Browsing Tag: Higher education

– I’d like to thank Dr. Eric Fredericksen for that very kind introduction, I feel exactly the same way about him. He’s a wonderful colleague and friend and privileged to serve
with him on the OLC Board, and really delighted to be here at the University of Rochester. I will tell you, I’ve
never been to Rochester, so this is my first trip to the city, and obviously, my first trip
to the University of Rochester, so Eric very kindly took
me on a nice little tour this morning, it’s a beautiful day. What a beautiful sprawling campus, I mean, I’m just so impressed
with what I’ve seen here, and again, very happy to join you today, thank you for coming. I am from St. John’s University,
I’m not a native New Yorker by the way, I grew up in Pennsylvania, and went to college in Pennsylvania, and then relocated to where I
presently live in Long Island, New York. But I work at St. John’s University, how many of you are familiar? A few, right, a little bit familiar, you’ve heard about the
basketball team, maybe? (laughing)
Right, basketball, yeah. That’s another whole story. I have to charge extra for that one. But St. John’s University, I’m
gonna tell you a little bit about that today, and
obviously to speak about what we’re doing with online
learning at St. John’s, that’s really the core
of what I’m here for, but I’d really love, and
I know you’re eating, so I won’t make you talk right now, but by show of hands, how
many of you are currently teaching online,
currently teaching online? Okay, that’s not a bad number. How many of you are considering,
perhaps, teaching online? No, we’re not taking notes or names. Okay, so some of you are
considering it, that’s good. And how many of you are administrators, non-teaching, sort of
personnel, anybody here? Okay.
– Well, I’m both. – Both, okay, okay. We wear a lot of hats sometimes, right? Understood, okay, so
we’ve got a really good, and I know we have some
graduate students here as well, right, who are our graduate students? Thank you for coming, it’s
great to have you here too. All right, so let me tell you a little bit about what we’re gonna talk about today, and then we’ll launch into it. I do have a presentation prepared, but I do invite you to ask, if
you have a burning question, and it just can’t wait until
the end when we do Q & A, feel free to jump in and ask or comment. It’s meant to be more of a
conversation than anything else. So this is what I planned. We’ll see if we can get through all of it. I will talk about the St.
John’s Organization and mission, which is fairly unique, and something that’s
deeply related to that, which is the strategic
priorities of our institution, and how online learning fits into our institutional priorities. The history and programs and
online learning initiatives at St. John’s, historical
and currently underway. I will definitely touch on
professional development for faculty who are teaching online. I oversee that unit and it’s
very near and dear to my heart, professional development for faculty. Talk a little bit about
student and faculty feedback and what is on the horizon
for St. John’s University, relative to online learning. So that’s my planned agenda. All right, tell you a little
bit about St. John’s first. St. John’s is a fairly large university. We are located in Jamaica, Queens, in the borough of Queens in New York City. So we are an urban institution, but we’re not unlike this campus, very green, very beautiful, like an oasis that somebody plopped in the
middle of Queens, New York. It’s a great place. We were founded nearly 150
years ago in Brooklyn, New York, by the Vincentian community
of the Catholic church. We are a Catholic institution,
faith-based institution. We were founded, primarily,
to serve the children of immigrants to New York
City, especially those in need. So that is very much part
of the Vincentian tradition, and I’ll talk a little bit
more about that in a minute. We are a private, non-profit,
research-doctoral, professional-dominant, if you’re into Carnegie Classifications, you know what that means. That is our classification under Carnegie. I think of St. John’s, not
as a research-intensive university, unlike the
University of Rochester, we are a teaching institution. That is what we’re really about. Research is important, however. We have seven campus
locations at St. John’s. The main campus, our
big residential campus, is the Queen’s campus. We have campuses in
Manhattan, Staten Island, we have a small campus out in Long Island, in Hauppauge, New York. We have campuses in Rome,
Paris and Limerick, Ireland, so big institution, spread
out around the world, and a very rich history. We have academic units,
including a College of Pharmacy and Health Science, Collins
College of Professional Studies, our School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, our College of Business,
School of Education, and a law school. Okay, so those are the academic
divisions at St. John’s. 1,471 faculty, according
to the latest count, which I think was last fall. More than 21,000 students at St. John’s. The vast majority of
them are undergraduates. Undergraduate students. And as I started this conversation, we are part of the Big East Conference. We have 17 NCAA Division 1 sports teams, and sports are a big deal at St. John’s. Okay, so that’s kind
of the general overview of our institution. Now, the mission and values of St. John’s are something that I really
felt I had to touch on today because they perfuse
everything that we do, everything that we do at St. John’s. We are a Catholic,
Vincentian, metropolitan and global university. This is part of our mission statement. As I mentioned earlier,
we were founded in 1870 in Brooklyn, New York, at the request of one of the Catholic bishops
in Brooklyn, John Loughlin, to serve the youth of New York City and the children of
immigrants, specifically. So this extends the vision
of St. Vincent de Paul, if you’re familiar with Catholic doctrine you may have heard of him. He was a 17th century French priest, and this university was
built with his values and his vision at the heart
of everything that it does. We direct all of our resources
of faith and knowledge to combat social injustice. So social justice issues
are very, very critical to St. John’s, and we
are constantly looking at online learning and it’s
place in that whole landscape of how to serve, how to
serve these students in need. Okay, so that’s the story. I’m giving you an org chart
here that I’m guessing you can’t see very well from the back, and you don’t need to. This is just to give you an
idea of how we are organized at the senior level of administration, and how online learning
fits into that landscape. So at the top of the chart
here, you see the provost and vice president for academic
affairs, that’s my boss, and he has a fairly large
number of direct reports. If you start on the
left side of the chart, he oversees all the deans of
