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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Engineering schools wanting to teach entrepreneurship is a different trend. What’s driving that trend is that engineering students and engineering graduates are the best equipped to start companies – especially when it comes to the whole IT kind of entrepreneurship which is the most prevalent form of entrepreneurship all over the world right now. These are people who can actually build stuff. It’s a lot easier to bootstrap the business and get something off the ground and launched if you can build something yourself as opposed to having to hire people to do it, which requires capital.

Sher Downing: The other part of it is that digital business is now striding across so many different things. For people to try to determine what they’re going to be and what they’re going to do when they get out of engineering school, it’s very difficult because they have the opportunity to really touch a variety of areas in any kind of business. I think what we’re seeing is students who want >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You said you have students taking your program internationally. Can you talk a bit more about where and what are the trends on that front?

Sher Downing: We have two types of international students. One is those who are obviously living overseas. We also have students who travel quite a bit extensively for their work. For people who live and are based somewhere else, once we get connected with them or work out any issues in terms of where they’re located, they’re pretty much set to go throughout their program.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about examining and testing? Especially, where you’re running full-fledged online programs, how do you handle testing?

Sher Downing: We have actually been trying out a number of products in the last year and have purposely focused on avoiding issues of plagiarism and any type of cheating. We pride ourselves, on carrying the Carey name, on ethics. We teach ethics to all of our students, obviously. We work with companies that provide software that does make it very difficult, if not almost impossible, to cheat on an exam. We do look at what we have to use to ensure all of our student body is doing the right thing and that everyone is earning their grade and place based on their knowledge and effort.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch to a different topic. Our audience is entrepreneurs. Talk to me about what you are doing in the realm of entrepreneurship education – first at the undergraduate level and then at the graduate level.

Sher Downing: We currently have an undergraduate degree in Entrepreneurship and that includes coursework that allows them to work on tested ideas. We are in the process of rolling out our new Entrepreneurship Center. That will allow for more showcasing of those pieces. It also allows them to learn from each other.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 3)

Sher Downing: One of the things that we do is have all tenured full-time faculty teach our online classes. So you get the same award-winning faculty online that you would get if you came in to take a course. We have surveyed the students and monitored the course just to see what the students enjoy. Over the last two years, we’ve seen an increase in the use of mobile devices. People want the ability to access things easily through mobile devices. We have made an effort to offer online lectures that they can also download as an MP3 or MP4. What we have found from student feedback is that many times they listen to it on a first run while they’re commuting. Then, they go home and watch the video a second time -particularly if it’s a type of application that has to show them steps on how to do something.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When people are working on these online programs – specifically, we are interested in understanding your online offering – are they doing online only program or is everything an online/offline combination?

Sher Downing: Our online programs offer a real breadth of flexibility and ability to learn within a capsulated calendar. Students, at the graduate level, will take one course at a time. One course will be five weeks long. Within those five weeks, they do have certain deadlines each week that they have to meet for submitting case studies and working in a team environment. Within that, they have the flexibility of working on their materials as it fits into their lifestyle. For example, they may have a deadline on Friday. How they complete the coursework by Friday is truly up to them. If they want to work on it during the day, they can. >>>