Grad school online: 21st century education
The Department of Information Systems is now offering the Online MSIM -- the same challenging W. P. Carey program offered on the Tempe campus that prepares the leaders who improve the performance of their companies by leveraging technology. knowIT recently met with someone who understands first-hand how graduate-level education translates from face-to-face in the classroom to online. Phil Regier is executive vice provost and dean of ASU Online. Listen as he explains how online education has evolved, and what students in the new Online MSIM can expect their graduate program to be like.
The Department of Information Systems is now offering the Online MSIM — the same challenging W. P. Carey program offered on the Tempe campus that prepares the leaders who improve the performance of their companies by leveraging technology. knowIT recently met with someone who understands first-hand how graduate-level education translates from face-to-face in the classroom to online. Phil Regier is executive vice provost and dean of ASU Online. Listen as he explains how online education has evolved, and what students in the new Online MSIM can expect their graduate program to be like.
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Transcript of Q&A
KnowIT: Online learning has been around for a number of years now. There are a number of for-profit institutions that have been offering online courses for a long, long time. I was wondering, as we are making our entrée into a graduate program, are there misconceptions out there about what online learning is and is not?
Phil Regier: Sure, I think there are. What I always say is the brand of online is tainted. In large part, it's tainted for two reasons. First off, because online learning really did grow out of correspondence courses, and the learning outcomes in correspondence courses probably weren't as good as they were in a face-to-face environment. Then secondly, I think the reason the brand of online is tainted is in large part because we allowed for-profit institutions to create the brand. The problem with that is, for-profit institutions — and we know this from a lot of the evidence that's coming out over the past several months — for-profit institutions do a very poor job at retaining students and graduating students.
Secondly, online isn't at all like a correspondence course, and the fact is, most of the best academic evidence out there now suggests that, in fact, learning outcomes for online programs are better than what happens in the face-to-face environment. I think there are several reasons why that is, but the most obvious reasons are that students have the ability to spend a lot more time with the material than they do in the lecture. A lecture is ephemeral. You see it once, it goes away, and you go home and you hope you have good notes, and you hope you remember it. Even if the instructor provides a PowerPoint slide deck, you're having to fill in a lot of the gaps. That's not the case with online.
With online, you can review the material over and over and over. Then the fact is, educational technology is improving rapidly all the time, and online learning is able to take advantage of that. Face-to-face learning is as good as it's ever going to get. It probably peaked around 1985 — sometime before PowerPoint — but it's as good as it's ever going to get. We have just scratched the surface of what we can do with online learning.
KnowIT: Can you give me an example then of something that can be done online that perhaps can't be done face-to-face?
Regier: Sure. The best examples would fall into categories of educational technology that you don't have available in a face-to-face environment. One example would be adaptive learning. In an adaptive learning model, the software is smart enough to understand what student A knows that student B doesn't know, and what student B knows that student C doesn't know, and it feeds them the material according to their competency level. It feeds it to them typically in short bites, where students can be successful. So you might have 5 or 20 minutes of instruction and then take an examination to show your proficiency, and students are not allowed to move forward until they've demonstrated proficiency.
This is very, very different than what happens in the classroom, because in a classroom, at the end of week one, we're going to move onto week two --
KnowIT: Exactly.
Phil Regier: And if you haven't mastered the material in week one, I'm sorry. We're going to move forward to week two. I mean you can see it very easily in subjects like mathematics which build from week to week to week, building on the material that you learned previously. Adaptive learning technologies really don't allow you to move forward until you've mastered it, and that's something that you just can't do in a face-to-face class. It's impossible to not move the class ahead because 15 or 20 percent of the class doesn't get the material.
KnowIT: That has almost counter intuitive than one might have an impression that online is the ultimate in a mass experience, and, yet, it's very, very individualized isn't it?
Phil Regier: Yeah — adaptive learning if it's done well, it's kind of an example of mass customization at the education level. In terms of an educational product, it's one that really customizes the software for what the individual student knows. By the way, it's not just knowledge variables. What we're doing something in the lower division mathematics courses next year that will look not just at what students know and don't know, but also when do they learn best? Do they learn best with other students? Do they learn best on their own? Do they learn best at 9:00 in the morning or 8:30 at night? It will target messaging and material to the students based on a whole set of variables.
LnowIT: That's absolutely amazing.
Phil Regier: Spectacular.
