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.