alumni futures

Conference: Non-Profit Executive Managers & Educational Travel

[Updated January 12, 2008: I will not be attending the program after all due to a change in travel plans. But you should still plan to attend!]

It's now time for educational travel professionals to register for the 2008 Educational Travel Conference (Baltimore, Maryland, USA, February 4-7, 2008). I've mentioned it before, and this year the program is again very strong.

A special pre-conference Executive Manager Forum on Tuesday, February 5, 2008 will focus on "Enhancing the Success of Affinity Travel Programs." I'm involved as a panelist in a couple of sessions, but tThe range of expertise represented elsewhere on the program is what makes it a unique opportunity.

Carolyn Sheaff who shaped the famous UC Berkeley Bear Treks program is the organizer of the one-day Forum and has pulled together an all-star program, including

• Alicia Stevens (AMNH Expeditions),
• Joe Small (President of AHI International),
• Ralph Janis (formerly of Cornell's Adult University and lured out of retirement),
• Charlie Brannon (founder of Starquest),
• Peter Voll (Senior VP at High Country Passage),
• Clark Oldroyd (U. of Colorado Alumni Association), and
• Jim Sano (President of Geographic Expeditions)

All will all be on hand to share their knowledge and experience in a discussion setting. Also of special interest is the opportunity for executive managers to network with others at their level in the same small, focused setting.

To register visit the conference web page:

Educational Travel Conference 2008

There's also a special page with details about the program described above:

One Day Forums at ETC 2008.

See you there!

2007 Minary Slide Presentations Online

Several PowerPoint presentations from the recent Minary Conference on Alumni Education are available for download from the Princeton alumni web site (2007 conference chair Andrew Gossen is at Princeton).

The topics (and presenters) are:

Book Clubs, Podcasting, and More
Andrew Gossen, Princeton

Online Education v2.0 - Plenary Session
Andrew Gossen, Princeton
Scott Vento, University of California, Berkeley
Steve Victor, Yale

Thank you to Andrew for setting this up.

Note: These are slides only, not multimedia.

Minary Conference Recap II: Alumni Education Online

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

Minary Conference Recap I: Metrics & More

A few weeks ago I participated in the Minary Conference on Alumni Education. After attending every year from 1989 until 2004, I returned to find a much smaller group than I remembered from the 1990s, when 60 or more people attended every year. This year 25 participants attended, and I was worried that the interactions would be more spare and perhaps less valuable than those I remembered from past years.

I need not have worried. The smaller group created the one-on-one interactions that make the alumni education community tightly-knit and productive.

Below are some highlights. Anyone who was there and who wishes to add more info, or to correct anything I got wrong, please add a comment on the Alumni Futures web site.

• Monique E. Rocca, Assistant Professor of Wildland Fire Science at Colorado State University was the "faculty member in residence" and she gave great classroom and on-site education about the science and policy around wildfires in North America. Unfortunately, in the last ten days her insights became very relevant to those of us living in Southern California. You never can tell when something academic will suddenly become personal.

• Professor Rocca described in a couple of sentences her "broad research goals." Academics can do this. It's the academic version of the entrepreneur's "elevator pitch." I think that alumni executives should develop and practice a couple of sentences that summarize our broad goals as professionals.

This ties in a little with our standard struggle to answer the question, "And what do you do?":

• I'm a fundraiser.
• I'm an educator.
• I run a non-profit.
• I'm a higher ed administrator.

All of them may be true; not one of them tells the whole story.

• Metrics were the focus of a plenary session plus a couple of breakouts. Conference chair Andrew Gossen of Princeton cut straight to the heart of the risks of applying quantitative methods to alumni relations. He pointed out that when we measure, we give the impression we can accurately gauge much - or even most - of what we do. This, said Andrew, is often "a veneer of measurement" that can be misleading, or that at best will be misinterpreted.

And yet universities try to act more like private sector businesses every day and this is one driver of the search for measurement: "the new vice president wants numbers." But, as Andrew suggests, "Metrics are only valuable to the extent they help us do our jobs better."

There's a chicken-egg relationship here, as MIT's Melissa Gresh pointed out. "Your programs will give you an idea of what you need to measure, and your measurements will in turn give you some ideas about how to run your programs."

I'll finish off this recap with a second posting on Monday.

One Day U Gets Copied: Back to College for a Day

In February and March I wrote about One Day University, a program designed to put the general public in touch with faculty from prominent institutions. A non-credit adult education program, One Day U now has competition: Back to College for a Day.

A local colleague shared some information with me about the program, which is based for now on the West Side of Los Angeles. Every program features lectures by professors from area schools and the program kicks off on October 27, 2007.

