I had a meeting a couple of weeks ago that I was supposed to do something about … until now, I haven’t acted on it at all. Things have been nuts, so I don’t feel too bad. But, the time is right and I thought instead of just typing up a proposal in Word, I’d post some of the thoughts here and see where it takes me.

The meeting in question was a get together that the Dean of our School pushed us to have. Quick background … he received an email (more of a spam) from a Dean at another University’s I School. The email contained a video introduction to the Dean, to the University, and the I School at that University. I said ho-hum, he said, “cool, let’s do the same thing.” He ended up asking our Marketing Manager, Director of Development, and myself to make it be so. The three of us met to discuss this idea and luckily I wasn’t the only one who didn’t think it would be appropriate to spam prospective donors, students, and faculty with multi-megabyte movie files of talking heads. That just doesn’t speak to me as being something a School like ours should be considering.

I started showing the others in the room blogs and blogging software, started discussing the power of RSS, and we talked about how this could be a very powerful publishing engine to drive traffic to the School. We discussed a scenario in which the Development folks would contact key members of our Advisory Board (these are heavy hitters in the IT world) so that they could contribute a post once a week or so … the Dean would have two tasks, one would be to moderate some of the postings from Advisory Board members and the second would be to post original thoughts about the School, the state of IST, and other things that make sense to our stakeholders. Guess what? They loved that! So the IST Leadership Blog Space may be coming soon. We’ll couple it with a bit of marketing materials and see where we end up.

I don’t pretend to think this will be a perfect solution … its been said before, but content is king and without content who is going to read? That will be a big test of this … I’ve been involved in so many “must haves” at the School only to see the huge effort to create them be wasted by inactivity and a lack of content. We’ll see … but what a better approach than sending our audiences spam. Makes me happy.

I came across this article last night and cued it up for a quick read today and thought I’d post a few thoughts and reactions — of course from my point of view. The article, Online Education Flunks But New Focus May Spark Revival, is an interesting read and does a decent, if limited job of describing the challenges of the eLearning boom and (perceived) bust. I understand the point of the piece is to look at the big-time (for-profit) initiatives lots of Universities engaged in and around the Internet craze of the dot com era … where it fails to go, IMHO, is at the way these distance or web-based learning initiatives have driven resident education.

Get in the way back machine with me for a minute … when I came to PSU, I was fresh off my stint in start up land and had just accepted a position at the University in the World Campus (WC) as an Instructional Designer. At that time, the WC was all abuzz with huge upside, tremendous growth potential, and the start up feeling I had just left. The only problem was that the University, in traditional University fashion, went head first into the initiative without a whole lot of thought on how to actually implement the thing. Our early numbers showed that … the University did lay some amazing groundwork to what has become a successful program, but a lot of that has happened in the last couple years … they’ve since built a relatively efficient process, workable policies, done some major reorganizing, and taken a few lumps to create a sustainable model. One thing that struck me about the WC back in the day was that eLearning courses built by us in the WC were not to be used for resident education, period … that was a very strange decision in my mind (of course I didn’t understand the political underpinnings at the time) … and one they’ve since reassessed.

Fast-forward a couple of years as I move over to the School of Information Sciences and Technology to get our eLearning initiative going and to do it the right way. I was one of the first employees in the School, so there wasn’t the history of how it was done in the past — we invented our situation. We decided from day one that eLearning would support our resident offerings first and be used for distance education second. Fundamentally, a great idea given our School was a start up and was at 19 of the PSU Campuses across the Commonwealth of PA. eLearning was used to support a consistent and quality learning experience in the classroom. That is a key differentiator … our eLearning materials are designed to help faculty at all locations get the real core of what IST is all about.

I think going forward we’ll see more success for pure DE types deliveries, ala World Campus, but I think more and more schools (k-20) will be using designed content as the basis for a lot of what happens in the classroom. Its funny, the year I came to IST to start the Solutions Institute I went to the President’s State of the University Address and listened to him say something to the effect of, “I see a day in the future where all of our resident courses will be a blended, hybrid structure with both in class and eLearning components …” It made me sort of angry at the time … I thought, why isn’t he talking about IST, we’ve been preaching hybrid for a year now? Looking back, I know he was. To date our eLearning program, Online IST, has touched over 10,000 enrollments in just four and half years … what’s amazing is that faculty have chosen to adopt it to change what goes on in the classroom. Good stuff!

eLearning isn’t at all dead, and was never a bust … its alive and will continue to fundamentally change what we as teachers do and what our students come to expect. Its a perspective thing … and its easy to have my point of view sitting inside the non-profit world of higher education, but let’s get real, if it didn’t make a difference and it was bleeding dollars we’d be done with it. Or, I’ll be wrong again … who knows … what do you think?