some of the highlights for me were they've seen apparently enrollment went down a little bit over the pandemic and they've seen enrollment bounce back. And most of these degrees are highly technical. So they're,
00:18:34
Speaker
degrees in engineering, you know, some business degrees, but there's a lot of technical ones in there as well, particularly from Colorado and Georgia Tech, and they're becoming more, more, more female. The proportion of women is going up, which is sort of interesting. But, you know, a couple of things I was struck by. One was the fact that
00:18:58
Speaker
you know, they're using a lot of other ed tech in there, so slate and yellow dig and some other kinds of things. And I would dearly love to understand some of the some of the economics of these because they're not making sense to me on the surface of things in terms of how they're actually working with often the provider in the case of many of them Coursera and charging pretty low fees and still coming out ahead.
00:19:26
Speaker
Yeah. Do they not address the economics or the financial side in the conference?
00:19:31
Speaker
not in the sessions that I went to. And that was sort of one of my frustrations. It was very valuable, but in terms of the online program was really only about six sessions out of a much larger total. So that was not addressed in any of the sessions that I went to. And I really understand and I really value the ability to go to a conference remotely, but it really sort of,
00:20:01
Speaker
leaves out for me some of that tacit knowledge. It's amazing how important that sort of side conversations and the hallway conversations are in terms of learning about what's going on. So the program that I went to was constrained, but also I didn't have that sort of more side conversation kind of thing. And although, you know,
00:20:24
Speaker
As I said, it's really great to be able to attend virtually and in terms of global warming and things like that, that's the future. But you really get a lot less out of a conference by attending that way than you do in person. So you're really not going to mention HyFlex in this conversation?
00:20:42
Speaker
No. Okay, that would open up too much. I would say you're a nicer person than I am or more tolerant. I only did that conference once, and I realize it's somewhat critical. But the problem I had with the conference is, yeah, you're dealing with these degrees at scale, a lot of the things provided by Coursera, and it's sort of, it's not all MOOC, but it's sort of triggered by the MOOC movement.
00:21:08
Speaker
But I found a lot of the conversations disjointed from reality very much to, hey, we want to take a philosophical stand. And if we make a statement together, it'll mean deadly squat. And I wish they were talking more about concrete challenges and what they need to do. So maybe that's me being grumpy or maybe this set of this conference was better, but
00:21:36
Speaker
I have not had the same experience there.
00:21:39
Speaker
Okay, and it could be a situation of a low bar, because I find most conference presentations really bad, in the sense that nobody actually talks about the nitty gritty of things, you know, it's all this sort of philosophical thing, let me provide a larger perspective and not talking about, okay, this is how many staff I have, and this is what it cost me, and this is what we ran into, and we had to do it differently. Whereas I did get some of that from the thing, especially as they brought in sort of people that weren't the head of the sections,
00:22:08
Speaker
you know, to talk about the media and things like that. So I did get more nuts and bolts kinds of things, but you know, ultimately people are defensive. So it's the sort of panglossian kind of approach to things. It's like it's going awesome.
00:22:23
Speaker
which is a conference problem generally. But I remember one, it was an open edX conference and Annette Agarwal was giving one of the talks and followed by Fiona Hollins, who I don't know but whom I love, and he was talking about the impact of these
00:22:41
Speaker
degrees at scale and they could lower the cost price. And she stepped up to give her talk and she said, I bet most of the students who are paying substantially more would be interested in knowing about this. Sort of an acid kind of comment there about how they weren't sort of explaining how that all got sort of sorted out in the wash.
00:23:03
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. I have to confess, I'm not familiar with that conference, so that's interesting.
Success of Curated Conferences
00:23:11
Speaker
But I take your point around missing, I think what we, how I describe it as missing the kind of opportunity to get the gossip in between sessions. But I think your broader point around conferences is
00:23:25
Speaker
Something I've been reflecting on this year, having thinking back to the ones that I've been at, I think there's just a real skill in curating a conference. And I can think of one that I've been to this year that was really well curated, but I think often there's so many tensions around sponsorship and what opportunities that affords and representation.