KnowIT: In light of all of this, what are you finding out about graduate level teaching?
Phil Regier: I actually kind of cut my teeth in online learning in our own W. P. Carey MBA program that's online. In the early years, especially, we did a lot of assessments because the faculty were very skeptical about this. What we found out -- and again it was counter intuitive to us at the time — was that the online students were outperforming the face-to-face students. Now, I think that there are a number of reasons for it. I've already alluded to some of them, which is you actually have the ability to spend more time with the material. The other thing I'll say about online students, in general that we're finding out, is that they're highly motivated.
I think everybody at the graduate level is motivated, but I think the online learners, especially because of their jobs — usually because of the requirements of their jobs -- it doesn't allow them to attend a face-to-face class. Yet they are still motivated, that they want to go ahead and sign up for a particular graduate program whether it's an MBA or information management degree or whatever. They really want to succeed. They're typically older learners. They're coming back to school, and this time they're going to do it right.
KnowIT: I'm wondering what impact this online model might have on a group of students who might include native English speakers and also students from other countries. Does this change the equation at all?
Phil Regier: The problem in a face-to-face class is, if you aren't a very talented discussion teacher, you will still end up with half or a third or a quarter of the students consistently participating, and you're having to pull the participation out of the rest of them. In online -- and faculty across the board comment on this -- nobody knows who you are, and the participation is much more natural. People are much, well I'd say less, inhibited. People can write onto a discussion board their thoughts. They can think carefully about something in a way that when you're I class, and you're reacting like this (clicking fingers), that classroom discussion rewards certain type of students. Discussion boards are a much more level playing field. So the international student who may not have quite the English proficiency is able to carefully consider what they say before they write it out.
Same with the Native American student who may be more hesitant to participate in a group discussion face-to-face. But in terms of discussion boards, the participation rates tend to be much higher, and I think the online learning is a — I don't want to say more egalitarian — but I think it is an approach that a larger population feels comfortable with than you get in a face-to-face environment.
KnowIT: Does this experience then translate onto the job or not? There's an argument that could be made that the classroom is a proxy for the world.
Phil Regier: I doubt if that's the case. You know I think there are some jobs, particularly in finance or investment banking or other things, where just the ability to be aggressive matters. I think that what most people want most of the time is really good written and oral communication skills and the ability to think carefully through something. There's no reason, and certainly no evidence, that online learning is at a disadvantage in that regard. In fact, a lot of the faculty that we talk with would say that the quality of the participation in the discussion boards, in online, actually allows students to develop critical thinking and communication skills better than what happens in the face-to-face classroom. I love teaching discussion-based classes face-to-face, but there's also the fact that some students are very good in that environment. Whether or not those are leadership skills, or whether it's just a comfort level with participating in a class, I think is not clear.
KnowIT: Do you think you could talk about how industry is welcoming of online graduates?
Phil Regier: There's a component of people who view online as a degraded form of education, but then there's another component who say, "Wait a minute. The technology is changing extremely rapidly. In our own companies, we don't do face-to-face professional education anymore. Everything's online, and we've gotten comfortable with it, and the learning outcomes are quite good. Why would we not think that in a degree program that couldn't also be the case?" So some people see advantages of online. The fact is that there are a whole lot of people that can participate in online course who aren't going to be able to participate in the face-to-face course either because they're place bound, or because they have job responsibilities or because who knows. They're single parents raising two kids, and they can't come to class twice a week from 6:00-9:00 at night. Then there's also a component of people who say the educational technology is improving very rapidly. We all know what's happened to professional education in the corporate sector, and they just don't do face-to-face education anymore.
Face-to-face market, you're confined to a radius of 35 miles around the school of business, realistically. The online market is unlimited, so I can have people who are in Santa Clara. I can have people who are in New Jersey. I can have people who are in Nigeria, and, again, we found that out with the online MBA program, and it's certainly true for the information systems program as well. So I have virtually no faculty member come back to me and say, "You know what? What happens in the face-to-face classroom is better." They say, "What happens in the face-to-face classroom is different and, in many ways, what happens in an online classroom is as good or better."
KnowIT: It's also interesting to note that companies are multi-national — many companies are multi-national now, and business is done enabled by these technologies that you're using in the online programs.
Phil Regier: Absolutely.
