KELVIN BENTLEY Welcome everyone.
This recording will be a summary of an interview
that I'm having today with Dr. Michael Moore.
Dr. Michael Moore is the chief academic and executive officer
of the University of Arkansas Systems eVersity.
And Michael, thank you for joining us today.
DR. MICHAEL MOORE: Good afternoon.
Happy to be with you.
KELVIN BENTLEY Great.
Well Michael, given your role with eVersity,
could you maybe tell us a little bit about what eVersity is,
and how you are leveraging technology to support the online learners
that your institution supports?
DR. MICHAEL MOORE: Happy to do that.
So I guess the easiest answer to your second question--
that is, how is technology supporting what we're doing,
and it's really the foundation of everything.
We are a completely 100% online university.
So technology is the way we communicate with our students,
it's the way we teach our students, it's the way we support our students.
And through questions today, I'm happy to go into all the different ways
that we utilize technology.
But to your first question, eVersity was started
about three years ago by the board of trustees
for the University of Arkansas System.
And it's a pretty unique institution.
I'm not actually aware of another institution like it in the country.
Certainly there are other online institutions,
but this is being managed at the system level.
It is a standalone institution that has its own degree programs.
And we borrow faculty from all of the other University of Arkansas System
schools.
So we have five four-year colleges and seven community colleges
and the medical campus.
We have brought together those faculty to create undergraduate degree
programs, everything from certificates of proficiency up through baccalaureate
degrees, in areas that are of high need in the workforce in state of Arkansas
and the surrounding areas.
And the degrees, we're striving for high quality.
Hence, we use existing faculty members of our schools, low cost,
we're very accessible, and workplace relevant.
And we're still in the very early days of running this,
but we've been teaching classes now for about a year and a half.
And our primary target audience is the adult learner
who stopped out of college and is looking
for an affordable, flexible opportunity to come back to school.
So our average student is about 36 years of age,
has over 70 hours of transfer credit, has been to a couple
prior different institutions, and in that respect,
doesn't look a whole lot different than online students
at other fully online universities.
But I think the truly unique thing about what we're doing
is that it's a system effort run out of the system office
to create a standalone institution.
KELVIN BENTLEY And that's a great overview
of what eVersity has become and is.
Michael, could you maybe tell our listeners
a little bit about what was the tipping point for your system.
So I imagine that many of the schools in your system
offer online courses and programs, and did so at the time
that a decision was made to create this new standalone university that's
fully online.
So what made the powers that be within your system decide,
you know what, we need something different from what we're already
offering?
DR. MICHAEL MOORE: That's a great question.
I'll give you two answers that I think were the primary influencers of this.
The first answer really has to do with the experience that myself and my boss,
Donald Bobbitt-- who is the president of the UA system--
had at a previous institution, where we saw the tremendous support
that online education could bring in terms
of revenue and educational opportunity to students,
if done in a very innovative way.
A lot of schools are leveraging OPM companies
to help realize those potentials.
And at that prior institution, we worked with an OPM as well.
But we also ran into some real roadblocks where within an institution,
good old-fashioned politics would prevent us
from launching a particular program that we
might want because we would have opposition
from a dean or particular department's faculty.
So it struck us that if we had the opportunity
to draw faculty from multiple institutions,
we might have the ability to avoid some of those politics.
There, of course, are the headaches and obstacles
of creating an institution from scratch where
you don't have the built-in resources.
So that was one part of it that was very intriguing.
I think the second major factor that contributed to our decision
to build in our institution was the idea that online education, as you
noted in your question, is offered at many schools.
And we have those either individual courses
or, in fact, entire degree programs at some of our institutions.
But in those cases--
and I don't mean this in a negative way at all--
but that experience at those institutions
is what I like to call a bolt-on experience for the students,
of actually offering online education.
The part about putting the classes online
is actually the easiest part of the degree program.
The hard part is supporting the students and teaching and advising
them, making financial aid available, making them feel part of the community.
And unfortunately, too many schools that are putting programs online,
in my opinion, are doing it in a way to try to grab revenue,
try to drive enrollment without really thinking through the entire life
cycle of the student experience.
And so we didn't want that to be the case for these adult
learners that we're trying to reach.
We don't want it to be an afterthought.
We want them to have dedicated services advisers that
know how to work with them, financial aid that's
structured to meet their schedules.
