Thought Leaders in Online Education: Becky Takeda-Tinker, President of Colorado State University Global Campus (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like one of the factors that you’re optimizing on is the cost of getting a degree. Is this an across-the-board trend that you’re observing in your peer group of institutions running online degree programs.

Becky Takeda-Tinker: No. As a public non-profit state university, our only mission is student success in the workplace through education, and we want to keep the cost low and be able to measure the return on investment. It is our philosophy that we provide the highest level of return for the students because that is our only mission. It is not profit. It is not size. It is not whatever else may drive other institutions.

Sramana Mitra: How do you view the whole trend or discussion going on in the world of higher education about the cost of college and even the relevancy of college? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Becky Takeda-Tinker, President of Colorado State University Global Campus (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What can you share about the demographics and psychographics of your student body? Who are these people?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: Interestingly, 40% are the first in their families to attend college. 27% are from underserved population – Latino, African-American, Asian, and Native American. 15% of our students are military affiliated. About 50% are male and 50% female.

Sramana Mitra: Is this because of how you market your program?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: Because we’re fully online, our program is asynchronous.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, that lines up well with the military story. I’ve heard that from many of the online education programs. Military is a very big segment. I’m trying to understand more about your students. One of the things about online education is that the people who do best in online education are the people who are self-motivated. I’m trying to correlate that with these first-time college goers. How is it that you have all these first-time college goers coming to you? >>>

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. >>>