Interestingly, College for the Day first recruited speakers from a private college and then offered the alumni office there 10% of revenues from the session. The alumni association is a potentially powerful marketing partner:

• It represents the lecturer's institutional brand, and
• Has direct access to almost all the school's alumni.

Is 10% a fair number to begin a discussion like this? Should Back to College for a Day have talked to the alumni office first, and then recruited the speaker? Or does the company owe the college the courtesy of any contact at all?

The topic of faculty making public presentations for for-profit "back to school" packagers came up a few times at the Minary Conference on Alumni Education earlier this month. I'll post some additional thoughts as a follow up to Minary in the coming days.

Ralph Janis Retires From Cornell's Adult University

After 24 years Ralph Janis is leaving his position as director of Cornell University's Adult University program. By his own count Ralph has experienced something like 480 educational travel programs and worked with about 15,000 passengers over the years. I want to congratulate Ralph on a well-earned retirement. I even look forward to his book about "the Protestants of Brooklyn" (which I assume will be about angry fans left behind by the Dodgers' move to Los Angeles).

Over the years Ralph (who is a Cornell alumnus and who also has a Ph.D. from Michigan) has been involved not only in educational travel but also on-campus learning experiences and even online educational forays. His volunteer leadership has helped the Educational Travel Conference in many ways for many years. But the way that I know Ralph best is from his commitment to the Minary Conference on Alumni Education.

When I first attended Minary in 1989 I was part of a young and confused group of assistant directors who wanted to talk about the logistics and day-to-day tactics of alumni education programs. How do you find a venue? What about recruiting volunteers? Should we do dinners or receptions? Do faculty expect honoraria? How much should we charge alumni?

Ralph, as one of the more experienced and thoughtful members of the Minary group, helped lend to the sessions an insightful, philosophical and strategic tone. He always knew when to step back and remind the eager newcomers that it's not enough to just show up at work and follow orders, recruiting faculty speakers and arranging travel programs because our bosses told us to. He convinced many of us to come to our own conclusions about the justification, rationale, role and value of alumni educational programs. And he helped us draw those conclusions in dozens of discussions over (for me) parts of three decades.

What I have appreciated the most about Ralph, though, is his sense of humor. I have never completely recovered from the pulled muscle I experienced while laughing too hard as Ralph recounted the story of the bowling ball bag and the family silverware. For that one, you definitely "had to be there."

I hope I speak for the innumerable colleagues and friends Ralph has helped over the years when I say congratulations and good luck Ralph.

Now when is that book coming out?

Update: iTunes U Not Just for Stanford Anymore

Earlier, I wrote about Stanford's innovative use of Apple's iTunes platform for distributing campus content - lectures, seminars, and so on. Today we are hearing a couple of more newsworthy items related to iTunes.

Most people are focused on the first announcement, that Apple has begun loosening the restrictive Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls that have - among other things - limited iTunes music from playing on non-iPod devices. I'm more interested in the second announcement.

This is the announcement of iTunes U as a free service available to colleges and universities for distributing content from their own campuses. Using the slogan, "the campus that never sleeps," Apple explains the nationwide roll-out this way:

Already, more than half of the nation’s top 500 schools use it to distribute their digital content to students — or to the world. Any school can open all or part of its site to the public, from alumni to parents to anyone with a love of learning.

The iTunes Music Store online has a section filled with free content such as classroom lectures, lab session demos, athletic broadcast highlights and even campus tours - from not only Stanford, but UC Berkeley, MIT, Duke, Otis College of Art & Design, Arizona State, Michigan Tech and many others. Schools using iTunes U agree to broadcast educational content through the iTunes Store, and it's a win-win-win situation:

• Schools get visibility for research, teaching, athletics, and more.
• Apple gets more customers in the iTunes store.
• We get access to cool content.

We'll see if schools involved are willing and able to update the content continuously or if some of them let their initial uploads become stale. Apple's marketing rhetoric is, as always, hyperbolic - but don't sell this development short. It will have measurable implications for the way alumni and friends interact with our campuses. We should be planning to use it to our advantage and to market our campuses' content to alumni and friends.

Links:
Apple's iTunes U information for administrators

Apple's Higher Education Homepage

The story as floated by ZDNet's Technology Management in Education blog

Multi-School Alumni Travel Partnerships

Over on the Minary-L email discussion group, people were talking again (as they do) about alumni travel programs. The question was about formal partnerships among alumni travel programs - how should they be structured, what are the pitfalls, and are there lessons to be learned?

