Doris Cassiday

This is a special edition of my blog that centers on an individual who was central to the creation and success of this College. For those of you who have not met Doris, she is the longest serving of the College's academic advisors. Her recent retirement announcement ended her service as a paid employee of the College after 30 years, one month and one day. All of that time has been spent counseling our students. I have spoken to numerous graduates who had Doris as their advisor, and they are universal in their praise for her clear advice and steady encouragement.

But as amazing as 30 years of employment is, Doris has done much more for this College. She has worked on behalf of the College since before its creation 41 years ago. She was part of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) effort that created the College. After the legislature established us in 1973, she served as the first chairwoman of the Board for Academic Awards, and she was the first president of the College's Foundation. Along the way, Doris has served as Founder, First Board Chair, First Foundation President, and student advisor for 30 years. That is a record of service that is simply unique in American higher education. And these accomplishments are just the ones associated with Charter Oak; she has done more.

We have honored her with the Doris Cassiday Award and an honorary doctorate and the state honored her as Mother of the Year. But none of these honors really does justice to the contributions Doris made to this institution, its mission, and its students. Presidents have come and gone, but Doris has been steadfast.

On Saturday, February 7, 2015, Doris Cassiday peacefully passed away. She lived a full life and served this College with extraordinary grace and skill. She was approaching her 90th birthday and worked full time until a few months ago. Yes, you read that correctly. We will all miss Doris terribly, but for me, it is hard not to be a little jealous of her success. She got to watch her dream - Charter Oak State College - become a reality, then a success, and she eventually became one of its stars. Who among us wouldn't want to be able to say that at the end of our lives?

About a month ago, Doris made a $20,000 donation to the Charter Oak Foundation's Shea Endowment. This is the single largest individual gift to the endowment ever received. In honor of that gift, and all the other gifts Doris has given to us and to our students, we are naming the Advising area The Doris G. Cassiday Academic Wing.

The family is having a private funeral, but if you would like to honor Doris, then I think a donation to the Foundation she both helped create and lead would be appropriate. I encourage you to think of our gifts in her memory as a "match" for Doris' gift. As I made mine, I was imagining her smiling at how her good deed was being amplified.

We will let her family know about every donation made in her memory. Rest in peace, Doris.

Welcome, new Go Back to Get Ahead students!

This new semester begins with the largest Charter Oak student body in our history. Our enrollment is up 30%, and many of those new students arrived here as part of the state's Go Back to Get Ahead program. So I want to start this entry by welcoming our new students to Charter Oak and welcoming back all of our continuing students.

It is very important to me and to our staff to check in and see how all of you are progressing. While it is wonderful to welcome such a large group of students to the College, we measure our success by how many of you succeed in completing your degree programs. By now, you have worked your way through your first courses and should have a sense of how both you and we are doing. Please share your insights with me.

I am curious about what you have been noticing about your courses, your instructors, our advising staff, and all the ancillary services we provide including eTutoring, Star Fish alerts, online library resources, orientation courseware, and Call Center support. How did your interactions with Admissions, the Registrar, and of course, Financial Aid go? We spend a great deal of our time and resources setting up these supports, and we are committed to continually improving them.

We also try very hard to produce marketing materials that provide an honest picture of Charter Oak, so my next question is for our newer students. Is the College meeting your initial expectations? Did the reality of Charter Oak match the perception you had from our website and our ads? If you are close to graduating, are you looking forward to being a Charter Oak alum?

Regarding tuition, how did the financial process go? Were your bills easy to understand? Were you able to pay them, sign up for payment plans, and generally navigate our business tools? And for those students close to finishing, was the price you paid worth the learning you acquired?

I wish I could meet you all so I try to use this blog to offer some insights into what we are working to accomplish. I would very much like to know whether we are providing you with the tools to accomplish what you are working to do. Please take a moment to give me some feedback. I will read everything that arrives, share your ideas with our staff and seek to find resolutions to any challenges you may have had or are experiencing.

Thank you for choosing Charter Oak. We succeed when you succeed.

Charter Oak Rising: Fall 2014

Another new semester begins, and for Charter Oak this is one for the record books.  I have written in this blog about the Go Back to Get Ahead program that the Governor and the System asked us to run.  You know that we developed the project plan between the Governors’ State of the State speech in early February and our launch date of June 2^nd.  Well the fruits of those labors have arrived.  To continue my metaphor, the College has been engaged in some pretty heavy lifting for the past eight months, and that work has delivered some truly amazing results.

 

First, our story: College enrollment is up 30% over last fall at this same moment.  And the number of credits that students have registered for is up 40%.  Let those numbers sink in for a second.  Now let’s look at just the past two months.  In July-August of 2012, 279 students matriculated; in 2013, 270 students matriculated; but during July-August of this year 503 students matriculants (of which 191 were GBTGA students).  That is an 86% increase in matriculated students over the same two month period in either of the past two years.

 

On the system level, our efforts have produced 6,381 inquiries that became 3,618 referrals, and then 1,250 applicants.  As of today, the system has enrolled 825 students toward our ultimate goal of 1500. In simpler language, our advertising efforts produced over 6,000 interested students.  Well over half of these inquiries asked to be referred to one of our 17 schools, and then 35% of that pool applied for Admission.  So far, nearly 60% of the Applicants have enrolled.  These are very impressive results, and they are gaining national attention.