We don't have to tell you to come to a campus,
for example, to attend the tutoring session, or with a math lab.
Everything ought to be online, particularly since we're
focusing on undergraduate education.
So we still have those programs at our other schools,
but the primary function of a brick and mortar school
is to serve a brick and mortar student, not serve the online student.
So those are the two things I think that were
kind of driving the creation of this.
It was the idea to provide a comprehensive online experience
across the entire student lifecycle, and to try
to find a way to generate sufficient enrollments so that over time,
as state resources continue to decline and so forth, we can find revenue
streams to support the educational mission of the UA system.
KELVIN BENTLEY No.
That's very helpful to hear how you are combating this concern
that sometimes online learning is an afterthought.
We don't always, perhaps, think through what we're getting ourselves
into by getting into online learning, which then perpetuates a concern
that I think some individuals have, that online learning is a fad
or it's not thought out well.
And it really seems as if you have taken a very different approach
to be very strategic, to really think through
how you could support your students.
DR. MICHAEL MOORE: Let me add one other thought to that, if I might.
I think part of what a lot of schools do-- and part of the reason they can--
quote, unquote-- get away with it, if you will--
is most online education, at least the vast majority of it,
in the early efforts in particular, were at the graduate level.
And at the graduate level, master's degrees.
If you go out there, there's just more master's degrees online you
can shake a stick at.
You don't have to worry as much about the student experience there.
In part, because you're dealing with a student
that has already graduated from an undergraduate institution.
In theory, they don't need any remedial education.
Really need limited advising.
You just kind of plop them in a degree plan, and say here
are the courses you need to take.
And they ought to be able to navigate themselves through that.
So they're pretty self-sufficient.
It's when you start to get into the undergraduate education experience
that I think the student life cycle starts to become a whole lot more
important and where you really need to think about all those other services.
Now you're talking 120 hours a week for an undergraduate degree plan.
You're talking about the need for remedial help
in mathematics and English, advising, changing majors, complex financial aid
issues.
They're not the same complex financial issues
that exist at the graduate level.
So to me, that's a fundamental break, and our institution
is doing exclusively undergraduate education,
and I do think that's partly why building a standalone institution
makes some sense in our particular business case.
KELVIN BENTLEY No.
And that's a great point to mention about graduate students.
So far in this series, we haven't actually addressed that issue.
So I'm really glad that you did that.
Maybe before we dive a little bit deeper into how your digital university is
supporting students, now that you are out there
in the mix with the rest of the campuses,
are you noticing that they are changing their model,
or evolving their model, to be as supportive of fully
online undergraduate students, like you are, because they see a really
good model within their own system that would be easy
for them to adopt and adapt based on what they're learning from you?
DR. MICHAEL MOORE: That's a fantastic question.
And it's one that I can give you a preliminary answer to.
So from the very get-go, that's been one of the things
that we've been saying that we wanted to help accomplish.
We wanted to be that sandbox, that experimental site where
we could do innovative things, try to not be burdened by legacy systems,
and be able to do all the cliches, be able to pivot
quickly, to be able to test and discard fail fast, all those terms
that you hear in the business world.
With the idea being that once we discovered something that worked,
we wanted to be able to roll that out, or at least demonstrate it
to other campuses.
To some extent, I think we're a little early yet in our evolution
to be able to point to a lot of examples of where we've
had significant transformative impact on other schools,
but that's certainly part of our core DNA,
and we share an awful lot of what we're doing.
Having said that, I can point to at least one
example of where I do believe we are having an impact,
and also another area where I think we're
starting to see some possible traction.
The one where I do think I can point to some significant impact
is we made a decision from the very beginning--
it's actually turned up much better than I expected--
we were going to try to be as much of an OER campus as we possibly could be.
I was pretty confident that we could be OER at the lower
levels of the curriculum for--
I assume most of your listeners will know
that's open educational resources--
English and mathematics and the social sciences.
There's just gobs and gobs of material out there.
I was a little skeptical about our ability
to do that at the upper division level, but I wanted to try.
And it turns out that we've been able to build all of our degree programs
100% OER.
We don't have a single purchased educational resource.
All the materials are included, of course.
The evidence that we're starting to see is that more and more
of our individual campuses--
I'm not going to claim sole responsibility for this;
there's clearly a national conversation around OER.