the various academics units that I just mentioned, and
there are seven of them. Plus a vice provost at
our Staten Island campus, which is more of an operational office. And university libraries
is also one of those deans. And then next to that, the vice president for student affairs reports
up through our provost. Our chief enrollment officer
reports up through our provost. Vice provost for academic support services and faculty development. The vice provost for digital
learning, that’s yours truly, I’m in the center of the chart, selfishly. Not really, but that’s where I put myself when I made the chart. An associate provost for
administration and accreditation, that’s our chief accreditation officer. We have an associate
provost for global programs, an associate provost for
academic resources and planning, that’s our finance person, right. And then the director of
institutional research. So that covers a lot of
territory at the university. Our provost is a very,
very busy individual with a great number of very
important responsibilities. I’m just one of those
smaller boxes down below. So the point that I wanted
to make with this slide was to tell you that my position
was created five years ago, it’s a new position at St. John’s. I’m the first person
to occupy the position, which is something that
I feel very pleased and honored to do. And underneath the vice provost position, there’s an Office for Online
Learning and Services. So this is a central service unit. It was created before I arrived. There was an associate
provost who was doing sort of a part-time gig as
the director of that unit, and then he decided to move on, they decided to create a new position, and I came in and basically
restructured that office, because the one thing that
we didn’t have at St. John’s that I felt we desperately needed was an instructional design team. So all of the new hires in
Online Learning and Services that I was able to make, and I was able to make four of them, there are three instructional designers, and there’s a media specialist
that does media production. And we serve the entire university, so this is a small but
mighty operation, right. So we report up through the provost, and as does our Center
for Teaching and Learning. Our Center for Teaching
and Learning reports up through Academic Support and
Faculty Development Services, and I do a lot of work with
the Center for Teaching and Learning, we collaborate
a lot on providing professional development to our faculty in a variety of areas, but obviously my area is
online learning and services. So that’s how it looks here. The other thing I wanted to
mention about the structure, which has a real impact on how we operate, is information technology reports up through a different officer,
not through the provost, and academic technology
is part of that group. So that’s another area of the institution with which I interface quite a bit. I mean, everything that we do
depends on academic technology so that’s a really important relationship, and we work very closely with them. Any questions so far? Following? – [Man] That Center for
Teaching and Learning is for all of the schools? – This is for the entire
university, it’s a central, it’s not, well it is now. We actually have a new
space that was built for the Center for Teaching and Learning, within the last two years. Before that, it was
just a very small office and it was more of a concept
than an actual operation. But now we have a physical location. We have a very, very small staff there. They don’t really do their own programing, all of the programing that
we do at STL, at St. John’s, is delivered by St. John’s faculty, it’s peer-to-peer kind of instruction. But now that online learning
exists in its current form, we also deliver our
offerings through the CTL. University libraries delivers
professional development through the CTL, there’s
a lot of partnership and collaboration with CTL. It’s an important unit. Anybody else? Okay, so that’s the
lay of the land, right. Online learning at St. John’s, so online learning didn’t
start when I arrived. We’ve been doing online
course work at St. John’s for nearly 25 years, and it’s grown very
organically, I would say, at St. John’s University,
grew out of faculty interest, and student interest in
providing some flexible and convenient formatting
for students to take courses, and the first pioneering
faculty that delivered these courses didn’t have
a lot of support and help, or resources with which to work. But nevertheless, they forged ahead. Our fist online course was
officially offered in 1995, and as you go down the arrow here, you’ll see that we adopted
a distance learning policy in 2002, we do have a formal
distance learning policy, it’s quite old now, I think
it’s time for a refresh on that by the way, I need to
get on that when I get home. Yeah, that’s an old policy, but one of the great
things about that policy, which I was delighted
to see when I arrived, was that we do require our
faculty to be certified to teach online before they
are assigned an online course at St. John’s. And so, that has made my job
of professional development a bit easier, I’ll say. By the way, we also have a
unionized faculty at St, John’s, did I mention that? We do. Unionized faculty. Okay, so the distance learning policy, our first online program was
a graduate program, in 2003, it was our master’s in library
and information science. Why did we start with
that program, any guesses? Any guesses? The discipline as a whole
moved into online learning pretty early on in the game, and there was a lot of
competitive pressure to start to move in that direction in library and information
science at the time. Coincidentally, the person
who ran the online learning office was the program director
for library science as well, so I think that had
something to do with it. So that was back in 2003,
small program by the way. We did our first online associates degree, we do some associates
degrees at St. John’s, the following year, 2004,
online bachelor’s degree, 2005. There was stuff going on
between 2005 and 2014, but 2014 is when I arrived on the scene, so I gave myself a dot there in 2014, and that’s when we hired our
instructional design team. And we delivered our first
online doctoral degree two years ago. It’s a PhD in literacy, in
our School of Education, fully online, there are not many of those. If you Google it, you won’t
find too many of them, so we’ve done, actually,
very well with that program, there’s been a high demand for it. It was a heavy lift, though,
to get a fully online doctoral degree up and running. We now have two, we
added recently a doctoral of professional studies
in homeland security. That’s through our College
of Professional Studies. So moving right along to, yes. – [Man] What’s your bachelor’s degree in? – The online bachelor’s degrees? – [Man] Yeah. – We don’t currently run them. We discontinued admission
to the undergraduate online programs at St.