00:23:47
Speaker
Was that a good one? If you don't mind me asking, was that the Leeds conference? That was the Leeds conference, yes. So the University of Leeds Online Learning Summit, which was, is a conference actually that's been running for a while, but it was Margaret Koracek who works at Leeds, previously worked at another university at Derby and ran the conference from there. So it was a first time Leeds kind of had hosted the conference. And it was a really good conference in terms of covering
00:24:15
Speaker
a broad range of areas, all of which were relevant and not too esoteric. We had representation from your side of the pond as well. We had Erin Kessler from MIT. And we had Joanne, I forget her surname, forgive me, from Western Governors. So that's always interesting for a UK audience to hear what's happening elsewhere as well. So that was an example of a really well curated conference in my view.
00:24:44
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. The curation is key. And when conferences go bad, and I think the majority do from the sessions, you know, most you keep hearing, oh, yeah, I got all my value for being at the exhibit hall and having good conversations with good people. And the abstracts look good. But then when I actually hear the session, it's just not there's no meat to it. And I find things very bimodal. I find that most conference sessions
00:25:13
Speaker
On one hand, they might just be Pam Glossian, as you were saying, and divorced from reality and soft thinking, but without really any meat to it. Or you have the opposite extreme. Like once you go to it, here's how we did this program.
00:25:30
Speaker
We pulled people into a room and we provided training in an asynchronous format. And it's like just very dry, detailed stuff. It's like, OK, we knew this 10 or 15 years ago. And it's the middle that is missing, the ability to say, we know the bigger problems we're trying to solve. Here's our strategy to deal with it. This is what worked. But more importantly, this is what didn't work.
00:25:59
Speaker
still need to go to conferences, but yeah, curating needs to improve. Yeah, I think we saw that taken to an extreme, or the ultimate sort of goal, not goal, but a result of some of this where Phil and I were at a conference where it turned out that
00:26:17
Speaker
a substantial number of the people had not registered. They had just sat in the bar of the conference hotel. Well, you could say this is ASU GSB and the podcast, all rules are thrown off the table. There's no Chatham House rules with the podcast. That's ASU GSB.
00:26:35
Speaker
And yeah, you're right. That conference started, I mean, it was always an expensive, well, maybe not in the Sky Song days. It's become a very important conference, but it's very expensive to register and to attend. And they've done a good job of changing the payments and getting representatives from colleges and universities there. But then that leaves the smaller vendors paying large amount of money
00:27:05
Speaker
And as you said, by this year, there's just a large contention. It is not just that they didn't register. That's not what affects me. What affects me is therefore they just camp out in a small bar and take over the bar. And so you actually lose some of the abilities, grab somebody in a hallway. Hey, let's just go here and chat. You go there and it's a bunch of companies that have their offices in the bar for the entire day.
00:27:32
Speaker
Yeah, and sometime we'll have to discuss the mechanics of conferences and compare them across the Atlantic here, because I was struck, obviously I went to OEB and it'll be interesting to compare, but I really did enjoy OEB. It was very valuable, but also they fed us amazingly well, which increasingly is not the case at many edtech conferences here. You're lucky if you can find a cup of coffee.
00:28:00
Speaker
Well, if we're headed to the I mean, we are headed towards the end of the year, that might be a good topic for our next podcast. Which are the valuable conferences and what makes them valuable to us? Because I think there's a lot of people who are there, they're hungry for that type of knowledge. And yeah, so let's let's go deeper into that next time.
00:28:21
Speaker
Absolutely. But before we do that, I want to touch on one brief thing.
Escape Room Idea for Conferences
00:28:25
Speaker
I think Neil actually won the internet yesterday because he was part of a Twitter conversation, somebody was complaining about trust building exercises, and icebreakers and things like that. And Neil pointed out in a tweet that
00:28:38
Speaker
you could probably structure an escape room about how to get out of trust building exercises or icebreakers or some of those terribly annoying things that people do at meetings and conferences. And I laughed so hard that I actually snorted coffee out of my nose and really got expelled from an airline club. Yeah, I was just thinking about
00:29:04
Speaker
you know, trying to climb out of a window, maybe kind of in one of those sessions and, you know, maybe kind of get down to the ground floor, you know, that could be a good challenge. Yeah. Well, how many times you go into, we keep going back to conferences. That's why when you go into a conference, you immediately look for a chair that's on the aisle so that you can escape without stepping over a bunch of people if you don't know how it's going to be run. But an escape room, I like that.
