As promised last week, here are some additional thoughts from this year's Minary Conference.
Many discussions circled around online education: what do alumni need, that we can give them electronically? Yale's Steve Victor, Princeton's Andrew Gossen, and UC Berkeley's Scott Vento surveyed the graveyard of online education: the Alliance for Lifelong Learning (later AllLearn); Virtual Temple; UMUC Online; Fathom, and NYU Online.
R.I.P. So who survives? For starters:
eCornell
UMass Online
Penn State World Campus
These last two are degree-granting. So one thing people need is course credit - enrichment is not a sufficient motivator to make alumni sit and look at talking heads for more than a few minutes, despite their best intentions (and what they say when we survey them). But the easy funding is gone, and online ed is not a profit center.
Initial questions for online education:
- Should the content be just for alumni, or for the public?
- What format do people want? Streaming? Something that needs a browser plug-in? Text only? iTunesU?
- Where should one seek funding? Academic divisions? The provost? Deans? Outside the campus?
- Who should produce these? How to divide the labor?
- How will we recognize success? What should we measure? (Metrics again!)
Even if we have ready answers to these questions, none of this is part of an alumni relations strategy.
- We don't have overarching strategies for these technologies.
- We don't know who is using the material (if we don't require users to log in).
And therefore,
- We can't measure "progress against goals."
We could be enjoying great success right now and not even know it.
So it seems to me that the remaining big questions are the same as for most alumni relations programs, services or events:
- What do alumni need?
- What are our goals for these services?
- How do they fit into our overarching alumni relations strategies?
- What is the cycle for assessing our success?
Reed College's Mike Teskey said that this might be leading us to "bowling alone for alumni relations" ten years from now: if the internet encourages individual learners and not social learners, are we doing alumni a service by sending faculty on the road? Alumni will say "I can watch it online." At first glance, the experience of Fathom, ALLlearn and others (above) suggests they won't do that. Nonetheless Scott Vento pointed out that students are now coming to expect streaming course content on campus. And guess what - they're going to become alumni and will likely maintain the same expectation.
Idea: What if Minary participants practiced what we preached and worked together to package some of the conference's content and make it available (at a price) for non-attendees? Not all of it, and not too cheaply. But,
- We'd learn how to provide online education.
- We'd reach more people than we ever could (even at a beautiful facility like Stanford Sierra Camp).
- And we'd earn funds to support next year's meeting (perhaps keeping the price down and increasing attendance).
And finally, some more links:
Princeton
Yale
UC Berkeley
Article about additional institutions' online for-credit programs
Open Educational Resources from the Hewlett Foundation