John’s about three years ago. (man mumbling) We just weren’t attracting students. – [Man] Within a certain subject area? – Yes, so we had one in liberal studies, we had one in criminal justice, and we had one in business, it was like a business
administration type of degree. General business. And it was run out of our
college, these were all run out of our College of Professional Studies. Because of enrollment
issues, the new dean decided we’re not gonna admit to
these programs at this time, we have to revisit what we’re doing at the undergraduate level
with online learning, so. That was a good question,
I’m glad you asked it. Any others? Okay, so that’s the history. Now, let’s talk about current
situation at St. John’s. When I arrived in 2014,
a new president arrived three months after I did, and some of the discussions
that we’d had around my hire and the plans that we
had for online learning development changed, as a result
of the new administration, which is good, that’s fine. But one of the things
that he very quickly did, our new president, was to
implement these four new strategic priorities for the organization, for the institution. And they’re very simple
and straight forward, deliberately so, and
everybody at St’ John’s, you can stop anybody at
St. John’s on the sidewalk and say what are the
four strategic priorities of St’ John’s University? And they will be able
to answer that question. They have been well socialized. So the first one is to
ensure student success. The second one is to recruit, recognize and retain the best faculty
staff and administration. So these first two strategic
priorities are focused on our students, focused
on our faculty, admin and staff community. The second two are a bit different. Number three is to enhance the teaching and learning environment, that’s where I spend a
lot of my time in my role. And the fourth is to expand global and community partnerships. So we don’t have a
conventional strategic plan at St. John’s University. We have strategic priorities that we visit and review every single year
at a president’s retreat, and we have a lot of
action items underneath each one of these priorities, and we review this on an
annual basis, and we asses it, and we look at our progress, and we look to see where
we need to shift gears as conditions change, in the world and in our
programs, and so on. So these are the strategic
priorities under which I now operate in terms of what
we do with online learning. So, again, another slide
that you can’t read, and you don’t need to. I will leave this with you, by the way, if you’re interested. So we have student success at the top and my organization, Online
Learning and Services, is really more of a
faculty-facing organization. We don’t work directly with
students, we don’t recruit them, we don’t serve them, we
don’t work on retention, or any of those sorts of things. All of our online programs are delivered by the academic units, and they are under the
purview of the academic units. It’s very decentralized,
right, very decentralized. But we are a central support service. Now, because it’s such a
priority at St. John’s, we are constantly looking
for ways to participate in promoting student success. So, for example, one of the things that we’re working on now is a new student orientation process. So student orientation to online learning. I have an instructional design team that can build such an experience. And so, if we have the capacity
to do that, we do that, because it’s a priority
for the institution. So that’s one of the things
that we’re working on. Another is looking at ways
in which we can contribute to student retention and satisfaction, specifically in online
courses and programs. So these two things that I just mentioned are very much front and
center this academic year for my unit. And I won’t go into
all the detail on them, but these are things that
we are working on now. Then we go down through the
other strategic priorities, I’m not gonna list off all
of these things for you, I’ll leave you with the
slides and you can read them if you’re interested, but we
spend most of our time here, enhancing the teaching
and learning environment. That’s a big one for
us, that’s where all of our professional development resides, that’s where we’re looking at developing and delivering high-quality
online courses and programs that meet Quality Matters standards. Quality Matters is a nationally
normed rubric that sets out, and I don’t know how many items
are on that survey, do you? – 43.