00:29:34
Speaker
Yeah. Before I get on to the next topic, I had a colleague at Gartner called Neville Cannon, who's in the government team. And he once famously started a conference session at Gartner. He walked in the back and he was miked up. And it was about cloud and how you need an exit strategy. And he said, I'm sorry, but the announced speaker is not going to be able to make it. So this session is canceled. And then
00:30:02
Speaker
carried on walking and then said actually I'm just kidding I'm here but like how many of you were looking for the door and found yourself somewhat stymied by not having an exit strategy to get out of the room now
Online and Micro-Credential Development
00:30:15
Speaker
that the session had been cancelled but more importantly I want to talk about universities building up their online and their micro credential or alternative credential capability
00:30:28
Speaker
This year, well, not this week, this week, there were there were two interesting articles which which came out to me. One was one in the Times Higher Education publication about universities are going it alone, you know, to you has has
00:30:44
Speaker
you know, is having a hard time and, you know, places are now looking to perhaps run their own stuff. I did not like the article, I believe Neil didn't like it either, but we can go into the details of that. There was also a survey that came out, it was an obscure modern campus survey about places running
00:31:06
Speaker
microcredentials, particularly former Continuing Ed kinds of units running and the kinds of obstacles that they were running into there. In short, and I would recommend you go read the survey, a lot of them are running into the fact that they're underfunded and
00:31:21
Speaker
The technology really isn't there. They're struggling with the technology. So I wonder if we can talk a little bit about this more because I know Neil had a piece out recently just looking at how a lot of places are in the UK are hiring for online and those kinds of things. But perhaps we can explore it a bit more.
00:31:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean it I guess there's lots of different components of that. Maybe I'll take the Times Higher Education article first because that was interesting. I think it kind of aligned a little bit with kind of previous discussions that we've had because I suppose my contention with the article was more that it was very one-sided and it was one voice offering one perspective and it was the Century Foundation who I have to confess I'm not that familiar with
00:32:06
Speaker
We've heard of them here. You've heard our good Good good. Okay. Well, I feel like this there's something behind that comment. So I'll let you I'll let you jump in in a minute but you know, there's lots of different perspectives on OPMs and on outsourcing and you kind of usually expect and journalistic outlets to represent a broadest way of the opinion so that was my
00:32:32
Speaker
take on that and i think we've spoken previously around this idea that yes there are some universities who are maybe more of a mature stage of their journey around online education and don't feel the need any longer to get a partner or feel like they can.
Unpreparedness for Online Education
00:32:50
Speaker
take a bunch of kind of unbundled services and make that work for them. But there are plenty of universities who are looking for that type of relationship where they can kind of have an OPM relationship to kind of grow. And this piece suggested that, you know, that wasn't the case and things were moving in a very clear way away from that, which I think, you know, we probably all acknowledge isn't what we see and hear on the ground.
00:33:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm on the same page. It was not a well-written article. I mean, it had some useful information, but it took that one explanation. Here's what's happening. Schools don't need OPM providers anymore. And to back this up, let's go to one of the key foundations whose mission is to kill OPM companies. And surprise, their explanation is they're not needed anymore.
00:33:44
Speaker
I mean, that whole approach led to a very poor article and it misses the key point that I think we're talking about.
00:33:52
Speaker
are colleges and universities actually ready and staffed and capable of picking up more and more of the abilities needed to do these successful programs? And I think it's a very real question to ask, but we just didn't get a good answer from the article. And I think I shared this anecdote a couple episodes ago, but one of the schools I worked with
00:34:19
Speaker
their digital marketing department or their marketing department was setting up that every single web page has to go through them. And they had a backlog. They couldn't change anything. So they didn't have the mindset. It wasn't just staffing. They didn't have the mindset to be able to reach new students, have different needs and to be able to do that adequately.
00:34:41
Speaker
And that doesn't even get into course design and how to think about things differently, the support services needed.
00:34:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we're beating up on the article, rightly so. But I don't, I think that schools are not being aggressive enough and taking the type of approach that Southern New Hampshire did. There's too much of a, hey, we need to compete with Southern New Hampshire University, which is the largest institution in the US now, without how did they do that? Well, the way they did that is when and
00:35:18
Speaker
Paul LeBlanc deservedly gets a lot of credit. When he became president, they looked at what they were doing. They realized they needed to have a strong online presence. And then they essentially treated it as like a Harvard Business School case study. They redesigned the institution from the ground up to serve those needs, get the job done, and do it themselves. They have a lot of partners, but they don't need an OPM.
