Copyright 2012 Everspring Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Proprietary and Confidential

September 2012

Innovator Spotlight

League for Innovation in the Community College

Ken Udas

A Little Background

Commitment to Education

• Interprofessional Education• Service Integration

A Little Background

First, I was a teacher…

• University of Maryland, European Division• Comenius University• The International University of Vienna

A Little Background

…then I became an administrator

• Harcourt• Spotfire• USAID/Carana• Open Polytechnic• SUNY Learning Network• Penn State World Campus• UMassOnline• Everspring

A Little Background

…So, generally why would those organizations invest in online learning?

And why would these in particular?• Open Polytechnic of New Zealand• State University of New York• Everspring

… and what do I think that have I learned?

Kia ora

Never a Missed Opportunity

Online learning is an opportunity for all of us to rethink those things we have wanted to do in any event:

Deliver…

• high quality academic programming• high quality and relevant student services• high quality and relevant faculty development and support

With…

• excellent learner outcomes• active and proactive engagement with continuous improvement• and engagement with as many learners as possible…

Oh, and we really want to create access.

Experience

We want to create a great experience.

We can avoid this:

Good Practice

It’s about making decisions that lead to learner success.• Recruiting • “Onboarding”

– Admissions– Preparation– Advising and Ongoing Support– Registration

• Academic– Learning Design– Course Development– Instruction

• Analytics (data for decisions)• Course Assessment• Faculty Support (Development, Help Desk, Incentives)

Good Practice

Obviously, good online learning practice is an organizational commitment.

My best advice is to identify a quality metric and use it for

guidance.  My favorite is the eLearning Maturity Model (eMM), which will help build organizational

capacity to deliver results and improve practice.

This sounds hard! I can’t get any

commitments from my school. I would not

know where to start…

Basics of eMM

The eLearning Maturity Model is a way of engaging in continuous improvement.

Processes: What should a mature organization be doing?

Dimensions: How should the organization be doing them?

Assessment: How is the Organization doing them?

Interpretation: How do we know what needs work?

Process is Capacity

• Learning: Processes that directly impact on the pedagogy of online learning.

• Development: Processes surrounding the development and maintenance of online learning resources.

• Support: Processes surrounding the oversight and management of online learning.

• Evaluation: Processes surrounding the evaluation and quality control of online learning throughout its entire life cycle.

• Organization: Processes associated with institutional planning and management.

Some Processes are Better than Others

The Dimensions represent the level of capacity the organization has to manage the processes that provide deliverables.

We do Some Things Better than Others

We need to assess how well we are doing things. eMM uses color coding to represent the level of adequacy.

I see, so this must be evidence

based.

Understanding Leads to Improvement

When it all comes together, we can identify where our processes can be improved.

Learning Design

This is really basic…• Always let learners know what they are in for

(comprehensive and accurate syllabi)

• Always connect the dots (Learning Objectives – Content – Activities – Resources – Assessment).

• Make it easy for learners to know what they are going to learn, how they will learn it, and how you will know that they have learned it.

And really, there are a lot of ways to improve learning outcomes.

Improving Outcomes

All of these techniques can be done online:• Mastery Learning • Tutoring (there is nothing like one-on-one attention)• Prerequisite Review and Mastery • Student Peer Support Systems • Reading and Study Skills • Preorganizers / Advanced Organizers• Enhanced Cues, Participation & Reinforcement • Active / Engaged Learning• Social Presence • Ostranenie "defamiliaration"

That’s way too much.

Scale

Given that we know that education is not “one size fits all,” our systems need to Scale Up…

Scale

… and they need to effectively Scale Down.

Ok, where are we going to put

everybody? There is not enough parking.

Three Areas of Traditional Constraint

There are patterns…• Services: Services (academic and student) scale through the creation of

effective workflows, which is informed through accurate use of data.

• Learning Design & Course Development: Course design and development is an academic activity, but at scale tends to require non-academic support.

• Instruction: Instruction is scaled through a combination of increasing teaching capacity through volume (increasing resources for instructional staffing), effective use of technology, and intentional instructional design.

Three Common Approaches

There are three (more or less) common approaches to scaling:• Increase Instructional Staffing: Throwing more

resource at it (just keep on doing what you have always done, but do more of it).

• Master Courses: Design standard classes that can support multiple sections.

• Open Educational Resources (OER): Allows for independent study.

• Massive Openly Online Courses (MOOCs): These are large courses taught by a single professor (with perhaps some support) to tens of thousands of “students.”

Ok, so how do these

effectively scale?

There are a number of answers…

Thank You

Just keep it practical.

I am happy to chat – kudas@everspringpartners.com