What if we subscribed to learning and educational engagement throughout our careers?

A huge trend has swept the world over the past few decades. While few have connected the otherwise disassociated patterns, there is an unmistakable increase in subscription-based models. The rise of leasing has grown to more than 30 percent of all new car transactions; the advent of software as a service (SaaS) has grown in tandem with cloud hosting; the percentage of households renting vs. buying is higher than any point in the past half century; Amazon has created a “Subscribe and Save” model; and the list goes on. Subscriptions have grown nearly across the board.

In education, we “buy” our degrees — that is, we pay for them through tuition and fees. While cumulatively going into debt more than $1.6 trillion, many pay for the purchase over a lifetime. And when the last semester ends, so does our service — with minor exceptions in the alumni association area. Meantime, the bills continue without any new value add. Yet continuing professional education is in high demand among both employees and employers. In fact, the publication Human Resource Executive reports, “Today’s youngest workers called education the most desirable benefit (not including healthcare), outpacing even paid sick/vacation leave and retirement savings programs. Eighty-eight percent say they would be more likely to recommend their employer because of its education benefits.”

A number of factors have come together to suggest that there may be an emergence of a new model in higher education that follows the trends in other fields. First and foremost, the advent of artificial intelligence and associated technologies is ushering in the fourth industrial revolution, and with it comes a rapid turnover of jobs and workforce needs. Many of the jobs of the past and today will not be long-lived in the coming few years. The change patterns are complex and interrelated, resulting in the need for constant upskilling, reskilling and reinvention among workers. The Brookings Institution does a deep dive on the anticipated impact of these changes writing their report “Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How Machines Are Affecting People and Places“:

The power and prospect of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) initially alarmed technology experts, for fear that machine advancements would destroy jobs. Then came a correction of sorts, with a wave of reassurances minimizing their negative impacts. Now, the discourse appears to be arriving at a more complicated, mixed understanding that suggests that automation will bring neither apocalypse nor utopia, but instead both benefits and stresses alike. Such is the ambiguous and sometimes disembodied nature of the “future of work” discussion.

This model of constant change and sustaining new needs is not best met with a static baccalaureate, static master’s or static doctorate completed just “once and then done” model of higher education. That model may have worked in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it is not a good fit for the 21st century. Just as consumers are leasing, renting, subscribing to other services and products to meet their changing needs, so too is higher education on the brink of changing to meet the evolving and ever-expanding needs of our clientele.

There is reason to believe that higher education will soon join the trend of moving to subscription funding rather than purchasing. The president of edX, Anant Agarwal, writes, “Recognizing that we need to expand the options for students to gain an education, higher education institutions are starting to innovate, creating new ways to unbundle degrees and create non-linear, modular career and education pathways.”

We have seen the changes in early disrupters in our field such as StraighterLine, which markets courses through a $99-per-month subscription plus a per-course fee starting at $59. Coursera has announced a personal subscription plan of $399 per year for learners based on the plans they have offered to businesses and campuses. Now, many continuing ed credit providers offer subscriptions to a menu of classes based on annual or monthly fees. LinkedIn Learning offers a massive catalog of 15,000 classes by subscription starting at $19.95 per month.

Subscription models abound. They are the sustainable future of higher education. It is all about growing with the learners from where they are today to where they will be tomorrow through evolving and expanding continuing professional education and engagement.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the “semester without end” approach that I initiated some 25 years ago. In the intervening quarter century, I have offered an increasing number of curated reading lists in topical areas of value to former students and professionals in our field of online and distance education. Millions of web views and thousands of daily email subscribers continue to follow the postings through blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook — in this case at no charge with no advertising. For example, see the UPCEA Professional and Continuing Education Update. Imagine if every class we offered were to provide an ongoing curated reading and discussion list, making for a subscription-worthy service for graduates.

Do you provide continuing value to learners after they have completed your class? How might you generate a continuing value add for those graduates of your program as they enter the changing environment of the workplace? Would this enhance the dynamic of learning at your university? Is it possible that a subscription to these value-added ongoing enhancements might generate a continuing and ever-expanding revenue stream?

This article was originally posted in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning. 

In 2005, more than 120 U.S. universities came to the aid of some 20 colleges and universities that had been impacted by Hurricane Katrina through shared online classes.

There is much discussion now about continuing the delivery of the curriculum in instances where the new coronavirus may disrupt traditional campus offerings. This is not the first time that such discussions have taken place. In most cases, disruptions affect only a few colleges and universities.