– 43 items on this rubric. So quality standards in online learning. We haven’t adopted it
wholesale at St. John’s, but we use a number of these standards in the process of designing
and developing online courses, so we’re very focused on quality. Creating digital content
and helping faculty to learn how to integrate media
into their online courses, which, of course, enhances
student engagement, satisfaction, it’s all related, right,
you can’t really separate these things so neatly, and we have a person who’s
dedicated to that, on our team. And then, of course,
identifying and discussing best practices with our faculty. Bringing them into
professional development events and activities to help them understand what’s industry standard,
what does quality look like? That sort of thing. So enhancing the teaching
and learning environment, very, very important, and it’s
my role as the vice provost to advocate for the
tools and the resources that we need to get this job done. And I spend a lot of time on that. Expanding global and
community partnerships. Now, this is an interesting one. We just are wrapping up an
initiative that we undertook with our Office of Global Programs. They asked us if we could help them to develop a professional
development learning module to assist faculty in creating
global learning experiences within their courses, because global is very
important at St’ John’s. And not all of our students are able to go and study abroad, for example. A high number of them
do, about 48%, I think, of our undergraduates study
abroad, which is pretty high. But not every student will
have that opportunity. How can we provide those
opportunities online? What can we do online? So we worked with the
Office of Global Programs and we developed this module, one of our instructional
designers worked with their three faculty members at St. John’s to create this experience, and we’re rolling it out for
the first time this semester. So I’m very proud of that
because it’s not normally in our wheelhouse, but it was something that we were asked to do,
we had he capacity to do, and we were able to deliver that. So we’re very eager to see how that goes. So these are just some examples
of the kinds of priorities that we’ve set for the current year. Okay, I mentioned a few
of these things before but I just wanted to run down
the list very quickly with you of what we currently offer
online at St. John’s. Our registered programs, the
programs that are registered with the State of New York. We have the two doctoral programs
that I mentioned earlier, Homeland Security and Literacy PhD. We have about 11 master’s degree programs, a lot of them are in
our School of Education, as a matter of fact, school leadership. We don’t have Curriculum
Instruction online, yet, I hope we will soon. Instructional and
Administrative Leadership and just a bunch of
different master’s programs out of the School of Education, and related graduate level
certificate programs. And then the student
population, it’s interesting, ’cause we have a fairly
good number of programs here on the list, but our fully online student
population is modest, not quite 500 students who study
fully online at St. John’s. Out of the 21 plus thousand
student body, right? So it’s a small footprint. Online courses, very different
story, very different story. In spring, 2019, which is
the last real good data that I have, we enrolled 6,200 students. Now, these are duplicated numbers, so we could have had one student taking more than one online course. 6,200 student enrollments
at the undergraduate level, more than 260 course sections, undergrad. We are a residential campus, we know that we have students
sitting in our dormitories taking our online courses, it
happens, right, it happens. And it happens because
they need the flexibility, they need the time, they
need the convenience of not having to physically
appear on the campus. We have a high number of
commuting students at St. John’s as well. And let me tell you,
from personal experience, the commute into Queens is not fun. Not fun. It’s a great place, but
the commute is not part of that great experience. So undergrads, which certainly have shown an increasing demand. If we look at the demand curve over time, it just keeps going up and up and up. At the graduate level,
there is demand, for sure. Most of our graduate programs,
when they’re offered online, they have a face-to-face
counterpart as well. So students have the option of
sort of going back and forth between online and face-to-face courses. About 2,500 student enrollments
in the spring of 2019, and about 200 course sections, so that is also on an
upswing at St. John’s. So, here’s another
interesting little factoid that I didn’t put on the slide but I have it committed to memory. We offer more than 200,000
credits at St. John’s every year, and of those 200,000 plus credits, about 10% of them are fully online, so that gives you an idea
of how much online learning we’re doing. In the overall scheme of things, it’s not a huge slice of the pie, but it’s a continually
growing slice of the pie. It went from 6% to 8% to 10%, let’s see what happens next year. Questions? Yes. – [Woman] You mentioned
undergraduate level courses that are both in person and online. Can you talk about the
difference in the experience? – Sure, well– – [Woman] For the same
course, the same content. – It is, these programs, by in large, were built as face-to-face programs, traditional on-campus programs, and for various reasons, decided
to offer an online format. So we had to transition
from that format to online. With the idea that these
are the very same courses, in terms of learning outcomes
and objectives and content, it’s the same experience
delivered differently. So, we do most of our online delivery in an asynchronous format. We do offer synchronous tools, but most of our online coursework
is done asynchronously, so it’s essentially the
same faculty as well. Most of our online courses are delivered by full-time faculty at St. John’s. We do have adjunct
faculty that participate, but mostly full time. So it’s the same faculty
member who’s teaching a section here or a section there,
in a lot of the cases. Does that answer your question? Okay, you’re welcome. Anybody else? – [Man] Liz, you talked about
synchronous and asynchronous. Is your synchronous constant, or do you feel like there’s
been growth in synchronous. Adding synchronous, at least, components? – Yeah, I think there has been. – [Man] Is it a growth area or– I do see it as a growth area. I think that I see it at
the individual course level and also at the program level, so for example, we have
an online MBA program. I’m just taking this as one example. We have an online MBA
program, late to the market. Everybody else had an
online MBA a long time ago, but ours just came to the market within the last couple of years. And a lot of fully online
programs, like business programs, are starting to implement a requirement for an in-person
orientation, or intensive, at the beginning of the program, maybe somewhere in the
middle, somewhere at the end, and so at the program level,
we see that happening, and it’s in person, not just
synchronous, it’s face-to-face. The synchronous components that
you’re taking about, online, yeah, we’ve had a lot
more faculty interested in using web conferencing, WebEx
tools and things like that, that’s the tool that we use at St. John’s. You may have others that you use here. So, yeah, I would say that
we don’t encourage people to require synchronous
components necessarily, at a program level. There are trade-offs to
that, as you well know. If you attract a national
audience to a program, or an international audience
to an online program, and you have required
synchronous sessions, you’re limiting your audience, right? You’re going across time zones, it creates all sorts of things. But at a course level,
and we primarily serve our New York metro region, a lot of people are
using synchronous tools. – [Woman] I have a question. You had said you offer
face-to-face and online and they can flip back and forth. Do you mean within the same semester, that can flip between your
live and your online or– – No. – [Woman] No, so your
online students are online and your face-to-face are– – Yes, so if we have a program, I’ll use our graduate accounting
program as an example. We have a graduate accounting program, it’s offered face-to-face,
it’s offered fully online, students must make a
decision as to which pathway they’re going to take. But the thing is, they can
actually take a few courses in a different format if it
turns out that they need to. We don’t prevent them from doing that. – [Woman] Right, in other words,
they could take two courses face-to-face and one
online if they’re trying to resolve a schedule– – Correct, correct, yes, yes. – [Woman] So there’s no
courses that are blended or a hybrid class? – Yeah, we have those too. – You do?