University of Rochester's Kevin Wesley had some good common sense observations about forming alumni travel partnerships with other institutions. In a prior job at another institution, Kevin had formed partnerships with some nearby schools. "This was a natural fit for several reasons," he says:

None of our populations had a large enough base to easily fill trips alone, all these schools had both geographic and academic "proximity," and our alumni had an implied connection to each other because of the history of interaction among the schools.

Kevin mentions some of the challenges the schools faced when partnering:

• Balance: "The same school generally had the most travelers. Often the other schools’ groups felt lost, especially if they only had a handful of passengers."
• Faculty selection: "We negotiated who sent faculty members on each trip. We initially toyed with a "two profs per trip" model, which worked for awhile but presented logistical problems."
• Faculty ratio: "Sometimes a school committed to sending a faculty member, only to have few to no passengers. Awkward all around."
• Amenities: "One of the partner schools was much better than I was about bon voyage items, sending banners on trips, arranging for group photos, and other important stewardship activities. This can cause disparities if one school doesn't seem as organized or prepared."

Worth noting: an additional school was added to the group, but was not a geographic partner, raising still more challenges. But it sounds like things have smoothed out over time and overall the system works.

Here's an observation based on my own experience. At schools with a low "rah rah" factor while traveling (we know who we are), alumni shops can strengthen the group's apparent affinity by partnering with museums, natural history groups, conservation orgs and other institutions where membership is open to the general public. This creates a more exclusive bond among the alumni who become the only ones with a true affinity group identity.

Other questions remain...Are there other ways to handle these issues? What are the other pros and cons of partnering with other institutions? Should it all be done informally, or is it better to have explicit or written agreements? Any major successes or true horror stories?

Finally, other than existing communities of practice, the best clearinghouse for finding partner organizations is probably the annual Educational Travel Conference.

Photo above: Caltech alumni meet the president of Iceland, 2006

Minary: The Alumni Education Conference

[Updated March 6, 2008 with dates for 2008 conference.]

NOTE: The 2008 conference will take place October 5-8, 2008.

Back in February I talked about the Educational Travel Conference. For alumni staff working on travel programs, it's a good way to get exposure to tour operators and destinations while networking with other travel planners.

But if you have a broader charge and need to produce on-campus education events, regional seminars or faculty talks, an Alumni College, or even online educational programs, you need to attend the Minary Conference on Alumni Education. I attended the conference every year from 1989 until 2004, and had the opportunity to serve as conference chair as well. I could go on and on about:

• the close-knit peer network
• the relevance of the agenda
• the beautiful location

but instead of listening to me, take a look at the Minary Conference web site and even if you can't attend this year, consider joining the Minary listserv, an email discussion group for alumni education topics (including educational travel).

Princeton's Andrew Gossen heads up this year's program. Andrew is an insightful thinker on these topics and in his message on the Minary web site he says

...that’s really the great thing about Minary – you’re not just attending a conference; you’re becoming part of a community of professionals who, collectively, can help you address almost any challenge that you’re likely to face in alumni education.

And in case you're wondering, it's pronounced: min-AIR-y.

See you there.

photo credit: Stanford Sierra Camp

Stanford's iTunes U Partnership

Late in April, Stanford reminded its alumni about the school's iTunes content, telling them, "we've just added lots of new tracks - including faculty lectures, interviews, events, sports and music." The message continued:

Here are just some of the topics you can tune into on Stanford on iTunes U:

    * Is Global Warming Real?
    * The United States and Asia: Risks and Opportunities
    * 21st Century Medical Advances
    * Charter Schools

You'll also find complete University courses and more content being added each week. Looking for a specific topic? All content is now searchable by keyword...

And iTunes U isn't just for Stanford alumni. Anyone can download tracks to a computer or mp3 player (like an iPod) and use iTunes to listen.

Stanford's Director of Alumni Programs, Cindy Pearson, gave her MINARY-L colleagues more info:

Though it's been "live" since October 2005, this is our first big marketing push to alumni. It is a public site, so anyone can access it, and we have been averaging over 15,000 downloads a week.

So far, though, Stanford can't track what fraction of users are alumni.

Meanwhile, Stanford has structured the site to give departments and schools a "home" for their content.  "So far," says Cindy, "the alumni response has been very positive." The partnership is a good example of entrepreneurial spirit combined with a societal trend. Alumni doing something anyway? Figure out a way your organization can participate in a way that makes sense to everyone. Putting academic content into the iTunes pipeline puts Stanford's unique content in the hands of alumni - and the public at large. 

Rewind: Forbes Magazine covered Stanford's iTunes move back in January of 2006.

Click images for larger screenshots of the main Stanford page in iTunes (top) and the Alumni Association's content (bottom).