Monday, April 17, 2017

Thinking Small About Online Learning -Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

Online programs can be a vehicle to highlight differentiation. What school, department, program, or area of research does your school do better than anybody else?What degree programs are you most proud? What areas of teaching and knowledge creation have you build a critical mass of faculty? Building online programs around your strengths is a way not to compete with the Liberty’s, WGU’s, and SNHU’s of the world. My advice is that you don’t want to compete with these schools anyway. They have figured out the efficiencies around scale. Competing against the recruitment and student services and course development and instructional engines that they have built is a losing proposition. So do something different. The economics of online education mean that it is possible to build a very small program that is financially sustainable. If the focus is institutional differentiation and program quality - economic sustainability should be enough. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/thinking-small-about-online-learning