{"id":1770,"date":"2009-12-09T06:06:18","date_gmt":"2009-12-09T10:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1770"},"modified":"2009-12-09T06:06:18","modified_gmt":"2009-12-09T10:06:18","slug":"online-grandiosity-failed-so-get-back-to-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1770","title":{"rendered":"Online grandiosity failed, so get back to work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So <a href=\"http:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2009\/12\/09\/u21\">U21 Global looks like it&#8217;s failing<\/a>, after the dumping of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2009\/09\/03\/globalcampus\">U of I Global<\/a> and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2008\/06\/19\/distance\">morphing of Western Governors<\/a> from the &#8220;we&#8217;re going to conquer the world through online enrollments&#8221; stage into the &#8220;we&#8217;ll settle for 10,000 students based on a Netflix model of tuition with half of our students in teacher ed&#8221; stage. <\/p>\n<p>This is not the death of online education, which exists at virtually every institution of some size. Nor is it the death of scaled-up online education, since there are several outfits, notably the K-12 Florida Virtual School, which appear to have done just fine at a large size. So what&#8217;s made the difference between the thriving programs and the dying programs?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Thriving programs serve specific purposes. Florida Virtual School is not trying to conquer the world. It addresses a few specific needs, notably providing catchup classes, a few basic requirements that many students would like to&nbsp;&#8220;get out of the way&#8221; to take other classes they prefer face-to-face, and some opportunities unavailable in smaller&nbsp;districts. The fact that thousands of students in Florida find those valuable is related to the size of Florida, not a lack of specific planning on the part of the Florida Virtual School&#8217;s administration. <\/li>\n<li>Thriving programs have stable (and nurtured) feeder relationships. An online program <em>within<\/em> a university can develop constituencies much more easily than Vague Global Program, and the Florida Virtual School has cultivated or taken advantage of a number of ways that students find out about its strengths (as far as I can tell, from other students and from counselors).<\/li>\n<li>Thriving programs have staff and teachers in a relationship modeled on bricks-and-mortar schooling. Florida Virtual School has made a point of explaining its acceptability in part because it has a dedicated staff and faculty &#8220;just like&#8221; the local&nbsp;public school down the street. As far as I can tell,&nbsp;thriving online programs within universities tend to treat faculty teaching online like other faculty, largely because they are faculty in regular departments and because the hiring patterns for full-time faculty normatively follow departmental patterns. How many ads in the <em>Chronicle<\/em> have job positions in an &#8220;online&#8221; department as opposed to a position in&nbsp;anthropology, economics, marketing, etc.? <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What appears to have died is online grandiosity, and that&#8217;s a good thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So U21 Global looks like it&#8217;s failing, after the dumping of U of I Global and the morphing of Western Governors from the &#8220;we&#8217;re going to conquer the world through online enrollments&#8221; stage into the &#8220;we&#8217;ll settle for 10,000 students based on a Netflix model of tuition with half of our students in teacher ed&#8221; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,12,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-higher-education","category-the-academic-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-sy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}