But in 2005 it was the massive Hurricane Katrina that disrupted more than 20 colleges and university and created widespread destruction along the U.S. Gulf Coast. A remarkable, historic response was mounted by universities across the country to deliver online classes to assist the affected campuses. Just last week I was asked by UPCEA vice president for online and strategic initiatives Julie Uranis to discuss on a virtual chat what lessons I learned from the Katrina Sloan semester that may apply to the situation that we face today.

My personal involvement in this began back in 2004 as I started a study of the SARS virus and the groundbreaking action of U.K. universities to offer classes online to assist Hong Kong universities. In the summer of 2005, I submitted a grant proposal to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the study. My daily routine back then was to communicate in the early mornings with my colleague, friend and director of the University of Online initiative, Burks Oakley. We would discuss developments in our field and plan initiatives for the future. On Aug. 31, 2005, Burks alerted me to the devastation of colleges and universities by Hurricane Katrina. We rapidly converted my early research and interest in emergency online learning into an initiative to address the unfolding disaster.

The Sloan Consortium president and Alfred P. Sloan Consortium program officer, Frank Mayadas, immediately recognized the potential. And the rest is history — a history of more than 100 colleges and universities offering accredited, credit-bearing online classes to students from the affected universities during half of the fall semester of 2005. Important contributions came from the late Bruce Chaloux of the Southern Regional Education Board; John Bourne, executive director of the Sloan Consortium; and so many other dedicated and talented people around the country. George Lorenzo chronicled the event.

Most importantly, a number of lessons were learned in our experiences 15 years ago about how we can best provide emergency online delivery of classes. Many of these may be applicable in cases where campuses may be impacted by sequestrations and other restrictions due to the spread of COVID-19.

Among the lessons that I recommend we consider today are:

Create the delivery framework — some of this can be done even before the “go” decision is made.

• Have a central communication site (campus webpage) for students, staff and faculty — organize by academic structure — links to colleges, then to departments, then to courses.
• Create a course shell in the LMS for every class offered on campus (many universities do that as a matter of course each semester).
• Populate those classes with rosters when the decision to move forward is made. In most cases, the appropriate classes will appear to each student.
• Move the basics as soon as possible — syllabus, discussion board — and solicit an announcement from faculty.

Triage priorities and ledgering are critical! These are most important, followed by communication.

• Identify first courses to be served: for example —
  • Largest enrollment classes in an effort to serve the most students
  • Senior seminar and capstone classes — students who are about to graduate are desperate to have the diploma; their first jobs are stake!
• Establish a clear hierarchy for triage.
• Create an action priority spreadsheet and ledger of who is doing what, where they are in the process and when each task is estimated to be complete.
• Communication — it is essential to keep the team in constant contact; this will require multiple paths of communication for concurrent messaging.
  • Use Slack, Microsoft Teams or some such app so you can be doing your work while at the same time updating the team, asking questions and keeping a record of the communication. Use email, Zoom or another conferencing software, text messaging, etc.

Staffing and support — there will not be enough!

• You will not have enough staff to do this if you have hundreds or thousands of classes to address in a day or two (hence the importance of the first points about triage and priority)
• Supplement your instructional design staff with select faculty members who are online champions. They can serve as mentors to help bring their entire department or another department along.
• Eight-hour shifts will not be enough, so consider 12-hour shifts. Based on our Katrina experience, know that some will work 18 hours a day on this — consider scheduling conference call meetings with faculty between 6 a.m. and midnight.

You cannot succeed alone: cooperate, collaborate, communicate!

• This is not going to be highly refined — do not let perfection become the enemy of good.
• Instructors must decide what can reasonably done to advance learning to achieve the established learning outcomes for each class. That may mean reordering or organizing materials in a different way to accommodate the unexpected closure of campus.
• Contact faculty and experts at other locations to share resources and virtual guest lectures.
• Imagine you are in a ship at sea — it is leaking; you have to plug the hole; hundreds or thousands of passengers (students) are at risk. Do whatever you can to stop the leak — stuff T-shirts in the hole if you have to and keep bailing to move the ship forward.
• The point is in each case you are going to try to cover an anticipated four weeks of closure in your first pass, then reassess after a couple of weeks.

Finally, this is not an excuse to ignore accessibility guidelines — those should be steeped into your development process.

Take your laptops home with you tonight — make sure the university VPN is installed so you have access to all campus resources. Wash your hands. And sleep, beginning right now.

This article originally was published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog.