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5 ways to tell if your college programs will survive the future

Online undergraduate and graduate college programs are growing at 15 percent a year, but will soon be a thing of the past.

As will campus-based programs. Both will give way to an agile approach in which the technology and design of a program are indifferent to modality.  Courses will be online, on-campus, or a blend of the two; marketing and recruiting will be integrated, as will student support and placement.

Agile programs will enjoy a substantial cost, convenience, and quality advantage over online and campus-based programs. And while academia isn’t quite there yet, a review of changes in online higher ed and commerce over the past 15 years presents the compelling case that this level of integration between and among traditional and online offerings is inevitable.

An Agile Model

The agile model is not unique to education. Fifteen years ago, companies didn’t know what to do with the internet. They knew it was important and that people were investing heavily, but they could not figure out how to integrate it into their core practice. Many set up online divisions separate from their core, and funded them separately.

This model allowed them to experiment, but had substantial downside; for example, if you bought something at The Gap online, returning it at a store was impossible. Eventually, successful companies created a unified experience for their customers. Amazon has 30,000 lockers in stores near you and, now, most retailers allow you to shop online and pick up at the store.

It’s easy for a higher ed administrator to think his or her programs are agile, but almost none of them are right now.

(Next page: 5 ways to tell if your college programs are agile)

Here’s how to tell if your college programs are agile:

1. Is there a single recruiting and retention effort, with a single website and phone number for students to call for information? Is there a single application? Do students need to commit to the modality they will learn in? If not, a school likely has two groups competing for search engine optimization and keywords, and a diluted message.

2. Is there a single learning management platform, serving a single community of students and granting one diploma?

3. Are on-campus students able to continue their studies without interruption during a move or change in work or life obligations? Do professors routinely teach sections of their courses online and in a classroom, or are faculties somewhat segregated? How does the campus shift to online operations during a serious storm or other interruption?

4. How do student services differ for various students? Online programs generally add a layer of tier one support, giving students and faculty a single point of contact for problems ranging from tech to financial aid or scheduling. That tier one support staff is often available for extended hours to address students in all parts of the world, and uses analytics to proactively find and address problems.  In an agile university, that system works as well for campus-based students too, lowering the cost of support, adding responsiveness, and raising graduation rates.

5. Finally, agile programs are financially flexible. Contracts in which schools pay a percentage of revenue to online program managers, for example, cannot be agile; there are too many disincentives to allow online students to take many classroom courses, or the reverse, and the support systems are completely separate. As online enrollment becomes the largest part of a university’s graduate school enrollment, the weight of that inefficiency, not to mention a 60 percent revenue tax to the online program manager (OPM), will drive tuition at those schools to non-competitive levels.

In summation, in an agile school, students will pick programs the way we select books on Amazon, for example. When book shopping, no one says, “Show me everything that’s available for Kindle. Or show me all hardcover books.” Instead, we pick the topic or title specifically, then select the format that works for us. There are far more efficient and rational ways to search and select education than asking “What college has classes I can take on a Thursday after 4pm?”

The Biggest Challenge and the Easiest Component

The trickiest part of agile education is instructional design. Better online programs use a flipped model and a series of asynchronous modules that include video, text, animation, simulation, and lots of student-generated content.  Designing or curating exceptional courseware takes money and time, and a commitment to flexibility and student needs.

The easiest part is the technology. It all exists, and is relatively inexpensive (the technology we are assembling and building is of the same fit and finish as I oversaw for my last company, a large OPM, and generally is less expensive than the tech our partner universities currently employ). With our partners at iData [1], we’re working to create an open technology platform to make it simpler for schools to integrate innovative new technologies.

The Cost Bonus

So why would all of this matter to schools and students? First, the cost of instructional support and counseling has been rising steadily for twenty years, as have the regulatory and actual need for those services. Lowering those costs while raising the responsiveness of the services

Executed well, agile programs that make no distinction between online and on-campus will reduce the cost of excellent higher education by 15 to 20 percent by cutting support costs and raising capacity. More importantly, they will enhance student-faculty engagement and drive competitive improvements in quality.

Schools that muster the flexibility to deploy and adapt most quickly will prosper from being first. But the new normal will force all schools to erase the lines between the method in which teaching is done – and that will benefit everyone.