Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sean Brown, SVP of Education, Sonic Foundry (Part 2)

Sean Brown: But they didn’t expect them to go chop down the trees to make the paper. There was an industry and process in which they could participate in ways that were natural to their teaching and natural to their research. I’m saying that from the Internet explosion, there was a period of time where it was just your individual responsibility to get yourself online. The demand of students in this YouTube generation – to this on-demand generation – to be able to see things in a video format asynchronously is such that the institutions are starting to step up and say that the ability to turn your teaching performance into a digital, distributable, durable, and portable document is a shared responsibility and so we’re going to wire the room for video and audio.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sean Brown, SVP of Education, Sonic Foundry (Part 1)

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Video of the classroom is a trend. How is it playing out?

Sramana Mitra: Sean, let’s start with a bit of context. Tell us a bit about yourself as well as Sonic Foundry.

Sean Brown: I’m the Senior Vice President of Sonic Foundry. I’ve worked for Apple, IBM, and Oracle over the last 20 years. I came to Sonic Foundry about 13 years ago to help roll out our flagship product called Mediasite, which is a system which when introduced, started a new trend in converting your average classroom into an online video studio. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 6)

Ray Martinez: The trend that we certainly want to see in higher education is the growth of options that will allow particularly non-traditional students in that category between 25 and 64 who are looking to go back to college and complete a degree to advance their careers further. That is a trend that we’ve probably not seen prominently enough but it’s one that I’d certainly want to see more prominently.

We have traditional universities and online universities that are emulating competency-based education which we’ve been doing for 16 years now. That’s a trend that we’ll begin to see more prominently because the vast majority of our students now in post-secondary degree programs is your non-traditional students. It is not your 18 to 22 year old. It is, increasingly, your adult learner that falls into that age category.

Sramana Mitra: This brings us to the question of price of higher education. How do you price? What does it cost to be a student in your program? How do you feel about the whole rising cost of higher education?

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You have two kinds of mentors – student and course mentors. Then, the curriculum material is coming from third party?

Ray Martinez: Typically, that is the case for most of our degree programs.

Sramana Mitra: What about completion rates? When we talk about MOOCs – self-managed online learning – there’s a distinct problem with people abandoning the course after a while. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 4)

Ray Martinez: The second part of our faculty is what we call the course mentor. The course mentor is typically your subject matter expert. If I’m signed up in the College of Business for WGU Texas and I’m taking an Accounting 101 course, and if I stumble along the way in trying to learn the material to complete one of my courses, what I would do is not call on my student mentor because my student mentor may not know how to explain about doing a particular spreadsheet that I need to learn. I would call my course mentor who would actually be able to help me with that. The course mentor would give one-on-one instruction via email or Skype.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You have the national number and you have all these WGU state chapters?

Ray Martinez: Exactly, we have our state-branded universities but they’re all a part of the national university, which again is Western Governors University. Here in Texas, our student population is close to 5,000. Majority of our students are enrolled in our undergraduate degree programs. However, slightly more than a third of our students are enrolled in various master’s degree programs that we offer in one of those four colleges that I talked about earlier.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little more about WGU.

Ray Martinez: WGU was founded 16 years ago by a group of governors who were representing western states. This is back in 1996 – a little more than 16 years ago. In 1996 at a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association, the idea of using technology to help expand the capacity of adult learners to have access to higher education was discussed amongst a group of about 14 to 15 governors. These governors were at that time the Chief Executive of their respective states and in a position to really do something about that.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 1)

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Adult education is becoming more of an issue. Competency-based learning that ties into employment directly is necessary to mitigate the unemployment problems in America and elsewhere. WGU has an interesting model.

Sramana Mitra: Ray, let’s start by giving our audience a little bit of background about you as well as your institution.

Ray Martinez: My name is Ray Martinez. I’m the Chancellor of Western Governors University (WGU) Texas. We go by WGU Texas. I have worked primarily in higher education policy over the last seven years. I’ve worked in various aspects of public policy either at the federal or state level for most of my career over the last 25 years or so. >>>