UPCEA Updates

By SmartBrief Editors

This post is produced in partnership with UPCEA.

As the Associate Vice Provost for Professional and Continuing Studies at the University of Delaware (UD), Dr. George Irvine has spent the last six months transitioning his division’s programs from in-person to wholly online due to the pandemic. He chaired a university-wide committee to prepare UD faculty to teach predominantly online in the fall 2020 semester. In this Q&A, Dr. Irvine shares his insight into the direction of continuing education for the remainder of this year – and beyond.  

Question: Tell us about your journey into and in the professional, continuing and online education field.

Answer: Ever since grad school, I’ve been in the field but didn’t know it.  My first job out of graduate school in 1996 was promoting American environmental policy and technology in 11 Asian economies by using training programs, study tours to the US and symposia in Asia.  These were all geared toward industry and government leaders, i.e. working adults learning new skills and technologies.  I was already in the continuing education field! 

When I “officially” joined the field in 2008 by joining UD’s Division of Professional and Continuing Studies, I immediately recognized the connection between my international development work over the prior decade and UD’s in-person and online professional development programs.  The online portion of my work has ballooned over the last three years given its importance to deliver education in our new pandemic-caused reality but also due to our students’ preference to learn online given its convenience and accessibility.  The journey in the field has been a fun ride to date.  We’ll see where it goes from here.      

Q: How has the work you did in your doctoral program informed your new role as associate vice provost? How has it shaped or changed your current thinking?

A: Short answer – in a whole lot of ways!  Long answer – I see a university as an ever-changing organization that continuously serves its diverse publics, not just a monolithic “public.”  It doesn’t matter if it is a private or public university.  These are just legal definitional terms.  All universities are public organizations because they educate citizens, conduct research that fosters economic development, provide valuable public goods in the forms of degrees etc., but they are also accountable to the public.  It is this on-going process of serving the public while simultaneously responding to the public’s demands for service that shapes a university’s publicness. 

So how does this affect continuing education, you ask?  We in the field of continuing education find ourselves on the leading edge of change in academia because we are fundamentally attuned to this changing university publicness that I described.  We interact with industry, government, our students every day to do our work and, in the process, we become open to and happy to change and be entrepreneurial.  Now is the time for us to bring our change readiness to bear on the acute problems facing higher education today – to help save the rest of the university from the pandemic’s on-going negative effects.  We can’t just be the kitchen junk drawer of the university.  We have to get out the drawer and help the kitchen run smoothly! 

Q: You have extensive experience working with the corporate community in Delaware. Can you tell us about that, and what others should know when building corporate relationships? Are there other things happening in Delaware that would be of interest to others in the field?

A: Our small size gives us the advantage to forge close ties across sectors – industry, government, nonprofit and the university.  We have open communication with corporations who do business here in Delaware.  They tell us their workforce development headaches and we help them address them.  Recently, we partnered with a major multinational bank that is domiciled here in Delaware to provide successive cohorts of its employees with a data analysis certificate.  The bank needed data scientists and analysts and we are helping them develop them.  This partnership grew out of open lines of communication between the university and the bank. 

So, the first step in working with businesses and corporations is to listen to their needs rather than tell them your program lineup.  Then, be honest with them if you can help them or not.  Sometimes our expertise and programs fit, sometimes they don’t.  Then, delight the customer by delivering research-based knowledge that it is hard to get elsewhere.  After they assess the outcomes of the learning, 80% of the time, they come back to us for more.  It just all starts with listening rather than selling.  We’re currently working on using this approach for online learning, which comes with a different set of challenges and opportunities. 

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges for leaders in our field today? What new and exciting things do you see on the horizon?

A: The university’s traditional currency – the degree – is becoming less popular due to changes in technology, changing workforce development dynamics, and declining household income due to the pandemic.  Families are rebelling against ever-increasing tuition rates and, in turn, legislators press universities about cutting our prices.  Plus, some companies are not requiring a degree for jobs that just a few years ago would have required at least a bachelor’s degree. 

A decline in the demand for degrees poses an existential threat to universities.  We, the leaders of continuing, professional and online units, must help the “core university” create new forms of knowledge that are shorter, cheaper and accessible because that is what students and employers are asking from us. But, we must ensure that these are quality educational programs, not just off-the-shelf products that don’t reflect our research knowledge. This should be easy for us to do if we can overcome institutional biases in favor of degrees and shrink our fixed cost base that has been supported these many years by degree tuition.  We can certainly help the university evolve this way.  We invented the system that we must change, after all.  Helping the university evolve as a role leader in our field should embrace.  If we don’t, someone else will lead it after all.

Q: What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?

A: Oddly enough, I didn’t follow the best career advice that I ever received!  My grandfather, who helped establish the United Nations, advised me to specialize in my studies and then generalize in my career, i.e. be a specialist in something since it is then easier to become a generalist later rather than vice versa.  I went the other way around and in hindsight I can see the merits of my grandfather’s advice.  Specialize and then branch out as you apply your specialization in different contexts. 

Dr. George Irvine serves as the Associate Vice Provost for Professional and Continuing Studies at the University of Delaware (UD).  In this role, he leads the Division of Professional and Continuing Studies, the portal for non-traditional learners to UD degrees and programs, including credit, non-credit, online and lifelong learning programming. 

Dr. Irvine’s career to date spans the fields of higher education and international development.  In addition to his work at UD, his higher education experience includes: directing executive education programs for UD’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics; managing international education and development programs for UD’s Center for International Studies and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.  In the field of international development, Dr. Irvine managed foreign assistance projects in Eastern Europe and Asia as part of US-government and foundation-funded programs.  His award-winning public policy dissertation focused on the changing publicness of American research universities between 1975 and 2015.  He has work and travel experience in 25 countries on four continents, with language proficiency in German and French.  As a practitioner of lifelong learning, he is currently learning Latin with Duolingo’s help.