 

So it is safe to say several things about this fall.  First, everyone at Charter Oak is thrilled that we have grown so dramatically. Second, the ConnSCU system is very pleased with our leadership and successful management of the Go Back to Get Ahead program. You can expect that we will be asked to take a leadership position in other projects as the system evolves.  Third, the staff is very tired but very satisfied with their efforts and thrilled others are discovering the Charter Oak secret!  And finally, we aren’t done with this growth quite yet.  We have another session that begins in late October, and we expect to see more GBTGA enrollments between now and then.

 

Ultimately, this growth means that more returning students will finally achieve their dream of obtaining a college degree.  And this is what truly makes this moment special. 

As always, if you have questions, advice, or just want to let me know how you feel, you can post to this blog or email me at eklonoski@charteroak.edu.

Ed Klonoski, President
Charter Oak State College

Keeping Charter Oak at the Leading Edge of Higher Education

[This article originally appeared in the Winter/Spring 2014 edition of Connections, the Charter Oak State College Newsletter]

With the beginning of another new year there are a variety of items I want to share with you. The most important item has to do with the challenges facing the entire higher education landscape. As I have said before, things are getting harder for all of us. There is increasing pressure on colleges to improve our outcomes (both graduation rates and graduate employment), reduce our prices, and increase our enrollments. The world wants us to be faster, cheaper, and better.

As you read this, there are four national conversations that I will be participating in that bear on these demands. In early December, I joined the Council for Higher Education Accreditation’s new Commission On Quality Assurance and Alternative Higher Education. My role is to talk about noncollegiate assessments (badges and CCAP). In January I delivered a plenary session at CHEA’s annual conference called Innovation, Disruption and the Status Quo: What Do We Want for Accreditation? My talk was about Education Without College: What Is It? Is It Desirable? Can It Last? I have also been asked to participate in a conversation about the link between college and employers by the Aspen Institute. In early February I will serve on a panel at the EDUCAUSE conference in New Orleans to discuss Strategic Innovation and Institutional Collaboration.

All of these engagements reflect two important themes: Higher Education is undergoing remarkable changes and Charter Oak has experience in those elements that are changing. I have told you that we are working to help the U.S Department of Education re-think its Title IV financial aid regulations, and we have just heard that the department is going to request ideas for experimental sites that can explore those new ideas. Charter Oak has been collaborating with Lumina Foundation and a set of institutions that are interested in competency-based learning to create An Experiment in Hybrid, or Mixed-Modality, Programs Using Competency-Based Education. This work seems to be moving to the next level and we are excited about submitting an application to be an experimental site. If we are selected, our students would be able to use their financial aid for portfolios and tests as well as online courses.

And finally, there is a movement right here in Connecticut around our Go Back to Get Ahead initiative. Board of Regents President Gray is committed to moving this project forward. In early Spring we hope to release letters to 100,000 Connecticut residents with credits from ConnSCU institutions but no credential. Charter Oak will be responsible for moving these students forward toward successful degree completion.

You might ask, what does all this activity have to do with me? Well, it’s all designed to keep Charter Oak at the leading edge of higher education, and in the minds of those who award grants for new initiatives and funding. These efforts are part of our commitment to making college available and affordable to as many adults as possible.

So you can see that there is a great deal of work ahead of us. If we perform as I know we can, you should see us in the news, our student enrollments should increase, and our approach to adult education should gain ground in Connecticut and across the nation. This is the work we were invented to do 40 years ago, and we are thrilled to be asked to do it. I will keep you posted. Please drop me an email anytime, I enjoy hearing from you and sharing your progress with the rest of the staff.

Ed Klonoski, President
Charter Oak State College

What Does the New Year Hold?

As I begin preparing for the New Year, there are a variety of items I want to share with you. The most important item has to do with the challenges facing the entire higher education landscape. As I have said before, things are getting harder for all of us. There is increasing pressure on colleges to improve our outcomes (both graduation rates and graduate employment), reduce our prices, and increase our enrollments. The world wants us to be faster, cheaper, and better.

As you read this, there are four national conversations that I will be participating in that bear on these demands. In early December, I will join the Council for Higher Education Accreditation's new Commission On Quality Assurance and Alternative Higher Education. My role will be talk about non-collegiate assessments (badges and CCAP). Then in January I have been asked to deliver a plenary session at CHEA's annual conference called Innovation, Disruption and the Status Quo: What Do We Want for Accreditation? My talk will be about Education Without College: What Is It? Is It Desirable? Can It Last? In mid-December I have been asked to participate in a conversation about the link between college and employers by the Aspen Institute. And in early February I will be on a panel at the EDUCAUSE conference in New Orleans to discuss Strategic Innovation and Institutional collaboration.

All of these engagements reflect two important themes: Higher Education is undergoing remarkable changes and Charter Oak has experience in those elements that are changing. I have told you that we are working to help the U.S Department of Education re-think its Title IV financial aid regulations, and we have just heard that the department is going to request ideas for experimental sites that can explore those new ideas. Charter Oak has been collaborating with the Lumina Foundation and a set of institutions that are interested in competency-based learning to create An Experiment in Hybrid, or Mixed-Modality, Programs Using Competency-Based Education. This work seems to be moving to the next level and we are excited about submitting an application to be an experimental site. If we are selected, our students would be able to use their financial aid for portfolios and tests as well as online courses.

