I’m often asked for advice around developing/scaling online programmes/courses and what I’m going to write is based my personal experience and views that I have developed over a period of almost 20 years – it’s scary to think how quickly time flies.
My first experience of online began at the University of Edinburgh back in the days of WebCT. I launched a Masters programme online because the on-campus version was struggling to recruit and I was getting a lot of people keen to study part-time and it just grew from there.
I was very lucky to work in an environment at that time where innovation was encouraged/supported under the leadership of Tim O’Shea and Jeff Haywood – I learned such a lot during this time also because I completed the Masters in Digital Education (eLearning back then) and had great support from the team in the School of Education.
In the last few years at Edinburgh I was fortunate to work in a College role and growing online was a key element of that role. My time at Glasgow allowed me to implement my learnings from Edinburgh to grow online firstly at College level and then University level.
What I did next was the best career decision I ever made, I worked in the commercial sector for Higher Ed Partners and I learned a huge amount – I would encourage everyone to take time out of academia, the people that I worked with were phenomenal and the ways of working were fast-paced, decisive and focussed on growth.
Joining the University of Leeds was another learning opportunity where I was so incredibly lucky to work with the amazing Simone Buitendijk who is just a phenomenal leader and innovator. Now in my role at Aberdeen, my luck in working with a fantastic VC has continued, George Boyne who trusts me to get on with the job and shows incredible leadership.
So what have I learned? The main piece of advice I would give is to just get started! In academia we can spend a lot of time naval gazing and less time doing, it’s important to try and fail than never try at all. We teach our students that failing is part of learning, but as a sector we tend to be very risk adverse towards failure. It’s understandable, but it does impact on being able to implement change and to modernise. Change is inevitable, the world never stands still and in HE we have to move towards being more agile because standing still means falling behind.
The next price of advice is to focus on a number of small changes rather than large changes where a lot of time is spent planning rather than executing.
Taking a waterfall approach is more typical in HE, whereas if we can think about continuous improvement and making small changes often then change becomes more manageable and also becomes more normal. Agility is not something HE is known for and can be difficult to implement in very traditional organisations. I try to take an approach of let’s change what we can with the resource we have – creating a culture where everyone can suggest improvements and make changes that enhance their day to day working as well as that of their colleagues.
Practically what does getting started look like, most Universities have the core elements of what is needed to run online programmes. Firstly, you will have a means of marketing and enquiry management, you will have an applicant portal, a VLE and all the other core systems needed. Start by looking at your current applicant process and then look at what can be streamlined for online programmes. Why does it need to be streamlined? Because the applicant journey massively impacts your ability to recruit in online.
The user experience needs to be slick and the time decision applications is the difference between getting 10 and 100 students. Then look at staff development, develop training that is scalable; for example, create an online course that provided the information staff need to help them develop an online programme – this way they also get to see what the structure of an online course looks like and can then apply that to their courses.
Start wit the keen beans, those that are excited to try new ways of teaching and those people then become your champions across the institution. In terms of what areas you develop, my advice is to look very carefully at the market and only develop in areas where there is demand. Price point for online is very important, brand does not play into online in the same way it does for on-campus programmes. Look at what you have in terms of high demand on-campus programmes and determine if there would also be demand online. If so, create a parallel programme and that was resources from the online programmes can be repurposed for on-campus teaching.
Where possible, develop courses (modules) that are stand alone with no pre-requisites so that a) you can then offer these are short courses and b) you can implement a carousel model whereby students can join at multiple entry points during the year. The to start is one of the key deciding factors for an applicant.
Those are just some areas to think about, but the key message is: if you want to develop/grow online then get started. Learn as you go and break the change down into manageable chunks.
Making change easy is the key to making progress – large, overwhelming projects tend to just make people back off and procrastinate.
Progress over perfection is my mantra.