But we have heard anecdotally back from some of our institutions,
that our focus on OER has helped pave the way on their campus for more
attention to it.
A couple of our campuses have started experimental programs
to encourage faculty to do that.
We hosted a system-wide conference, a day and a half on OER, and it resulted,
I think, in the sharing of some good resources.
So we're real optimistic that that is having a positive impact.
The second thing we're doing is we've really
worked hard to change the way we do the admissions process.
For example, we take the responsibility of going out and tracking down
the students' transcripts.
We pay all the fees.
It allows us to turn around an admission decision more quickly.
And we're starting to share that information with campuses in our system
who are looking for ways to speed up the admission process.
We admittedly have some lost leaders there.
We pay for some transcripts for students that don't intimately matriculate.
But for us right now, that makes business sense.
So this is something we're going to continue
to try to do as we get lessons learned, push those things out to our campuses,
whether it be the application of an innovative technology
or just simply the change in the business process.
If it leads to enrollments, we're going to try to do it.
KELVIN BENTLEY No.
Those are really great examples of how you're
leveraging technology as far as new processes to benefit your students.
Do you have any other examples you would like
to share in terms of how you're leveraging technology
to support your online learners?
And then maybe the second part of my question
is what are some things that have been challenging, in terms of doing that.
I think you've already mentioned the one in terms
of you're trying to be proactive around securing transcripts for students,
and then, of course, the OER debates, trying
to identify the best quality OER.
But what are some challenges that you're facing as well
to ensure that you have this high-quality, digital university
model that's out there?
DR. MICHAEL MOORE: Yes.
So let me start where you began the question, which
is another example of how we're trying to use technology.
And if you'll bear with me for a moment.
I might like to use a example that may not seem initially obviously relevant,
but I think if you give me just a moment or two, I'll apply it.
I'm a big sports fan.
I love college basketball, love college football.
And if anybody follows the NCAA Division I programs,
you'll know that at major schools around the country,
student athletes at all the major conferences,
particularly in football and men's and women's basketball, typically they're
admitted to their flagship institution, some of the best
institutions in our country and ones in each of our states,
they admit those students under very different criteria
than they do the regular student body.
They have lower SAT scores and ATC scores.
They don't have to meet the same class rank standards.
So coming in, they're not as well-prepared.
And if you were going to base their success models
predictions on their incoming high school scores and test scores,
you would predict these people would not be very successful.
And yet if you look at the graduation rates for student athletes
and retention rates of student athletes compared to the general student body,
comparing the student athletes to much better
prepared, academically-prepared students,
student athletes outperform them in almost every case, whether it's
PAC-10, the SEC, the ACC, the Big 12, whatever it happens to be,
they completely outperform them.
So the question is why.
Why is that happening?
Why are under-performed student athletes outperforming better-prepared students
that are coming into college?
And the answer is it's the resources that these big athletic departments are
able to throw at the student athletes.
And if you had an opportunity to visit a few athletic departments--
and I'll use an example of one here a few months ago I visited.
They literally have one guy who's responsible for supporting
the men's basketball team.
So he has 15 athletes he's responsible for.
And every morning he gets up, and his job
is to send an email or a text message to every one of the men's basketball
players, telling them what class to go to
and what assignments are due that day, or preview any assignments coming up
that week.
So those athletes have an incentive to remain academically eligible,
obviously, in order to play.
But they're getting tremendous support, tremendous support.
There's a lot of money at stake.
A lot of tickets have to be sold, postseason conference, all bids,
a lot of money at stake.
Imagine if we could find a way to do that same level of support
for the general student body, for the people that actually
came in the door better prepared.
We would have this idea that--
some people say I'm just crazy, but I really
don't believe retention is that difficult. It's about time on task.
It's about getting people the resources they need and the time to study.
So what we're trying to do is leverage technology
to provide some of that messaging that we clearly can't provide a 1 to 15
ratio with our academic advisers, but we can
try to provide lots and lots of information
to our students about what's important.
Let me just give you a few ideas about how we're trying to leverage technology
in really pretty simple, straightforward ways that don't require purchasing
big fancy early alert systems.
So the first thing we do is that mentality
that's around Fitbit Technologies and Nike
Fuel and all those kinds of things, where people like to be competitive.
