This article is part of a series on the financial challenges facing colleges amid the coronavirus pandemic. Please join a virtual forum on Thursday, May 28, at 2 p.m., EST, to hear from experts about how to prepare an online-education strategy for your institution. The forum will be hosted by Scott Carlson, senior writer at The Chronicle, and Paul Friga, an associate professor of entrepreneurship.
University leaders are knee-deep in scenario planning, budgeting, and cost savings at a pace never experienced in our history, which is not surprising given potential revenue losses of 25 percent or more next year, and even the year after. We survived the spring by moving our classes online in a manner that no one could imagine was possible. I am worried, though, that many colleges will not survive the fall without focusing on one of the most important issues from a student perspective — quality virtual education. Students are demanding something different than “remote instruction,” and we need to make major changes for them. The clock is not on our side.
Higher ed has generally been slow to move to online education. Before the spring move to “Zoom U.,” only 17 percent of students were engaged in online learning. Now it is nearly 100 percent. Students have clearly communicated that the quality and experience of this form of virtual education is not what they signed up for, as evidenced by lawsuits demanding tuition refunds and anticipated drops of enrollment for the next academic year. How are universities responding now?
We have an incredible opportunity for collaboration but also a very short window of time to pull this off, and it will require unprecedented national effort.
Most leaders are doing everything possible to facilitate a return to on-campus instruction for the fall, an admirable but incomplete strategy. Behind the scenes, some colleges are preparing additional online material and new technologies, but a dramatic shift in urgency is needed. Every university should be preparing, right now, for a complete online delivery model for the fall. I am certainly not wishing this outcome, but it is a distinct possibility, and if we don’t prepare for it, we will have complete chaos and we will let our students down. We only have two months to make another amazing shift in our higher-education delivery model, and we can only accomplish this if we work together — on our individual campuses, at the system level, and with national coordination and support.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
The starting point is your own campus. The dexterity by which colleges shifted online for spring and summer programs has been amazing. The general model for the spring was remote instruction, where the faculty delivered its traditional content but did so via the internet. The primary goal was to complete the semester’s classes while keeping students safe from the risks associated with Covid-19. For many institutions, this was also the approach for summer classes.
While students have cooperated with this transition, it is becoming increasingly clear that they will not be satisfied with this model for the long term or even just the fall. In fact, 16 percent have said that such a situation would lead them to defer for a semester or even the year, according to a survey by Art & Science Group. Why? In addition to the obvious on-campus benefits of personal networking, social interactions, and the entire community experience, students justifiably say that the quality of the online classroom experience is not equal. They believe virtual instruction lacks careful design, interactions, feedback, faculty comfortable with the technology, and adequate challenges and expectations (yes, even students want those). Other factors are the challenging IT infrastructure at some universities and the lack of access to technology among low-income students. And many of the one million international students find time-zone issues problematic, as well as the regulations that limit earning academic credit while abroad.
With the shift to online, there may be a disconnect between students and university leaders, with 82 percent of presidents believing that the transition went “well” or “very well.” Around the country, students at dozens of colleges, including Columbia, Drexel, Northwestern, and Temple Universities, and the Universities of California and of Florida, are seeking refunds for inadequate educational offerings in the spring. The fall could be worse, without drastic improvements. As one student recently put it, “If it’s going to be online at the same tuition price, then I’ll just wait for the spring semester.”
Universities hope to avoid a repeat of the spring/summer remote instruction, given signs that students will react with lower enrollments and demands for lower tuition. That is why so many colleges are publicly planning a return of students to campus come August — up to 68 percent according to a Chronicle survey of colleges’ plans for the fall and of chief financial officers by ABC Insights. Others call that approach short-sighted given the health risk to students, employees, and their families. Regardless of your stated position or baseline projection, you should plan, immediately and aggressively, for 100-percent online education as your starting point. Only then can you be as prepared as possible for that outcome and avoid the chaos that may ensue if you wait until late in the summer to develop and execute a strategy for the fall.
High-quality online education involves much more than just academic content. A well-designed online course can take up to a semester and up to $1 million to properly design, film, build in interactive opportunities, and create feedback mechanisms and marketing efforts. Now that we appreciate the tough situation that university leaders are in, let’s discuss ways to work through this crisis.
The first step is to prepare. Raise the importance of quality online instruction to the top of the campus priority list. Yes, operational teams need to continue their work on what it would take to safely return students to campus, but just as importantly, online-instruction teams should be prepared for what happens if the virus resurges, we have vast outbreaks on campus, or local governments intervene with stay-at-home regulations.
To properly establish the urgency of this effort, the president should publicly announce that the college will use this opportunity to increase the quantity and improve the quality of its online educational offerings. This will be an all-hands-on-deck effort, and it will be backed with resources and led by the provost. A special team will be organized that includes faculty, deans, key administrators, and students. This is not a signal to the public that the college expects all classes to be online in the fall, just a recognition that should anything unanticipated happen, the campus will be ready.
The bolder universities will follow the lead of the California State University system and several other universities that have made a firm decision to cancel in-person classes for the fall so that they can focus on improving the quality of the online educational experience for the students. In early May, Simmons University, realizing how difficult it would be to open in downtown Boston, announced plans to use the summer to completely revamp its fall classes to online, for both new and returning students.
In Canada, we are seeing openness from top universities to shift strategy earlier and publicly announce plans. At Dalhousie University, in Halifax, leaders announced that nearly all classes will be online for the fall, and that the university is investing more than $1 million on “technology development, additional online instruction training, and increased online support for students” for a higher quality experience. McGill and Concordia, two of the largest and best-known universities, announced similar plans, affecting more than 85,000 students.
Whether you announce your plans publicly or internally, the effort needs to start immediately and be laser focused. You essentially have two months to prepare what could be thousands of courses for tens of thousands of students. Before exploring the steps to prepare your courses, your team will want to tackle step two, make priorities.
Each university must do a realistic assessment of its fall offerings and its capability to develop high-quality online modalities for each one. To assess classes, the starting point will be to gather data on the number of enrolled students, available faculty members, strategic importance to academic areas, fit with online format, and degree to which an online format has already been developed on this campus. Adjust the weighting of the factors as you see fit, but start with the assumption that you are likely to be able to convert only a fraction of those courses to a high-quality online offering for the fall. There will be additional strategies for securing quality content beyond your campus, but the baseline is this assessment, perhaps best shown on a scale of one to 10 for each of the factors described above.
The final, and hardest step, is to form partnerships. This may be a time to recognize that it is better to ask for help than try to do everything on your own. In fact, some would say that the autonomous approach to building independent course content and supporting methodologies such as cases, exercises, and assessments, even within one college, is what has led to such high costs in higher education. At least for the short-term, focus on the mission to develop high-quality online content for students and set a clear vision statement for the future, including longer-term goals for high-quality online courses and levels of student satisfaction.
As shown below, several options are available for rapidly developing online content for the fall, and all involve partnership in one way or another. Note that they are not the only options, nor are they mutually exclusive, as you may want to pursue several at once.
Let’s start with Option A, creating courses on your own. While most attractive to faculty, this is the least likely option, given the short time frame to complete everything from instructional design to filming to creation of interactive exercises and assessment tools. Over the longer term, this is a viable option, and all colleges should build at least some capabilities in this area, and many already have. The key questions are, what is the capacity to create new courses, and how can they scale in a short period of time? The advantage of the faculty-created-courses approach is that it draws on the university’s investment in local faculty members, but it is more expensive, requires upfront capital, and is not flexible once programs are built out. At a minimum, such an effort is likely to go well beyond individual faculty members or even departments to the school and university level.
Option B is to work with an online program manager such as 2U or Noodle Partners. I have researched these in my previous role as special adviser to the provost for online education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and realize that there are many and that they do add value to higher education. Essentially, OPMs have become a cottage industry helping colleges assess student markets, design programs, film content, and provide project management for the delivery of online programs. The services and financial arrangements have changed over time, but in my calculations, they typically charge 20-percent more than the costs you would incur if you did the work yourself. In return, they often offer upfront capital, move faster through experienced project management, and get results in terms of student enrollments. Their revenue sharing arrangements — up to 70 percent of tuition revenues — often draw criticisms, but they do provide needed services in return, and lately a gradual shift to more fee-for-service arrangements has emerged. The chart below summarizes the OPM market, should you be interested in pursuing this route.
