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.