00:35:43
Speaker
That's what I find that too many schools are not doing, saying, hey, wait, what's needed? How do we rethink it and then make sure we're staffed and organized to do it? And there's too much of an incremental, oh, we don't need OPM. We can do this, but we're going to try it the same way we do face to face without realizing the different needs. So I think there's a legitimate question. More schools are doing that. It's just way too slow.
00:36:12
Speaker
too little transformation in the approach. And Phil, did Southern New Hampshire really come to a tough place in order to kind of then change strategy?
SNHU's Online Transformation Case Study
00:36:27
Speaker
And I thought that that was the case, but I just wondered if you feel that it's going to take that for a lot of institutions to be able to kind of make that change.
00:36:37
Speaker
Yes, and yes, I mean, definitely they were small, mostly on campus, private university in New Hampshire. Yes, they were looking at not we're going out of business next year, but the board clearly supported the transformation approach. I don't think, I don't know, it'd be interesting to go back in time. Did anybody have any idea the size and the influence they would get to? Like, I don't think they sat down and said, we want to be the largest in the country.
00:37:06
Speaker
But they definitely had the tough choice that led them to support the change. And going to your second part, do I think that for a lot of traditional schools, do they need that? I'd say yes. It's got to shake them out of complacency. But most of them are unwilling to put the resources necessary
00:37:28
Speaker
into actually making that transition. Just one little data point, and I want to write about this either this week or next week, but, you know, and keying off of a blog post from Neil, you know, a lot of places are starting to staff up now, particularly at that senior level, somebody to run
00:37:44
Speaker
online learning. But what I'm seeing is there's a giant disparity between salaries, you know, and so a lot of people are coming into the market offering a salary that is way too low, to get somebody who actually knows how to do this and further goes beyond that that initial person, then they don't understand the capital upfront is going to take to actually build a proper and viable online program. So
00:38:10
Speaker
they're really underestimating, won the money, but also the time. I've got a slide that I often show that shows UCF's growth over time, and it took a long, long time to get them where they are now, and it was a slow growth. And even Arizona State, which grew with the help of an OPM, it took some time.
00:38:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's an interesting area because I think there's getting to a place where you feel you need help or you feel you need to change. But that's not the same as really knowing the ways in which you need to change and where you need help and what that looks like. And I think that's one of the big challenges.
00:38:58
Speaker
you know, a point you made around online education senior roles, you know, there's a whole different flavour across institutions around that kind of thing, which influences things like the disparity in salaries across the piece. But you know, you could even say that that is an example of we know we need to move in this direction,
00:39:21
Speaker
we think we need this role, we're going to situate it here, we're going to give this role this amount of responsibilities and you know sometimes they don't seem to, I don't know, they don't seem to quite hit the mark I think sometimes.
00:39:39
Speaker
So I was interviewed early in the pandemic. I can't remember the exact details of it, but it was somebody I was getting asked by some publication about, you know, should schools as part of the changes here, should they now be investing in true online infrastructure? You know, when's the right time to, you know, develop these capabilities? And I and I basically said, yes, they should invest in the question of when should they invest? I said a decade ago.
00:40:08
Speaker
And to your point, Morgan, it takes time to develop these capabilities. And it takes a lot of time if you're going to underpay key staff to be able to develop that new capability.
00:40:22
Speaker
So yeah, higher ed, see this gets to a lot of what I see with higher ed. I think we're going the right direction in so many areas, reaching out to new students, realizing there's more support. It just, it doesn't need to take this long.
Slow Adaptation to Online Learning
00:40:37
Speaker
There's so many decisions made in higher ed, such as what you guys are mentioning around salaries, that cause the change to take longer than it should be taking.
00:40:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I want to put a slightly more hopeful spin on what you said, they should have been investing a decade ago, you know, the old personal finance thing, you know, when is a good time to invest in retirement one, the, you know, 20 years ago, was it was a good time to start saving for retirement, the second best time to start saving us today. So places should get on it today.