The Market Landscape for Online-Program Management
TUITION REVENUE SHARE
HYBRID AND FEE-FOR-SERVICE
Option C, cross-campus collaboration, should be a strategy for every campus, but it requires breaking down silos among units. For example, ABC Insights tracks educational technologies as an administrative cost, finding that centralized ed-tech activities often coexist with decentralized efforts. Chief financial officers have told us that there is often confusion and redundancy between online efforts on a campus. At UNC Chapel Hill, we have a centralized unit, the Carolina Office for Online Learning, but major campus units, such as the schools of business and pharmacy, have their own capabilities as well. In addition, our business school, school of government, and school of public health have all built graduate programs with 2U, one of the largest OPMs.
The sharing of existing courses often involves transferring courses from one program to another, most likely within one school. For example, at Chapel Hill, we have a fully built-out online M.B.A. program that has historically not shared its courses with the full-time residential program, but that is changing. Additionally, students from the online program are eligible to take some full-time M.B.A. courses, such as the class where students work on projects for corporate partners as a group — even virtually.
Option C can be extremely helpful for assisting with Option A as well, especially when it comes to sharing learning objectives, technologies, capabilities, and best practices across a campus. For example, in the spring, UNC was able to leverage the online-learning office’s resources and other units to help those units with little experience in online-course creation or management. “Our campus really came together,” says Todd Nicolet, vice provost for digital and lifelong learning. “We built a Keep-Teaching Website of resources for everyone, leveraging existing capabilities to share, and helped each other quite a bit. We also enlisted student workers to join our instructional designers and faculty coaches to enable high-quality conversion to online efforts in the spring and summer.”
Faculty who taught in our program are welcome to use the captured content in any of their courses.
The same situation was seen at Harvard and Purdue, top universities with relatively autonomous online educational programs, Harvard Extension and Purdue University Global, respectively. Harvard Extension is officially separate from Harvard College, offering its own degree online, with a focus on adult students. But it resides at Harvard, utilizes Harvard faculty (in addition to those at other universities), and it even offers a graduation ceremony on campus.
Henry Leitner, the interim dean of the Harvard Extension School, describes how his unit works to help the main campus in addition to attending to its growing number of students in online programs. “Faculty who taught in our program are welcome to use the captured content in any of their courses,” he says. “We also developed some certificate programs and courses with the Kennedy School of Government; Divinity School; and HMX, the online program from Harvard Medical School. In addition, we are able to leverage our classroom technologies and cloud-based lecture capture for many faculty across campus.”
At Purdue, the online arm focused on nontraditional students isPurdue University Global, and is the result of the purchase of Kaplan University, one of the country’s larger online players. Similar to Harvard in that it is run independently, Purdue University Global has also been working to assist the main campus in the switch to online instruction. “We have 65 instructional designers, over 1,000 online courses in our catalog, and significant experience in creating tailored content and assessments that get results,” explains Frank Dooley, Purdue Global’s new chancellor. “Main campus also has great online course-creation competencies, and we are exploring how we may work together even more, given the possible demand for growth in online courses for residential students. Note that they are a very different student population and require unique methodologies but some content and technologies can be shared.”
Option D, cross-system sharing, is common at Chapel Hill, and while the system campuses already collaborate on online education, there is an opportunity to do even more. Systems represent an existing group of universities that are connected in their service to the state and often are part of a general governance and budgeting model that should immediately afford opportunities for the sharing of resources. All 16 campuses in the system award credit for online courses taken at another institution. They even share a service, UNC TV, which has instructional designers and course creators as well as great filming capabilities. All universities within a system should be sharing content and capabilities at this very moment.