– Yes, yes we do. I’m not focusing on them
today, but I’m glad you asked, because we do. And I actually have taught a few of those at St. John’s myself. I teach in our EdD program in Instructional Administrative Leadership in the School of Education, and I love teaching in all
these different formats, they’re great. We don’t do as many hybrid
courses as we do fully online, and I would venture to say,
in my personal opinion, it’s harder to do hybrid courses well, than it is to just do them fully online or fully face-to-face. That’s been my personal experience. Some of you might, I
see some people nodding. Yeah, it’s not always easy to
do it in that way, but we do. Anything else? We probably have a lot of
hybrid programs at St. John’s and we haven’t even identified
them as such, necessarily. Because students do
have these options now. Okay, so on the technical side of things, I’m just gonna give you a
smattering of some of the tools that we’ve adopted, that
we use at St. John’s. Obviously, the learning
management system is critical. We are a Blackboard school. We are currently in Blackboard Learn, we are transitioning to Blackboard Ultra. Anybody know about Blackboard here? What’s your, is that what your, okay. So everybody knows about Blackboard. Yeah, so we’re making
the transition to Ultra, have you done that? – No.
– No, not yet, okay. I’m not gonna talk about it. – [Woman] Is it that bad? – No, no, I’m not gonna talk about it. But with Blackboard, obviously, there are a lot of tools
that are native to Blackboard but also a lot of tools
that can be integrated with Blackboard, it’s
fairly flexible in that way. You can do asynchronous
and synchronous instruction using tools in Blackboard, and the web conferencing tool that we use, as I mentioned earlier, is WebEx. That’s the one that we support. We are also seeing an increasing interest on the part of our faculty, and certainly it’s been a push
through our IT colleagues, to design for mobile devices, so that students can
participate wherever they are, at anytime, on pretty much any device. And a high, high number of
students come to St. John’s in possession of a mobile device, whether it’s a phone or a tablet. We also have a laptop
program at St. John’s. Every student at St. John’s,
entering as a freshman, gets a laptop. There’s a fee built in but
everybody has a laptop. So that is something that we’re seeing some growing interest in, and certainly something to
keep an eye on, I think, for the future, if you’re not
already involved with that. The integration of social media platforms. Very, very interesting. I find a lot of faculty are
interested in using social media in their courses, especially
with their undergraduates. It’s something that, these are
platforms that are familiar to students, they use them all the time. Finding ways to integrate
them into the curriculum and into delivery is
something that I think is very powerful, so we do that. I don’t even know what they all are. I mean, if you could name
every one of those platforms, there’s no prize at the end or anything, but some of them probably look familiar, some of them may not, right. Digital multimedia and courseware. A lot of our faculty, this is a little bit more discipline specific, I would say. A lot of faculty are
integrating digital courseware into their curriculum, and
using these tools extensively. I don’t necessarily have data on that because it’s sort of up to the
individual faculty who adopt to do that, and using major
publishing company’s software. And then, of course, file sharing, and we’ve got a variety of tools for that. So I think we’ve got a fairly, and I don’t even have everything up here, I feel like we have a
pretty good set of resources for online learning, on the
technology side at St. John’s. I think we’re very fortunate to be able to use all these tools, and they’re fairly well supported as well. Okay, going through this quickly. So, when Eric and I talked
about this discussion today, we talked about some of the
more general initiatives that are underway at St. John’s, I think I’ve given you a
flavor for what, you know, the purpose that online
learning serves at St. John’s and it’s place, sort of, in the ecosystem of learning at St. John’s. It’s a small slice of the
pie but a growing one. In the individual academic units, there’s some interesting
initiatives underway as well. For example, our law
school makes extensive use of lecture capture technology. Law students go to a
lot of lectures, right, a lot of lectures, and
the law school decided to do lecture capture for all
of its lecture courses, and to make those lectures
available after class so that it’s a supplemental
resource for students that are taking these courses. It’s very popular, apparently, and they’re doing well with it. Law school, I don’t know
a lot about actually because they function fairly
autonomously at St. John’s. We don’t interact as much
with them as I would like, but we’re working on that. I think part of the reason is because there’s so many restrictions
on legal education and JD degrees. There’s only a certain percentage
that can be offered online according to all these
different organizations, I don’t even know all of
them, but it’s changing, the landscape is changing
with law education so we’ll keep an eye on that. OER, open education
resources, anybody using them? You are using them? Good, what do you teach,
if you don’t mid my asking? – [Woman] Professional
development for math teachers. – Okay, okay, so you’re using OER. If I may ask, what
prompted you to do that? – [Woman] No, personally, I use (mumbles) and some of those– – Oh, okay, I see, so not in
the curriculum, necessarily, but just you’re familiar and
you’re using the tools, okay. Yeah, so open educational resources, I won’t spend a lot of time on it, it’s not something that we’re
doing a lot of right now at St. John’s, but this is
an area of intense interest. An area of intense interest. In fact, I just attended a
demo from a vendor yesterday. It was for the university libraries. They provide a system, an
administrative backend system, that integrates all of
the library collections in addition to all the OER collections that are out there for students. And it’s especially interesting
to me for online courses because it really just, literally, puts all of the course
readings, materials, everything that you need for a course, at the click of a button,
it’s an amazing resource. Keep your eyes and ears
open relative to OER. Yes. – [Man] On that one, is part of that idea to think about a strategy with OER to avoid textbook purchases by students? Is that a driver for that? – It is, and it comes back
to our Vincentian mission and the people that we serve. So we serve a very high number
of Pell eligible students. Students who come from very
modest financial means. And so money is an issue,
it’s always an issue for our students, and how can