00:41:11
Speaker
Oh, you could sell a book and have a shtick based on that. Yeah. Phil and I have known each other a good 20 years now. And in that time, we've been talking about having a shtick. So maybe that would be my shtick. And I'll actually choose to not mention the name that caused that initial conversation we had. There was somebody who was very influential.
00:41:34
Speaker
every time you would see a talk, it's like, oh, it's the same thing, but it's successful. They get invited to all the conferences, get quoted all the time. They need a shtick. And among the other reasons that we're not mentioning the name was it was somebody who was always very, very, very nice to me. That's a weakness. Oh, sorry, but yeah.
00:41:57
Speaker
Well, let me ask the positive side of this is, since we do have existential crises that we're mentioning, and since there is a general trend to schools picking up new capabilities,
00:42:10
Speaker
Is there any acceleration happening? Like I'm arguing that things are slower than they need to be, but are we seeing signs that schools are at least accelerating their slow processes to be able to develop online programs and not just online programs, online courses for a mix and match mode and continuing ed, non-matriculated students. Are you guys, do you sense an acceleration? Yeah, I don't know.
00:42:41
Speaker
I couldn't characterize it as an acceleration. But to pick up the hopeful theme, there's plenty of things happening, which is a really positive thing. And I think thinking about online education, it was niche and under prioritized, I think, for a long time. And that's changing. So that can only be a good thing. And I guess my hope is that,
00:43:11
Speaker
You know, as I kind of alluded to earlier in the podcast, there's a lot that other forms of learning and teaching can learn from the best of online education. And I think, you know, some of the things that we're talking around, the kind of challenges of the higher education faces are a little bit around reaching a new audience in different ways.
00:43:31
Speaker
an online education is just one facet of that. So there's real potential for the kind of moves that we're seeing more widely to kind of help influence the developments that happen in other areas too, I think.
00:43:50
Speaker
I think I don't see a lot of places moving very quickly. I see places moving slowly. And I think we're gonna land up with a situation. And I'm contradicting myself, but in a way, yesterday you wrote a blog post about to you and the
00:44:06
Speaker
economics of it and essentially one of your points was the richer getting richer you know the people that got in early and got out of to you and and Harvard and MIT made 800 million on 80 billion investments so they're getting richer but I see the places that are already doing it well
00:44:23
Speaker
continuing to grow. You know, your Oregon states, your Arizona states, and things like that. So it's going to be even more difficult for places to break in, especially as people are going after the same kinds of things. I used to give a talk about online where my beginning slide was a slide of eight-year-olds playing soccer.
Herd Behavior in Online Education
00:44:48
Speaker
And you know, if
00:44:49
Speaker
If you've ever watched eight year olds playing football or soccer, they all run to the ball and then the ball shoots out and then they all go and run to the ball like a little pluck. And that's how I see online learning is everybody clusters around the same kinds of things. You know, we're all going to offer an NBA. We're all going to offer the same kind of thing. And nobody really finds the white space or the the new thing. It's all following the crowd.
00:45:14
Speaker
Yeah. Or a degree completion was a big, it still is a big motivation. And then you get the same stats. This many million adults have some college credit, 40 million. And we're going to go after that. Just like the past 50 announcements we heard from 50 other schools. That's another example. I think it comes down a little bit to strategy and the lack thereof, some of this kind of thing, because I think,
00:45:41
Speaker
You know, you can want to get into online education and you can look at the kind of common areas where there are programs and titles and things like that but you know the key question is, what is going to differentiate you from everyone else.
00:45:58
Speaker
We have cue cards on the podcast. I know we don't record the video, but Morgan had pre-made cue cards to say, all right, shut it down people, but that's good. So I would, as we start to close this one down, it's been a great conversation, but I think there are two things we could do in upcoming episodes and picking up on these discussions. One is conferences. Where are we getting value from conferences and meeting with other people?
00:46:25
Speaker
and share it with our listeners and also what are the successful elements of those conferences.
00:46:33
Speaker
But then we should also, I think it'd be worth sort of exploring where things are going well, for online programs. You mentioned Oregon State. What about a deeper dive into what are the aspects of their programs are going well? Some of the things that are happening through US, UK, but even outside of that, I think we could sort of, let's discuss highlights of those success factors.
00:47:00
Speaker
and opportunities. So maybe this will force us into a joint resolution to look at more of the positive side. But it's been a great talking today and look forward to our next episode.