And finally, there is a movement right here in Connecticut around our Going Back to Get Ahead initiative. President Gray is committed to moving this project forward. In early Spring we hope to release letters to 100,000 Connecticut residents with credits from ConnSCU institutions but no credential. Charter Oak will be responsible for moving these students forward toward successful degree completion.

You might ask, what does all this activity have to do with me? Well, it's all designed to keep Charter Oak at the leading edge of higher education, and in the minds of those who award grants for new initiatives and funding. These efforts are part of our commitment to making college available and affordable to as many adults as possible.

So you can see that there is a great deal of work ahead of us. If we perform as I know we can, you should see us in the news, our student enrollments should increase, and our approach to adult education should gain ground in Connecticut and across the nation. This is the work we were invented to do 40 years ago, and we are thrilled to be asked to do it.

How can we help make your 2014 more productive and rewarding?

Happy Holidays to all of you!

More Feedback Please

This is a continuation of my previous blog that focused on your experiences with Charter Oak. We received some interesting and useful student feedback about courses, enrollment processes, and lots more. So I am encouraged.

I want to dig into your experience with our Fall 2013 courses. We have noticed that interest in our fifteen week courses is declining while our eight week offerings continue to grow in popularity. As a result, we are developing mostly eight week courses, leaving the longer format for those courses that require a longer learning curve. Please tell us why you are choosing the eight week format. How does this format serve your needs better than longer (or shorter) courses?

Next, we have also noticed that many of you were pre-registered for this semester, but at the deadline, you did not complete your paid registration. We know that adult students do not pay for their courses until the last minute, presumably because family money for your education must wait until the family expenses are covered. So we get that. But for those of you who did not finalize your Fall registrations, even at the very last minute, please let us know why not. What changed? What can we do to help?

And finally, we have been working hard throughout the entire College - Admissions, Advising, Registrar's office, and the Business Office - to better coordinate our outreach to you through the registration process. We have reviewed our outgoing messages, coordinated their content, and tweaked their timing; we have compiled "must call" lists and assigned those calls; and we have tracked the whole process. So now is a good moment to ask how we did with reminding you about registration, prompting you to meet deadlines, and working with you to make sure your course selections met your Plan of Study. Please let me know your thoughts about our process so we can do a better job of meeting your needs.

As always, I love hearing from you, even with criticisms. We are committed to being the best adult serving College out there, and only you can help us become that.

Distance Learning: Planning for a Disrupted Industry

Recently I had the pleasure of testifying before Connecticut's Higher Education Planning Commission. The topic was Distance Learning: Planning for a Disrupted Industry. I wanted to share my thoughts with you as they reflect much of what you are experiencing or have experienced in your own pursuit of a baccalaureate degree. This is over an hour of testimony and my contribution starts at the 10:10 mark:

View this video on CT-N's website

Highlights of the discussion occur around and following these times: 41:00, 49:00, 1:16:45.

I continue to find great pleasure in telling the story of our adult students. If you have feedback or thoughts, please post them here!

Ed

Charter Oak Receives Next Generation Grant

I have just returned from a wonderful three-day working meeting in Seattle held at the Gates Foundation headquarters. Charter Oak has been named a Next Generation Learning Challenge school, and we were funded to bring a team of 8 staff members representing senior administration, information technology, learning design, institutional effectiveness, and prior learning assessment to the working meeting. This is phase two of the Next Gen program funded by Gates, and they asked EDUCAUSE and the Innovation League to operate the program. Our eight-institution group is referred to as the Breakthrough Incubator Institutions. We are all pretty excited about both the honor and the work.

We were invited to apply for the funding by imagining a Breakthrough Project that we could manage if they gave us $100,000 in seed money. We proposed growing our competency-based learning initiatives -- testing, portfolios, and assessment of non-collegiate learning -- and increasing the amount of Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) credit on our graduates' transcripts from the current 13% to approximately 20%.

If we succeed in encouraging our adult students to implement more of our PLA choices, they will save money, graduate faster, and graduate at higher percentages. The Foundation was intrigued by this argument and our approach. So off to Seattle we flew for a series of 12 hour days. It was invigorating, creative, and we came to see our program more clearly. Our group will work toward a January launch date for our effort.

I write this just before I leave for a second trip related to this work. A group of us from Charter Oak (do you sense a pattern here?) have been funded to fly to Chicago for two days of conversation around how to get Federal Title IV financial aid to flow to competency-based learning programs. Currently, Title IV dollars (Pell grants) can be used to support courses but not tests or portfolios (even though these are less expensive options). So we have been part of a group of institutions fighting to get the Department of Education to allow either a Demonstration Program or a Pilot Program that makes competency-based programs eligible for federal financial aid. The Charter Oak vision for this is that the federal dollars should follow student choice not dictate it. If a student sees a test or a portfolio as the best choice for them, then their financial aid should empower this choice, not resist it.

So wish us luck. Higher Education is under real pressure to lower its cost while improving its outcomes. For our students, we believe we have the right approach to accomplish both of those goals, and prior learning assessment is the solution. And as always, I’d be interested in hearing from those of you that have used or are using some of these methods to gain college credit and what you thought of the value of that experience.