Every morning for a class, we send to them
what we call a triumph report, which compares a particular student that's
receiving the message to their classmates.
And we show them how much time they've spent
on class compared to their classmates.
We show them what their grade is in class compared to their classmates.
We show them what activities they've engaged in
compared to their classmates.
People, we think, are competitive, and if you see your grade is low
and you're not spending as much time as your peers,
it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out,
I need to up my game a little bit, spend more time and have my grade go up.
So that same mentality that those of a different generation
had when we ran to the faculty members door
and looked for our grade that was posted on a piece of paper back in the day.
We followed our social security number down-- which we can't do today--
and we tried to figure out what are grade is.
On Mondays also, we send every student a list of the assignments that
are due that week.
On Wednesday, we send them an updated list
of things that remain to be done that week, along with the points that
are assigned to those particular assignments.
And we do it again on Friday.
So some people might think that's babying the students.
Our target population are adult students.
They're busy.
They've got children.
They've got jobs.
And our theory is that we would rather evaluate students and have
them succeed or fail based on the quality of the work they
do in the class, than whether or not they forgot to submit something
or happened to miss a deadline.
Those are not real high-tech solutions, but they
do require us to pull data out of our learning management system
about what's been submitted, what hasn't been submitted,
to pull information about time on task and numbers of activities,
and it's making a difference.
Our GPA for our students is about one full letter grade
higher than it was when they transferred into the institution.
We're seeing success rates over 90% in terms of people passing our classes.
The other thing we do for our academic advisors is we
have provided them with a dashboard that simply shows--
if you imagine-- little bar graphs.
One bar will be time on task and the other one would be grade.
And what we're looking for are disconnects between those, people that
have an awful lot of time, I would say, a spike on one bar,
for time on task, but maybe a very low grade.
That tells us, in a quick scan every morning, which students are not
being very efficient with their study.
And what we're learning over time is that sometimes time on task
is not a real good indicator in particular kinds of classes.
For example, in some of our IT classes that
have an awful lot of homework that is to be done outside of the class, LMS,
we find that--
and it's about getting to know the curriculum
a little bit-- that lots of time spent in the LMS
is actually a sign of somebody struggling.
So these are ways that we're trying to leverage technology.
The typical average advisor, according to NACADA,
should have an advising mode of about 1 to 250--
one advisor for every 250 students.
Well you clearly can't support students in the way the athletic department can
if you're having to plow through each individual record.
So how can we lift up to the student and to the advisor critical information
so that they can act on the important information.
Now the second part of your question was about challenges.
I think part of the biggest challenge is fending off vendors, quite frankly.
Everybody wants to claim that they have a built-in solution and they want
to bring you the--
I like to call them-- shiny object, and we all
get attracted to the shiny objects.
But they all come requiring customization.
None of them ever exactly fit your particular use case.
They're all very expensive.
And for an institution that is, like us, a startup, and also
committed to trying to keep costs low, it's
trying to find ways that you can accomplish
with some of these big powerful software packages.
Where service companies are professing to be
able to do-- these early alert systems, these predictive analytics systems--
they're all they're all wonderful.
And they've all got their limitations, but they're crazy, crazy expensive.
And at the end of the day, that all gets passed on to the student.
So we're trying to work real hard at balancing that.
What can we do in-house, using really pretty simple analytics,
so that we're not driving up the cost.
Our student is an adult learner who is--
here's our challenge for our population.
If you have 70 hours of college credit and you're 36 years of age--
which is our average student--
when you fill out a job application at that point,
you're a high school graduate.
That means you're being paid like a high school graduate.
Those are your wages.
So you don't have a lot of extra disposable income,
and you may have tapped out your program, or be nearing the end of it.
So we are really, really conscious about trying to keep our price down,
and trying to stay away from as many of these bright, shiny objects
as we possibly can, while still finding ways to help technology
make us efficient.
KELVIN BENTLEY Leveraging, that could easily
be the topic of another conversation-- how
do you leverage technology on a budget.
And it's great that you are trying to do so in a way that, again, still provides
students a high level of service and support, given this newer
model of instruction within your system, this new online university, which
is, I think, a great model and I hope that more schools definitely
take a look at adopting it.
Given that we have been focused on what you're
trying to do in a lot of different areas to support your students,
not just on the academic side.
You've talked about the student services side.
