Thought Leaders in Online Education: Becky Takeda-Tinker, President of Colorado State University Global Campus (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to ask you some questions. Help me understand what is the size of the student body and how that splits into different areas that you’re talking about. You talked about seven areas of IT certification. It sounds like they’re well-tuned to job prospects. How big is that in your student body?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: Going back to your first question on how big the student body is, we opened our doors to about 200 students in September 2008. We now have 17,200 students, and we’ve graduated over 8,500 to date. We offer courses every single month and they’re 8-week terms. We keep data on everything because we’re online. At the Bachelor’s level, we have 1,538 and 200 at the Master’s level for the IT program. All of our programs are geared towards workplace success. We are actually looking at employment data in the longitudinal and also current status to understand what, in fact, we need to train our students. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Becky Takeda-Tinker, President of Colorado State University Global Campus (Part 1)

This discussion is about CSU’s online program that caters to 17,000 students. Many online higher education trends are discussed at length.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as your activities at Colorado State.

Becky Takeda-Tinker: I’m the President of Colorado State University Global Campus. We are the nation’s only 100% online fully-accredited state institution. We serve non-traditional students between the ages of 18 to 65. Our average student is 35 years old. Our mission is very unique in that it is driven for workplace success in a global marketplace through education.

We are always looking to address what will prepare our students for workplace success in a global market. We have a very different approach in how we look at >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Those are very different level questions. One question is about personalized learning. What you’re saying is that different types of personalization  are necessary in this process. You’re saying that that is going to be a longer process just because the levels of personalization and the variations are a lot more complicated than just having to cover the most common cases.

The other question of what does a mid-21st century citizen need in terms of education, that’s a much bigger philosophical question.

Rob Waldron: The reason that it feels like it won’t end is there will be societal expectations on our schools for certain ages. Once we figure out what those expectations are and if we agree about them, we’re going to have to provide tools and materials in order to drive learning for children. I think those things will always be moving. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Explain to me what you organization looks like to be able to do something like this. This is not something you can do with technology. You’re going to have to analyze everything. Perhaps you can analyze and pinpoint to some extent using technology, but somebody has to go through it manually and look at the content, and figure out what to change.

Rob Waldron: It takes hundreds of people if you’re going to do it on our scale. We have, what would look like, a normal agile development process with developers and QA. We have an operations group to make sure that the system is humming all the time. The school bandwidth is quite low so we have to do a lot of heavy lifting on our end.

We have a whole product group. In many tech companies, product groups would be smaller than in our industry because we have to have people who are writing items. Those items have to be >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I understand. One of my objectives in this interview is to find gaps in the ecosystem.

Rob Waldron: That’s a gap, right?

Sramana Mitra: Yes. Let’s switch gears and talk about the instruction. What has been the evolution? Where are we coming from? Obviously, we’re coming from textbooks and prints. Within that text space, what has been the evolution? What are the key moves and drivers?

Rob Waldron: There was a lot of junk out there in the beginning. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the old model, there was an annual testing procedure. There was a lot of lag and delay as you’re pointing out. With the introduction of technology, is there ongoing testing? Is the annual state-level testing all online?

Rob Waldron: In a few places, it’s online. Mostly still, it is in print. Schools have moved online during the year for the benchmark to predict the test. It’s in flux right now. The adaptivity is much more efficient on that side. I gave you that example before on the area of circle where I’m capturing four or five pieces of data on an item instead of one. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: From everything that I have read about Khan Academy, they are also doing a lot of test analysis and skill gap analysis. What is your analysis of their work?

Rob Waldron: I don’t analyze their work. I see it out there and my kids use it sometimes. It’s been a remarkable asset for the world to have access to that content. I don’t spend all my time analyzing the competition. What we are doing is working with educators every day. We have a long list of things that they want and we just keep making that better and better. I don’t really worry about what everyone else does. I am super focused on what the teachers and administrators want. My understanding is that they don’t think there’s anything close. Again, we don’t have time to go look at each competitor. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 1)

Rob and I discuss the evolution of personalized learning, skill gap analysis, curriculum design, and much more in this excellent interview.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Curriculum Associates.

Rob Waldron: I’m the CEO of Curriculum Associates. We’re a K-12 ed tech company. We’ve actually been in business for a long time. We became a tech company five or six years ago but we continue to have a healthy print business as well. The pencil and paper still works in education, but increasingly a majority of our business comes from technology. >>>