Charter Oak's First Effort at the Master's Level

We have been working toward our first Master's Degree in Organizational Effectiveness for a long time (a very long time). This week we actually launched our first effort at this level and how that occurred will surprise some of you.

I attended a press conference at the Connecticut Science Center on July 2nd to announce the launch of the Joyce D. and Andrew J. Mandell Academy for Teachers. The Science Center has created a program of hands on science learning for Connecticut's K-12 teachers, and at the launch they were lauded by the Governor, the Mayor of Hartford, and Stefan Pryor, Commissioner of Education, to name a few. In addition, they attracted the support of the Mandell family in the form of a major donation, so they are currently educating 50 teachers.

The piece of this story that speaks to Charter Oak is that we performed a CCAP evaluation of this educational program and found that it is deserving of nine graduate credits. You read that correctly. So this program is now Charter Oak's first graduate program. Notice that it involved our CCAP approach of using a team of faculty to assess training offered by someone else for College credit. This was the first time we used our master's level authority. Now, if the Science Center enrolls the 1500 teachers they are planning to serve, the number of graduate credits that will be placed on a Charter Oak transcript should be substantial.

When Matt Fleury, the Science Center CEO and our alum, brought me to the podium, I used my three minutes to comment on how Charter Oak is poised to build a bridge between corporate training and higher education that will make the trip to a credential shorter and less expensive for everyone who travels it. I took some pleasure in seeing several heads turn in surprise.

Happy Summer!

Weathering the Storm

We were proud to host our 2013 commencement ceremony on Sunday, June 2, in Welte Auditorium at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, CT. Below are some thoughts I shared with the Class of 2013.

Let me begin by congratulating all of you on your achievement.  Most of you have arrived at this moment along a non-traditional path, often after a number of false starts, and over far more than the usual number of years. 

But this graduating class has faced some extraordinary challenges because the past two years have been stormy—literally.  Connecticut experienced two hurricanes and two blizzards of historic consequences.  All of us know more about generators, storm tides, and snow removal than we ever thought possible.  But against that backdrop of extreme climate, this graduating class kept at it.  You persevered against not only the usual life events—sick kids, job loss, parental illness—but against the elements as well. 

During one of our storms, the generator that backs up the College data center ran for one week straight.  It kept our servers and our software running.  But it did not power up your houses or the computers of our faculty and staff.  Still, you persevered. 

It is not unusual at graduations featuring adults like you to talk about how “Life Happens.”  But never before has that phrase had quite so much natural disaster woven into it. 

But the same might be said for both our state and national economies.  They too are laboring through a storm.  The long, slow recovery from the recession of 2008 has been a hallmark of the years that you have been working toward your degree here at Charter Oak.  Your determination to finish your degree, even with the unemployment rate and the under employment rate so high, gives those of us who work in higher education both hope and inspiration.  You may not have realized this, while you were taking courses, passing tests, and working on your portfolios, but higher education has been under assault.  The value of a bachelor’s degree is no longer assumed.  Providers of such degrees, like Charter Oak, must defend its value.  Our success is measured in graduation rates, retention, and the employment success of our graduates.

So your participation in our program, your insistence that the degree you sought was worth the price you were paying, your honesty in critiquing our processes and our courses, all these reminded us that the degree path we are providing has value—to you.  And your seriousness, your persistence, your ability to weather the storms—both falling snow and falling stock prices—showed us the value of a Charter Oak degree. 

In every one of my graduation addresses, I take a moment to acknowledge the folks around you who supported your dream: the spouse who took on extra family responsibilities so you could write that paper; the kids who stayed quiet so you could read, and even the parents who babysat so you could go to library.  And this year, let me add the brother-in-law who loaned you a generator.  Graduates, give your support circle a hand…

Today I would like to close by thanking all of you for not surrendering your dream of a college degree.  Not when it snowed 3 feet, not when the wind blew, the rain fell, and the tides came in, and not when the snow broke all the trees in your yard.  Your fierce determination to finish what you started gives us the encouragement we need to keep improving, keep building new programs, to keep working to make you, our newest alums, proud.

Congratulations class of 2013.

Lowering the cost of a college degree: Charter Oak expands exam-for-credit offerings

We recently made the following announcement:

Charter Oak State College has partnered with the non-profit Excelsior College to expand credit-by-examination options for Charter Oak students.  Through an agreement reached with Excelsior College, Charter Oak will offer registration for Excelsior College Examinations on its website CharterOak.edu.  Students who register for exams will take them at a secure Pearson VUE testing center (www.pearsonvue.com).   Students can review the new exam offerings and register online at www.CharterOak.edu/examreg.

What this means is that we are working to expand the available tests that our students can take for credit.  Testing for credit is the lowest-cost approach to building your transcript.  It is possible to meet every Charter Oak requirement—except the Cornerstone and the Capstone courses—through testing.  We have even had students who accomplished their entire bachelor’s degree this way.  The key point here is that a test costs on average $150, which is approximately $600 LESS than a course.

The process for taking a test is very simple.  For the Excelsior exams, you sign up and purchase their test preparation packet.  This set of materials contains exactly what you need to know to pass the test.  It also includes sample questions so you can prepare for the type of test you will be taking.  When you feel you are ready, you sign up for the test itself, schedule at a test center near you, and take the exam in a proctored setting (which just means you are supervised as you take the test). The other national credit-by-exam organizations have similar processes.