Other systems are following suit. California’s two main university systems are planning for predominantly online courses in the fall and will be marshaling resources to share content among universities. They have also been developing online courses for a number of years, which make this change somewhat easier.
At the University of Florida, a leader in online education, especially at the undergraduate level, Evangeline Cummings says she has seen an increase in interest and collaboration as a result of the crisis. “I chair a systemwide task force related to online STEM classes, and we are increasing efforts to share best practices, setting up Google docs for cross-university collaboration, and considering even more ways to transfer content and capabilities across the system,” says Cummings, assistant provost and director of UF Online.
Option E, cross-university sharing, may be one of the most challenging approaches but potentially the most rewarding, especially for universities without a history in online learning. Bill Gates and others have long been proponents of the concept of master teachers eventually decreasing the need for individualized campuses, departments, or even individual courses. Theoretically, this concept is appealing in that we do not need to invest over and over in the local creation of content when great content may be applicable at the same kind of course at a different university.
The problem is that universities are resistant to this model, as they have individual brands and claim that much of the content is varied across institutions. While probably true in some subjects and particularly in electives, general education is more likely transferable across universities. Why would a biology faculty member need to start an introduction to biology course from scratch, when she could leverage Eric Lander’sone to the course itself? I did:/hl***good, thanks lm Massachusetts Institute of Technology course, free, with more than 134,000 students? Could this crisis change things, at least for the short term? I hope so.
The bottom line is that while top colleges with stable student demand, financial support, large endowments, and established brands will certainly survive this crisis, albeit with belt-tightening, many will not be so lucky. Imagine that you are a small private or public institution staring at a 20- to 40-percent loss in revenue, with very few quality online courses and few or no residential students in the fall. What now? We have an incredible opportunity for collaboration but also a very short window of time to pull this off, and it will require unprecedented national effort. Perhaps the story could unfold like this:
We select one organizing association, such as the American Council on Education, to coordinate the effort and assist in branding and quality control. We work with a major consulting firm for project management and an educational-technology firm to handle the platform and user interface. We create a national repository of courses from any and all universities, publishers, and faculty members with good online content. Universities and faculty members access the database, download and try content, and then use what they want for their courses, playing an important role in the delivery of content, class experiences, assessment, and feedback to ensure engagement and completion. We work out simple pricing based upon unit or student enrollments, and we maintain constant evaluation and feedback processes for all potential users to see.
Funding could come from the government or more likely philanthropic sources such as the Bill & Melinda Gates or Lumina Foundations, and the federal government could assist with flexibility in regulations, accreditation, and transfer requirements. If the government were involved, it would need to operate as an independent support structure, rather than appearing to mandate or endorse certain content or universities over others.
John Katzman, a long-time entrepreneur and higher-ed expert, believes the idea has merit but will require a major funder to get it off the ground. “The goal should be to create something that helps in the short term but also leads to positives for higher ed in the long term,” he says. “In particular, the goal should be to enable faculty to be more successful at what they do, not to replace them. By sharing all kinds of learning technologies, objects, simulations, they can be more productive and increase capacity and quality.”
We will also want to establish metrics of success, such as the number of students enrolled, costs saved, and the quality of courses shared. All of that should contribute to improvement in higher ed over the long haul, and we should be held accountable for any governmental or philanthropic funding to our industry. There must be quantifiable returns on investment, for academic institutions as well as society, as described in a potential plan for government investment in higher ed.
Online education could be the most important key to setting up higher ed for success in the short and long term. It has the potential to bring us closer to students and to meet them where they are, in terms of flexibility in classes and format of delivery. It can lower the overall costs by leveraging existing content and focusing on new ways to utilize faculty members and improve educational quality at the same time.
Michael Crow shared his road map with me: “We need to rethink how we do everything changing admissions to be more about inclusion rather than exclusion, improving delivery to seamlessly integrate online instruction even in residential programs as a hybrid model, implementing new technologies such as predictive analytics for student success, and actively engaging our communities. Only then can we truly solve global problems and elevate higher education and achieve our potential.”
Time is of the essence. Let’s do this, together.