we help them to address that? And I think OER is one
of those strategies. So that is one of our motivations, and one of the reasons
we’re talking about this very intensely right now, to make these resources
available to our students, to reduce the cost of textbooks, yes. Anybody else? Okay, another area of interest, and this is not specific
to one academic unit, it’s more of a university-wide discussion, is around the notion of micro-credentials related to stackable credentials. So the idea that we’re a
very traditional university, we’re offering associates
degrees, bachelor’s, master’s, PhDs, and EdDs, and certificates
here and there, right, certificates here and there. But we’re really interested in
looking at micro-credentials, these smaller certificate programs, if you wanna call them that, or programs or units or modules for which we can create digital badges. And then some of these
might be offered for credit, some of them might be offered
as non-credit offerings, but the idea is that students can come in, they can take a set of
learning experiences, we’ll call them modules
for arguments sake, and then get a credential for that outside of their normal
curriculum, let’s say. And the idea is that if
they’re offered for credit, that those credits might be applied then to a larger degree so
that there’s a pathway that we can create for students, all the way from an associates level through a PhD or doctoral level. And implementing these micro-credentials for certain skills and
competences that they need but may not be able to get
in their normal curriculum. So it’s an area that I see as
very promising for St. John’s. I think it’s something
that faculty seem to be very interested in. I’ve had, I don’t know,
over the past two weeks, I’ve had three different program directors and associate deans come
to me to ask me about this. So this is something that I think, again, we wanna pay attention to. Hybrid and low-residency
online graduate programs comes back to your comment before, Eric, about synchronous and
asynchronous learning experiences. Being where we are in New York City is a wonderful competitive
advantage in some ways. We’ve got a high population density, and, of course, I think a lot of us know that most fully online students, that are signing up for
fully online programs, are going within a 50 mile radius of where they actually live. They’re not venturing far to
get to an online institution, they’re going to online
institutions very close to home. So that’s an advantage for us as well. But we’ve got this big,
beautiful sprawling campus, like you do, right, and
we wanna make sure that we’re leveraging all of
our assets in this way, so this notion of hybrid and
low-residency online programs is something that I think
has started to take hold at St. John’s as well. And we’re certainly exploring
how we can integrate a little bit more of the face-to-face
or synchronous components into our fully online programs, and on the other end, how can we bring some additional online
learning experiences to our residential students? Which we’re doing a
better job of the latter, and we need to work a little
bit more on the former. So these are some of the things
that we’re thinking about and looking at. How about you guys? Does any of that resonate
with what’s happening here? – [Woman] We’ve been having discussions at the Simon School
about the digital badges and micro-credentials. And thinking about
moving into that market. – The Simon School is which one. – Our business school.
– Sorry. Business school, right,
yeah, that makes sense. Anything else? – [Man] What’s the conversation like about the low-residency? Are you talking about
low-residency master’s programs or residency doctoral programs? – Both, both. – [Man] In certain schools? – [Man] What does low-residency mean? – It means that there are
required face-to-face components but they are very minimal,
they’re short in duration. So, for example, I had the
good fortune to attend an event this semester with a brand new cohort of our online doctoral
students for Homeland Security. So it was great because
I very seldom get to meet with online students,
it’s just not what we do, but I was invited to this event, I said, I’m gonna go, I wanna
meet some of these people. So I went and I started talking
to the brand new students in the cohort, it’s a
cohort-based program. They were required to come
for a week-long intensive at the end of the summer, before they started the fall semester, so that was a requirement. It was timed such that
they could actually do it because these people all
work full time in the FBI, in the military, some
of them were deployed, but they could get there
for that week, right? So that’s a good example, I think, on one of these low-residency. It’s a fully online program
in the regular semester, all the coursework is fully
online in fall and spring, but they do have these occasional
face-to-face experiences. That’s what I mean by low-res. Anything else? And one of the reasons
they came to the program, ’cause I asked them about it, I said you had other choices, right? Why did you pick this one? And they said because it’s St. John’s, and they were familiar with St. John’s, St. John’s has some brand recognition, especially in criminal
justice, homeland security and things like that, and because they had known people that had been to St. John’s, maybe parents or other family members,
and because of the format. The format was one of the
most important things to them, because some of the other
programs in that discipline were fully face-to-face
or had very minimal online and they just couldn’t go,
they just couldn’t attend under those circumstances. – [Man] In our science and engineering we’re about to embark on
an analysis of that space in that some of our more unique programs, optics, for example, where
we’ve always been a hub for optics, but could we get
more grad program attendance if we had partially online
or professional degrees where they were mostly online, but maybe they would
come here for experiments and things that they would do in optics? And we’ve certainly seen a
huge growth in lecture capture. I mean, I looked at one, was
it biochemistry, what was it? – [Man] Chemistry, it was chemistry. – [Man] Like, tens of thousands
of hours of watched video in a single semester, it’s
kind of mind blowing how they– – Well, when you’ve got
a course like chemistry, like I’ve taken a few of those, a chemistry course, it’s very intensive, there’s an awful lot of
content that you need to pack into a course, and the opportunity to
review a lecture like that, it’s great, it really helps those students who are trying to scribble it all down, but really to go back
and review in that way I think is great. We didn’t have that in
my day, I wish we had. – [Woman] For your micro-credentials and stackable credentials,
you seem very attuned to who your student population is. Are those things that you’re
