What end of the online learning pool are you in?

As more and more institutions continue to dip their toes in the pool of online education, it's becoming more and more apparent that organizations don't know if they're entering in the shallow end or deep end. "Unless you know where the deep end is and where the shallow end is, only two things are going to happen to you if you jump in," said Dr. Ken Hartman, senior fellow and principal analyst at Eduventures. "Either you're going to drown or you're going to break your neck." In order to remain successful in the future, online learning programs need to start asking themselves the big questions: Do you want to be a regional player or national player? What types of students are you trying to attract? What types of degrees do you want to offer?

To learn about the major points of disruption and blind spots in online higher education, check out our video interview with Dr. Hartman, former president of Drexel University Online, or check out the text version of the Q&A below.

asYou'll be giving a talk titled "The New Higher Education Highway." Can you talk about what you mean by that term, and specifically the role you see online education having in the future of higher education?

I don't think it comes as any surprise to anybody that higher education has changed quite a bit, certainly in the last 25 years, but really in the last two or three years. I've been in this business for over 30 years, and I've never seen so much internal as well as external pressure to change. Some institutions have jumped on board that, other I think, by the title of my session—the highway—are coming to a point in time where the bridge may be out up ahead and there are going to be very few exit ramps afforded to them. The secret, and what we'll be talking about, is how to take exit number one to avoid exit number two, which is bad because you've got to explain to your constituents why you didn't take exit number one. And the last exit, that's really bad before the bridge is out.

I know you've been in a lot of different roles in higher education—from the professor side of things, from the administrator side of things and now on the research side of things with Eduventures. From your perspective, how has your metaphor of the bridge been changing in online education in the last few years?

In the last ten years, we've seen everyone jumping on the bandwagon when it comes to online learning. It started in large part with the for profits and then many of the non-profits came on board. What we saw, certainly in the last couple of years, is there are a lot of players in this market, and the student population has at best leveled off. So you have a lot more people competing with a lot fewer students, namely adult learners, which is still the vast majority of those students. So colleges, those who have not got into the business of online education, will find many challenges. I often use the metaphor of the swimming pool. Online learning is a big swimming pool. But unless you know where the deep end is and where the shallow end is, only two things are going to happen to you if you jump in: either you're going to drown or you're going to break your neck. What I find today is that a lot of colleges don't know which end they're in, they don't know how to swim, and consequently they're losing a lot of money and not gaining a lot of students. So that's the beauty of this conference, as I see it: helping colleges understand where is the deep end, where is the shallow end and what they need to do in order to swim.

One thing you mentioned there is there are a lot more players now in the online sphere coupled with a leveling off in student enrollment. For institutions who are already offering online degrees, what do you see as the next big disruption for online education? And what are these major blind spots that people aren't aware of?

This is the big thing and a lot of people may not have thought about this as being a big thing in the industry, but I can sum it up in one word: quality. That's what's going to make the difference going forward. Most online programs, and I daresay even the ones I was responsible for, you have most online degree programs and classes are simply talking powerpoint slides—vanilla instruction, vanilla learning. The secret to the future and the institutions that are going to be successful are the ones that introduce truly life-changing pedagogical approaches to learning, instruction and assessment. We haven't got there as an industry, at least on the non-profit side. You're starting to see more and more of it on the for profit side. But I think the game changer down the road should be the institution that offers online, not just to adult learners, but also to traditional age kids, and that experience is fundamentally different than what we're experiencing today.

Administrator in online education have all of these ideas coming at them at once to increase the quality of their programs, to be more strategic in aligning programs with what students are looking for today. They're being pulled in so many different directions, so is there one thing they can concretely focus on now? What kind of questions should they be asking to determine what is their biggest priority then?

The first thing is to understand how e-learning fits into their overall strategy. When I used to teach educational and instructional technology, I used to tell my students that the secret to online learning, the secret to technology and learning is not just to know when to use it, but to know when not to use it. For a lot of institutions, they need to understand whether or not they should actually jump in the pool, and then if they decide to jump in the pool, what segment of the population out there do they want to focus on? Do they want to be a regional player? Do they want to be a national player? What types of students? What types of degrees? Find their niche. And how does that niche fit into the overall mission of the institution? Trying to change your mission is going to be a difficult thing to do for most institutional leaders. So you've got to be able to convince your constituents that moving to online learning is just a natural part of your overall institutional mission. And part of the discussion I have with my session will be how to do that because it's not an easy thing to do, but it's certainly achievable.