That’s it.  Just choose a subject, register, purchase the test preparations materials, study at your own pace, and then take the test.

Yes, I know that most of our adult students hate tests.  But we also know that most of you get A’s and B’s in all your courses.  In other words, you are all good test-takers.  So here’s my proposition: try one.  It’s a $150 investment.  If you hate it, then you never have to do another one.  But if you pass the test, think of all the money and time you can save by testing for credit.  I am not imagining that you will do your whole degree this way, but if you did even five tests, that would be a savings of $3,000.  And that is real money.

America is looking for a way to lower the cost of a college education, and Charter Oak is committed to providing the solution.  I am traveling to Washington, D.C. every month trying to get federal financial aid extended to include testing (and portfolios as well).  Together we can show America the way.

If you decide to pursue taking an exam for credit, I would be interested in hearing about your experience here, or feel free to email me at eklonoski@charteroak.edu.

Thank you for your feedback!

Two weeks ago, I asked students to share with me what was working for you as a Charter Oak student – and what was not working. I was extremely pleased by the large turnout of responses I received. Your feedback is integral in shaping future plans for the College, and I thank you very much for taking the time to write such thoughtful and honest responses. I plan to share your thoughts with my staff as we work towards making your experience as a Charter Oak student the best it can possibly be. Below, I share with you a small sampling of the emails I received.

***

I tell everyone I meet that's considering on online school to check out COSC. I am proud to be graduating from COSC.

I spoke with Allison the first time I called.  She was very pleasant and helpful.  The best was when she called me back to let me know she had the paperwork needed and I didn't have to do anything. She took an extra step and the time to look through my file, which I believe she didn't have to do. That effort made such an impression on me that I just had to share. Going back to school as an adult can be somewhat intimidating. It’s reassuring to know that there are people available to help with guidance and understanding.

It is a significant drawback that COSC does not, at least, offer master's programs in Education, Political Science and some other fields. I have several friends that are interested in graduate studies at COSC based on my positive experience, but they were disappointed to learn that the school does not offer any master's programs. am finishing my Bachelor’s soon, and I would have liked to pursue my education here at COSC, had the school offered master's programs.

If it weren't for my advisor at COSC, I would have continued to take college courses, but would never have obtained a degree in anything.  I started taking classes at MCC many years ago, but never really knew anything about matriculation.  In 2009 when I first started inquiring at COSC, it was an advisor that told me about matriculation, transferred credits that were transferrable and I received my Associates degree with 100 credits!  I can't say enough about my advisor, Karen Schultz. She has changed my life.

I understand the difficulties inherent in the online experience – I’m an IT professional.  But the challenges at COSC are daunting.  Some classes work well apart from classmates and instructor, but other require that you be able to communicate with them in more immediate ways than email.  I didn’t mind registering for my own conference line, but a student who was not aware of that option would be trapped. 

2013 will hopefully be my last year as I plan to graduate. I actually am so proud of myself that I am going to put on a cap and gown. I have two classes, and two capstones to complete. I have not dropped out or given up partly due to my counselor, Doris Cassiday. When frustrated that I would never get done, she told me that I have gone too far to turn back now.

I never would have finished up my degree if I'd had to attend traditional classes.  I really enjoyed the pace of learning and doing assignments at any time of day, or while away on business or vacation.

***

I will be reaching out to you again in the fall to see how things are going for you, and I hope you will consider sharing your thoughts again.

Charter Oak needs your feedback

Every time I make a purchase, the merchant wants to know about my experience. Repair persons and installers ask for a high rating when the inevitable survey arrives. Stores put surveys on the back of receipts and offer prizes for turning them in. Even my auto repair shop asks for my feedback, and offers me comfortable seats, evening hours, and WiFi to boot. So now it is my turn. I want to know how you are doing.

My first question concerns the current crop of Charter Oak Spring courses. I would like to know how those courses are going for those of you who are enrolled. This question begins with the enrollment process and includes instruction, content, technical systems, and advising. And I am not just looking for complaints or problems, although I welcome the opportunity to improve. I am also looking for insights into what works well for you.

My next question is for those of you who have not registered for Spring courses. Why not? All the research is clear: the closer a student's course load is to full-time enrollment, the higher the rate of degree completion. In other words, the more coursework you can handle, the better the chances are that you will finish your degree. So it is very important to know why our students -- you -- are not enrolling.

And here is my favorite question: Why haven't you dropped out? Seriously, when we ask students why they drop out (and most of you have dropped out from somewhere before you arrived at Charter Oak), they all say, "life happens." But when we ask our graduates if life happened to them while they were working on their degree, they all say "yes." So what is it that keeps you going? Why haven't you quit? How do you get through the tough spots —- sick kids, job pressures, jobless pressures, threaded discussion burnout, or just plain fatigue?

Send your thoughts and answers to me at eklonoski@charteroak.edu or post in comments. I promise to give each of you a response, and truly appreciate your feedback.

Here We Go Again

This holiday season, I have been thinking about the things for which I am grateful. Certainly I would include health, family, my job, and our students in my list. But I would include something else as well.