targeting your alumni, like people who’ve already
have some bite size with you and you think of this as like
a continued relationship, they get these added on? – Well, that’s a great idea. Thank you. We haven’t actually gotten
that far in the discussion, this is a fairly preliminary
kind of discussion at the institution. It’s just something that we feel, that we have a future here, and an idea that there
is a market for this at various levels. I just met with an
undergraduate dean yesterday who wanted to have a
discussion about this. There is professional
and continuing education types of offerings,
and that’s more in line with what you’re talking
about, and targeting alumni, people who have a
connection to St. John’s. So, yeah, I think there are
gonna be different levels related to micro-credentials
and digital badges, some of which will be
more of like professional and continuing ed, non-credit and focus, and others that will be opportunities within the actual curriculum. There are a lot of ways
to do this, is my point, and we haven’t landed on
one specific direction yet. – [Woman] In medical
school, we think a lot about how to do credentials that
are combined with the PhD, or even, can we make our
MD curriculum three years, and that fourth year being a
different degree of what it is, or is workforce readiness? What does our workforce
need as they change? Do they need something
(mumbles) informatics? Do they need implementation science? Do they need, so things where
an MD is not gonna go back and do a full master’s program, but what they need is
something a little bit more than that weekend seminar. And so, is this some type
of solution for that? – Right, I think that’s
a good train of thought. I’ll be interested to see
where you go with that. – [Woman] Me too. I know we’re running out of time, but I think we have time
for one or two more? Please. – [Woman] A couple of questions, one from a student perspective
and one from a faculty. So, what is the average
age of your students, and do you find it challenging
to provide online programs as students are older? And the second question regarding faculty, do you find the requirement
to have a certificate for online teaching a
barrier for some faculty to actually provide
that type of education? – So I’ll start with
your first two questions. The average, I don’t have these
data at the top of my head, but I’m gonna give you a
pretty close informed guess. The undergraduate average
age is young at St. John’s, it’s probably 22 or 23, on average. Graduate students, I think it’s about 29. So we have a fairly young
student population, okay, and a lot of them have
been exposed to educational technology in their primary
and secondary schools, and things like that, so the technology is not a
barrier for undergraduates. It’s time management, it’s
discipline, it’s focus, it’s persistence, those are the
things that we grapple with, with the student side. What was the other part of that question. – [Woman] That was the question. – That’s the question, okay. So on the faculty side, is
it a barrier that we require? This has been a requirement for so long that nobody ever really raises
a fuss about it anymore. They know that this is the
expectation and the requirement, and it’s not the only
pathway to certification. My unit offers a four-week
certification course. It’s called Online Teaching Essentials, that’s the bar that they to pass, right. We also offer some other
optional training after that. But nobody really barks at
it and the only thing that we have to make sure is that
we can offer enough sections of it throughout the academic year to accommodate folks that
are teaching for the first, if I’m teaching in class for
the first time in the spring, I wanna make sure I get that
faculty member in in the fall to do the required training. Some people come in and request a waiver based on previous
experience and credentials, and I review those, and we
do issue waivers as well based on prior experience, so I haven’t found it to
be a heavy lift at all. And I don’t think the faculty do either, and it’s a really good course. So I think they get a
lot of value out of it. – [Woman] I’m curious if you have done any program evaluations,
you know, with students or faculties about how they
actually perceive the learning experiences with this online program? – As a matter of fact, we have. This is an area where I
feel we need to do better, and we need to more on
student outcomes and feedback and satisfaction, and also
faculty feedback as well. But on the student side,
I will tell you that because we are a unionized faculty, the instrument that we use to
do student course evaluations is collectively bargained, it’s written into the faculty contract. We can’t do anything but what’s there. And I will tell you that the evaluations for the online courses are the
same instrument, basically, as the one for the face-to-face courses. So there’s some challenges with
that, which I won’t go into, but largely speaking, I’ve
been looking at the trends over the last five
years for online courses verses the face-to-face counterparts, ’cause they’re offered,
usually, in both formats. No significant difference in outcomes or student satisfaction,
no significant difference. The trend lines are almost
exactly overlapping. So the feedback from students is good, and it’s actually getting
a little bit better in the last couple of years, and I would attribute that to the fact that we’re getting
better at delivering it, and that we’re offering more
resources to support it. Faculty, there are
different issues for faculty who are interested in
dipping into online learning. They’re often concerned
about cannibalizing their face-to-face courses and programs. We have a number of faculty at St. John’s who have been there for many, many years, and they’re concerned about that. And they don’t really see
the pedagogical benefit, or how it could be as
good as or better than a face-to-face experience, so they hold that face-to-face experience as their gold standard, if you will, and there’s another whole discussion we could have about that. So, the faculty feedback
is not really about having to train for it or how to do it, so much as it is about
what does this really mean for my engagement with my students? How do I achieve that in an online format? I don’t see how I can possibly do that, and it’s our job to help
see that path forward and to be able to deliver that. And I think once they do
go through that experience, they take some of the strategies and tools that they’ve developed
for their online learning back into their face-to-face
course design and delivery, and they find that they’re more satisfied with what they’re doing face-to-face, having incorporated that, so it seems to have a lot of
tangential benefits as well. It’s not for everybody, and
there are people who will never teach online at St.