Outside of maybe using the eVersity model or a slightly different model,
what do you think it's going to take for institutions to come up with a better
version of what the digital university will look like,
in terms of, perhaps, a fully online college or university
like you're offering?
What do institutions need to do in order to get there, do you think?
DR. MICHAEL MOORE: Well, that's a challenging question that would come
out of lots and lots of different ways.
I tend to be pretty optimistic about the innovation that
is happening in higher education, but there is part of it that concerns me.
And it comes more from the policy side, and it's perhaps
because I share an academic background as a political scientist,
but having been on an administrative side of higher ed
now for a number of years, we have done a really, really lousy job
in higher education of making the business
case to people outside of higher education
about the return on investment.
It is a really long time down the road before you see the return
on investment on higher education.
It's hard to compete against requests for filling potholes and roads.
Truck shows up with asphalt, fills the hole in the road,
the road is smooth again, and off you go.
And people, taxpayers see that result, and they
don't see it from the investment in higher education
necessarily that quickly.
And the challenge is that policymakers across the country--
and the New York Times recently did a piece on this
not too long ago, where they tracked over a multi-year period, the cuts
in the per annualized spending per student.
And with the exception, I think, of two or three states,
it has gone down every year in every state,
and I think the only state was North Dakota that showed
a consistent increase in spending.
We're going to be held to higher levels of accountability.
We're going to have to become more efficient,
and we're going to have to be able to demonstrate that students
are learning in our classrooms.
And we don't do a very good job of that right now in the academy as a whole.
We rely on a faculty member's judgment to say, well
how do know a student learned, well I gave them
an A. That doesn't necessarily prove they learned anything.
You don't know where they started at in the class,
you don't know where they finished in the class.
Did you move the needle a little bit with that student?
Did you move it a lot?
And part of that is going to require us, I think,
to leverage technology to increasingly demonstrate measurable learning
outcomes.
And we're going to have to get our heads out of the sand.
I don't think folks like Clayton Christensen are quite right,
that half the schools are going to go out
of business in the next 10 to 15 years.
Having said that, there was an article in either the Chronicle of Inside
Higher Ed here with the last couple of weeks,
there are fewer institutions of higher education
today than there were last year, and fewer than the year before.
So schools are closing and going out of business.
And what I worry about a little bit on the technology,
and in higher education, just broadly speaking, is the bright, shiny object;
is that we lose sight of why it is that we need the technology.
We focus on the really crazy innovative practices.
And we always need that stuff out there on the bleeding
edge, the moonshots that are trying to really, really push the envelope,
but we also just need a lot of real practical solutions.
These funding agencies that want to fund grant applications
at the elite schools, that's fantastic.
That helps fund the bleeding edge.
But does working with a bunch of undergraduates at an Ivy League
school in a research project really help move the needle
at a community college, which is where the effort might really need to be?
The kids of the Ivy League school are going to be fine.
They don't really need the technology.
They don't really need the innovative study.
And I don't know how generalizable the results from that study
are to the bulk of folks at regional public four-year schools and community
colleges.
So I think we need to have some of the innovative stuff,
but more importantly, I think we really need
to focus more and more of the technology on accessible solutions
that really, really make a difference.
And unfortunately, so many of these innovate
predictive analytic packages, for example,
they're just beyond the reach of a small community
college or small regional school.
They've got tons of potential, but the school can't afford them.
KELVIN BENTLEY And that's, again, an excellent point to highlight.
And of course, again, we can have a separate conversation too about
what is that balance that we need to have the between, again,
being high touch and high tech.
What does that actually mean and how can we
collect better data to determine whether or not we should even
attempt to go after shiny objects?
But Michael, thank you so much for your time today.
I think that's a good place for us to pause on the conversation.
I'd love to reach out to you at another point
and definitely continue this, because I think you've said a lot of great things
that we need to think about as we continue to leverage the technology
to benefit our students.
And again, for our listeners, we've been having a great conversation
today with Michael Moore, chief academic and executive officer
for the University of Arkansas Systems eVersity.
And Michael, thanks again,
DR. MICHAEL MOORE: Kelvin, thank you much.
I enjoyed the conversation.
And I'd be happy to visit with your students at any point.
Have a good day.
KELVIN BENTLEY Yeah, you too.
Thank you
DR. MICHAEL MOORE: Goodbye.