I was lucky enough to be part of the Internet revolution in higher education. In the late eighties and early nineties, I was one of the higher education nerds exploring the possibilities associated with this new global network. While playing with new technology toys, I began to understand how this explosive communication revolution would change higher education. Those changes are best illustrated by distance learning, or the idea that learning is an activity not a location. Betting my career on those changes turned out well for me, and it has also turned out well for the College.

Today, as I look around the higher education landscape, I see another such "change moment" arriving. This time the driver is not technology, but money. For the U.S. to remain the world's dominant economy we must continually find new ways to increase the percentage of our working population that is educated. The aggressive pursuit to grow the number of people who receive higher education is what has driven our country's economic success. For the first time in generations, that percentage is slipping. And it is slipping because the cost of higher education has outstripped family incomes.

The solution to this problem is lower cost models of education, and, as I have written about before, Charter Oak's prior learning programs are being re-discovered by the larger educational community. Education that stresses assessment while opening the door to a variety of approaches to learning -- from classrooms to work experiences to military training -- lowers the cost and increases the speed of degree attainment. I can sense that those institutions that understand learning assessment are gaining leverage and will soon gain market share. Traditional higher education cannot "bend the cost curve;" only a new model can do that. I can't believe that I will be alive for two such disruptive education revolutions in a single lifetime. It feels like 1992 all over again.

Charter Oak was created 40 years ago to disrupt traditional higher education (long before Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen did the research that gave "disruptive innovation" its name). We are not designed to create sustaining innovations in the dominant model of higher education. We were created and then placed outside traditional higher education in order to be able to invent new approaches that serve underserved or unserved markets. Today it looks like we will be called on to figure out how to do those things at scale, for thousands of students instead of for dozens.

For those of you who have taken advantage of Charter Oak's prior learning assessment programs, I'd like to know about your experience. Please share your thoughts in comments.

So I plan to send my staff off for the holidays with this wish: Have a wonderful holiday season, and then come back to work invigorated and ready to invent the future.

Health Information Management: Charter Oak's first major

After two years of research and planning, we were thrilled to have launched our first major, an online Bachelor of Science degree in Health Information Management (HIM), on September 27. Just three days later, members of our admissions team took part in one of the largest HIM conferences in the country, the AHIMA 2012 Conference in Chicago.  Over 4,000 participants attend this conference, which is organized by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and is the largest of its type in the country.

Making the choice to offer a degree in this fast-growing field was a big decision for us, and one we think will pay off in big way for our students, both in their career trajectories and their salaries. Let’s step back for a minute and talk about how we got here.

Over the past 15 years, we noticed that our students were arriving at Charter Oak with fewer transfer credits. This means that they had enough course work ahead of them to complete a degree in a particular area (a major) as opposed to a General Studies degree (with a concentration). We realized our students didn’t just want to complete their bachelor’s degree as fast as they could; they wanted to complete their bachelor’s in a discipline that would get them a job in an emerging industry.

So we did our homework, and found that the Health Information Management (HIM) is one of the 20 fastest growing occupations in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with an average annual salary of $57,370, according to AHIMA. We knew this was an excellent next step for Charter Oak.

Our HIM program was developed by experts to equip students for the electronic management of sensitive patient health information and healthcare organization revenue cycles. Once approved by the Commission on Accreditation for the Health Informatics and Information Management Education (CAHIIM), this degree will prepare our graduates to sit for the AHIMA Registered Health Information Administrator (RHIA) licensure exam, and we will measure our success by the pass rate of our graduates.

Our foray into the world of HIM has been greeted with great enthusiasm by the health and insurance companies in Connecticut. In our Health Information Management video, you will hear from Cynthia Pugliese, Hartford HealthCare Director of Health Information Management, who is very passionate about this field. We also had a great reception by many in the healthcare industry while at the AHIMA conference in Chicago, and hope to draw students from across the country. Conference participants were also impressed by the affordability of our HIM program, an extremely important factor to students finishing their degrees in this economy.

If you are already a matriculated Charter Oak student interested in exploring this degree program, I encourage you to call your advisor. If you have friends or relatives who are looking to enter the dynamic new field of HIM, please have them call Moses Adgers (860-515-3832) in our Admissions office.

I will keep you posted on our progress with our HIM program. We consider it an important part of our work to continue creating new and cutting-edge online workforce-focused degree programs here at Charter Oak. As you have heard us say before, “We are a dynamic community of online learners advancing the nation's workforce one graduate at a time.”

I would love to hear your feedback about our HIM program, so please share in comments.

Back to the Future

I’ve just returned from a panel presentation in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the Lumina and Gates Foundations.  They asked me to be part of a small panel of institutions that are working to offer students a competency-based approach to higher education.  Specifically, Lumina and Gates are actively working to lower the cost of higher education by exploring alternative approaches to traditional college courses.  Their theory is that working adults have various skills and competences that could be assessed for college credit. Furthermore, they believe that adult students can learn independently using a variety of free or low-cost online courseware.

Charter Oak was placed in the mix because we have been working to provide such competency-based approaches to higher education for our entire 40-year history.  Lumina matched several new programs with our longstanding efforts to show the policy community in D.C. that competency-based learning is both tested and growing. 