John’s, and that’s okay. But I find more and more,
especially as new faculty are hired every year, that there is a willingness,
and even an expectation, they’re gonna be teaching
online at some point. I hope I answered your question. One last one. – [Woman] I’m curious
about whether you have any statistics of the following up, and relational statistics, to prove that which types
of community students is more successful,
with the online degree, the students with online degree, or students without the online degree. Which one is more accepted
in the world market? In other way, whether the
online, totally online degree, is accepted by the work market? – That’s a great question
and I think it also has a relationship to the discipline that you’re talking about. Whether it’s a business or
healthcare, whatever it may be. I don’t have those data on students who have graduated from
St. John’s programs. The curricular are identical, there is no indication
on a student transcript or anything that it’s
been an online program verses a face-to-face program. An accounting degree is an
accounting degree, end of story. Now, the perception of an online program out in the workforce
is a different matter. I think, in my personal opinion, there is growing acceptance
of online degrees, especially when they’re
issued by accredited, not-for-profit institutions, like ours, that have a good academic reputation. So I think there’s more openness to that than there has been in years past. Would you agree with that, Eric? – [Eric] Yeah. – Yeah, so I think that it
really depends on the discipline. I have heard stories,
I’m not saying where, which institution, but
I have heard stories of hiring committees saying,
oh, online degree, no, not gonna consider that candidate. I think it really depends
on the discipline. Any other thoughts about that? – [Woman] If it doesn’t
say it on their degree, why would you even put down
that it was an online degree? – We wouldn’t even know that
it was one or the other. – [Woman] ‘Cause when I first
came to the Simon School, I kept it pretty quite that
part of my graduate degree, I completed online, because
I could hear some of our faculty make some
pretty disparaging remarks about online education,
so I thought, well, just keep that under my hat. So I have MS in accountancy, but you could either do
face-to-face or online, and I only did online when I had to solve a scheduling conflict. And so the vast majority of
my degree was face-to-face, but occasionally, you know,
oh, I gotta teach class at that time and I gotta
take the online session. But there is that kind
of connotation that, oh, if you did it online, it
can’t possibly be as good. And I found, very quickly,
that the online courses I thought were a little
bit, even more rigorous than on face-to-face. – Yeah, that’s true, I mean,
I think a lot of people are surprised, and a lot of
our students at St. John’s are surprised at the rigor
and the quantity of work to be done in an online course. They’re expecting it to be
an easy ride and it isn’t. And it shouldn’t be, it
should be of equal rigor, if not more, than a face-to-face course. Why not? So, yeah, that does come as
a surprise to some folks. I know we’re out of time, Eric, and I don’t wanna go too much longer. (Eric mumbles)
Are you sure? Okay, so as far as what’s
coming next at St. john’s, I don’t wanna spend too much time here, but we’re certainly looking at our unit, Online Learning and Services,
is looking at partnering with other units in the organization to deliver some of these
programs that I mentioned here. The Office of the Mission, okay,
again, Catholic university, Vincentian, mission is a big deal, has come to us and asked
us to help them put their orientation program
for faculty and staff into an online format. And this is a really big
lift because they do a lot of instruction in this area. So we said, okay, we’ll help
you, how could we say no? Right, how could we say no? So we are working on that currently, and helping them to design
and develop online format for this orientation program. Academic integrity, we
developed a learning module for students at the undergraduate level. This is kind of a remediation,
it’s a learning module delivered in Blackboard
to help to remediate and educate students about
plagiarism and academic integrity and things like that. So when students get disciplined for that, this is something that they have to do in this particular academic unit. So that’s been pretty fun and interesting. Diversity, equity, inclusion,
big topic of conversation at our institution right now, and we are looking for
ways to help our faculty to integrate these principles
into the curriculum across the disciplines. So I’m sure we’re gonna be
working with our DEI office at St. John’s to help to
design some online modules for that purpose. Accessible course design, ADA compliance, this is ongoing work and
I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with this. We developed a self-paced
learning module, again, for faculty, self-enroll in Blackboard, to take them through
accessibility issues and design and development. The online student orientation
I mentioned earlier. The Blackboard Ultra transition, which is gonna be a big deal
to transition to a new format. And I’m also undertaking some research with one of our doctoral
fellows this semester. I have a captive and I
said, you’re gonna help us with our research. We’re looking at our student
course evaluation data over the last five years, and also the outcomes of out
OTE four week required training so some research going on
in our department there. So these are some of the
things that we’re taking up. So with that, I’m way over my time and I apologize for
keeping you longer than you expected to be here, but again, thank you so much for coming, it’s always a pleasure
to meet other colleagues out in the field that are
doing this kind of work, or considering doing this kind of work, and to have a conversation with you, so thank you very much for
having me, I appreciate it, and thank you Eric.
(applauding)