I spent my time talking about our Portfolio, Testing, and CCAP programs.  The audience, mostly congressional staffers and D.C. organizations, was surprised and pleased to learn that we regularly graduate students who have completed a bachelor’s degree through testing for a little as $8,000.  They were also amazed to learn that through our CCAP program we can assess workplace learning (e.g. the State Police Academy or the Carpenters Union training program) and grant college credit for these robust training experiences.

 I explained that our Public Safety program attracts police and fire department employees because we value their training and help them use it as part of their degree program.  This approach speeds up their degree attainment and lowers the cost.  I think Lumina was very attracted to this approach.

 All the institutional presenters were offering models for degree attainment that shortened the time frame and offered more flexible curricula (through time shifting, online offerings, and prior learning assessment).  Each institution is working to lower the cost, shorten the time, and validate what students know.  I believe that this is the next big thing in higher education as the public pressure to lower costs increases.  The good news for Charter Oak is that the next big thing is something we have been working at for our entire history.

As always, I value your input as we make our plans.  If you have done an analysis of the cost of your Charter Oak degree or the savings you attained from using our approaches, I would love to hear from you. Your experience is the sort of “real world” evidence that would help me convince organizations like the Lumina and Gates Foundations that Charter Oak’s story and programs are valuable assets in this shift in higher education.  Please let me know in comments, or email me at eklonoski@charteroak.edu.

Congratulations to the Class of 2012

We were proud to host our 2012 commencement ceremony on Sunday, June 3, in Welte Auditorium at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, CT. Below are some thoughts I shared with the graduating class.

Let me begin by congratulating all of you on your achievement.  Most of you have arrived at this moment along a non-traditional path, often after a number of false starts, and over far more than the usual number of years.  All of you have been frustrated—right?  All of you have felt guilty about the time your studies took from your other responsibilities—am I right?  And all of you have worried about whether you were good enough?  All of this is a way of saying that you are second chance learners.

I have been coming to graduations at Charter Oak for 15 years, and I am always struck by two things: first, they are incredibly noisy…and second, they are incredibly happy.  Both are true for the same reason—our graduates are surrounded by their families, and those families are here to celebrate.

So as I prepared for this year’s ceremony, I asked myself what it is that makes these graduations so joyful and such a wonderful family moment.  Remember, most of our graduates are grownups who have sat in the audience cheering on their kids, or even their grandkids, at similar events.  So why are they sitting here being celebrated by their children, their grandchildren, and their spouses?

I think I can answer that.  The graduating classes of 2012 are all heroes. 

No, you are not heroes because you have risked your lives for others.  That is the heroism of our soldiers, firefighters and police officers.  But you are heroes because like Hercules with his 12 Labors, you have done a hard thing, an important thing, a good thing, an expensive thing, and you have done it for the right reasons. 

First, the reasons: Charter Oak grads are here because they decided to finish their degree.  They started something, it got interrupted, and they were determined to make that dream come true.  We live in an age where such quiet quests are not celebrated.  Instead, we celebrate overnight sensations, teenage millionaires, American idols, reality TV survivors, and stupid pet tricks.  But what we are here to celebrate today is a group of people who made a commitment to their education, and stuck to that goal through family emergencies, computer problems, financial setbacks, and bad weather.

You are heroic because you refused to give up, refused to quit, refused to quietly abandon your dream.  Like Odysseus, you may have taken a long time, but today you have made it home.

You are also heroes because you are examples.  You persevered, and all those around you watched you do it.  Your family saw you at the kitchen table reading articles, typing submissions to a thread, taking a timed test, and reading articles on Wikipedia. That homework often occurred during late nights after the family went to bed or early in the morning and even on holidays; but through it all your family was watching.  And they are proud of you. Am I right?

So how do I know that you are heroes?  I see it in your children’s proud glances.  I see it in your spouse, carrying a bouquet of flowers. I hear it in the laughter all around us today.  I even watched one of you at my own kitchen table. You have provided your family with an example, with a clear picture of what a person can achieve if they are willing to roll up their sleeves and do the work.  You have shown your loved ones that it is never too late to finish what you start.  And you have shown them that achievement is not about perfection or easy success; it is about perseverance, struggle, and the refusal to surrender.

As Bruce Springsteen so powerfully sings …No retreat, no surrender.  That attitude sums you up.

And for me, that makes you all my heroes.

Congratulations.   

Higher Education and Consumer Demand

Higher Education is facing a challenge that will require it to re-think its essential value proposition.  For generations, we have provided the degrees—think tickets—that were required for entry into the white collar, professional world.    Additional steps (degrees) were often required as well.  No one asked us how we decided what the content of those degrees should be.  We were a third party provider of credentials, and we were trusted to know how to produce effective workers.

So what has changed?  The first development was the shift from college being necessary for some of our workforce to it being the avowed goal for most of our workforce.  I won’t argue about whether this is a reasonable goal, just that it is the de facto goal for most high schools.  That shift meant we are no longer educating students who are already equipped with both learning skills and motivation.  Now we were/are being asked to educate students who may be underprepared for college and not motivated for its rigors. 

The second development followed that increase in scope.  Educating a dramatically wider population is shifting our focus from how higher education traditionally measured itself—faculty credentials, books in the library, research grants, etc.—to how prepared our graduates are for the 21^st century workforce.  To understand how profound this shift is I must turn to an example. 

Those of you who are my age (baby boomers) remember what it was like to shop for something before the Internet.  We had to trust sales people.  There was very little comparative information (except for Consumer Reports).  Pricing was a mystery.  Compare that experience to now.  You can enter your desired product into a search field and immediately find websites that offer the product, compare it to its peers, and offer prices for both new and used versions.  The buyer now has all the power.  When I was young, it was the seller who had the power, although those sellers had huge problems introducing their products to the public.

Another huge change is the ability for consumers to drive product demand and offerings.  Via the Internet, consumers now freely post reviews, like/dislikes, suggestions and requests for new products and services.

When I went to school, institutional reputation was determined by how exclusive a college was.  The fewer students it accepted from its applicant pool, the better it was.  Now, Internet resources permit consumers to ask much deeper questions about institutions, to compare them across more dimensions, to see what students think about their faculty, and finally, to compare prices.  These emerging capabilities, when viewed through the larger educational mission of higher education, spell change.  Our customers are now able to ask deep questions about our results.  How many students do we graduate?  What sorts of jobs do they get?  How much do they earn?  Can they repay their student loans? Will you offer an online master's degree?  Can I earn a credential in logistics, energy or education?

These questions signal a shift in power from the sellers—higher education institutions—to the buyers—students.  We saw this happen in every major industry as technology forced established companies to re-invent themselves (e.g. IBM, American Express, McDonald's) or be replaced (Kodak). 

In my next posting I will talk about some of the concrete actions higher education and Charter Oak are taking to adapt to this shift.  To help me address those actions, please share with me the most important factors to you when decided what college to attend. What questions did you ask?

What does Charter Oak mean to you?

Recently John Ebersole, President of Excelsior College, published a book called Courageous Learning: Finding a New Path through Higher Education (Hudson-Whitman Press).  The book highlights some of the most creative approaches to learning available in higher education.  Excelsior College is an institution very similar to Charter Oak; in fact, Excelsior played a role 39 years ago when Charter Oak was being created.  It serves adults, is non-traditional, and like us, works to validate the prior learning of its adult students.  John was kind enough to include a section about Charter Oak in the book.  I encourage you to pick up a copy.

As I explained our programs and students in our materials for the book, an idea began to take form.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out—directly from you, our students and alums—what Charter Oak means to you?  We think we know what you value from our list of programs and learning options because we see what appears on your transcripts.  We know who takes tests, who uses portfolios, how many credits you each transfer in, and how long you take to finish.  In other words, we have lots of data that describe your activities, but we do not have a statement from you about what meant the most to you on that journey.

The list of things that might have made all the difference for you may have nothing to do with our programs.  It might involve an advisor, or a fellow student, or an instructor.  It might be financial aid, or a scholarship, or just the low price of a Charter Oak education. 

I am preparing my graduation speech, and I would love to include some of your responses in that address.  So please give some thought to the question “what does Charter Oak mean to me?”  Send me your answer either by email to eklonoski@charteroak.edu or in the comments on this post.  And as always, I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,

Ed

Online learning and the 21st century workplace

I get asked how Charter Oak State College is preparing students for the workforce at every meeting I attend, and my answer is one I enjoy giving time and time again.  I shared it at a meeting in Washington, DC last week, and one of the college presidents attending told me he was going to include it in his blog.  So I decided that I had better get my idea into print before I needed to cite someone else.

All kidding aside, the question of how higher education is preparing students for the 21st century workforce is a critical question for our industry. It is being asked with increased urgency because so many students are borrowing larger and larger sums of money to pursue their college education. So it should be no surprise that the questions about whether these loans are justified by the learning are getting louder.

My answer is this. When I look at the classroom experience of our online students, what I see is a perfect example of the 21st century workplace. Like the workplace, our online courses are distributed in time and space, are technology-driven, collaborative, and short term. In effect, the strategies and behaviors of an online class mirror the strategies and behaviors of the 21st century workplace. Let me explain.

Our online courses emphasize communication between the instructor and students.  This communication is executed through email, threaded discussions, and various types of digital presentations. The course activity occurs within the framework of a Learning Management System—Blackboard’s Learn, in our case. 

This technology is necessary because while students take the course as a cohort, they do their “work” on their own schedule.  For example, each set of assignments is due during a given week, but there is no specific time when the whole class meets.  This is called asynchronous learning.

That same Learning Management System makes student collaboration easier. Our courses use very few high stakes objective tests and a large number of collaborative (team) projects.  Students must produce work, share that work with their instructor and classmates, react to suggestions and offer them to others, play a specific role in the team’s project, and then deliver a final product by a due date.
 

And finally, since the vast majority of our students are working adults going to school part-time, these courses are just part of the work they do every day.

What I have just described is what an average work day is like for most people employed in this 21^st century economy.  Employees often team up with colleagues who may not physically work in the same office, or even the same state or country. They collaborate constantly, and use a variety of communication technologies to support those collaborations. They may also be members of a variety of teams, none of which is their only job.

Charter Oak State College's students are being prepared for the 21st century workplace because their academic activities occur in the same online space, using the same tools, and arranged in the same collaborative teams as that workplace.

Would you agree? If you are a former or current online student, does this idea resonate with you? Please share your thoughts in comments. I would love to hear them.