KnowIT: So it's —
Phil Regier: It's a way of 21st century learning. It's kind of funny, around the university, the one segment -- the one set of stakeholders that doesn't question that online learning is as good as face-to-face is 18-23 year olds. They sign up for classes at a very high rate. We're teaching over 100,000 seat enrollments this year at ASU online. By the way, I think students are very sophisticated consumers of educational product, particularly at a graduate level. They aren't going to sign up for something after the first section if they don't think they're getting value for the money. If it's a lousy program, they are not going to pay $30,000 or $40,000 in order to get a degree where they didn't get the content knowledge. People who are spending a lot of money said I'm going to continue spending money because this must be a value add for me.
I think that's what you'll see in the information management program as well. I know the faculty. I think they're very dedicated. I think they can pull this off in a very big way, and it will be great. They'll expand their reach. Graduate programs and information management have a very high demand, and I think they'll have a very successful program.
KnowIT: Thank you very much for talking with us today.
Phil Regier: You're welcome.
Phil Regier: Sure, I think there are. What I always say is the brand of online is tainted. In large part, it's tainted for two reasons. First off, because online learning really did grow out of correspondence courses, and the learning outcomes in correspondence courses probably weren't as good as they were in a face-to-face environment. Then secondly, I think the reason the brand of online is tainted is in large part because we allowed for-profit institutions to create the brand. The problem with that is, for-profit institutions — and we know this from a lot of the evidence that's coming out over the past several months — for-profit institutions do a very poor job at retaining students and graduating students.
Secondly, online isn't at all like a correspondence course, and the fact is, most of the best academic evidence out there now suggests that, in fact, learning outcomes for online programs are better than what happens in the face-to-face environment. I think there are several reasons why that is, but the most obvious reasons are that students have the ability to spend a lot more time with the material than they do in the lecture. A lecture is ephemeral. You see it once, it goes away, and you go home and you hope you have good notes, and you hope you remember it. Even if the instructor provides a PowerPoint slide deck, you're having to fill in a lot of the gaps. That's not the case with online.
With online, you can review the material over and over and over. Then the fact is, educational technology is improving rapidly all the time, and online learning is able to take advantage of that. Face-to-face learning is as good as it's ever going to get. It probably peaked around 1985 — sometime before PowerPoint — but it's as good as it's ever going to get. We have just scratched the surface of what we can do with online learning.
KnowIT: Can you give me an example then of something that can be done online that perhaps can't be done face-to-face?
Regier: Sure. The best examples would fall into categories of educational technology that you don't have available in a face-to-face environment. One example would be adaptive learning. In an adaptive learning model, the software is smart enough to understand what student A knows that student B doesn't know, and what student B knows that student C doesn't know, and it feeds them the material according to their competency level. It feeds it to them typically in short bites, where students can be successful. So you might have 5 or 20 minutes of instruction and then take an examination to show your proficiency, and students are not allowed to move forward until they've demonstrated proficiency.
This is very, very different than what happens in the classroom, because in a classroom, at the end of week one, we're going to move onto week two --
KnowIT: Exactly.
Phil Regier: And if you haven't mastered the material in week one, I'm sorry. We're going to move forward to week two. I mean you can see it very easily in subjects like mathematics which build from week to week to week, building on the material that you learned previously. Adaptive learning technologies really don't allow you to move forward until you've mastered it, and that's something that you just can't do in a face-to-face class. It's impossible to not move the class ahead because 15 or 20 percent of the class doesn't get the material.
KnowIT: That has almost counter intuitive than one might have an impression that online is the ultimate in a mass experience, and, yet, it's very, very individualized isn't it?
Phil Regier: Yeah — adaptive learning if it's done well, it's kind of an example of mass customization at the education level. In terms of an educational product, it's one that really customizes the software for what the individual student knows. By the way, it's not just knowledge variables. What we're doing something in the lower division mathematics courses next year that will look not just at what students know and don't know, but also when do they learn best? Do they learn best with other students? Do they learn best on their own? Do they learn best at 9:00 in the morning or 8:30 at night? It will target messaging and material to the students based on a whole set of variables.
LnowIT: That's absolutely amazing.
Phil Regier: Spectacular.
KnowIT: In light of all of this, what are you finding out about graduate level teaching?
Phil Regier: I actually kind of cut my teeth in online learning in our own W. P. Carey MBA program that's online. In the early years, especially, we did a lot of assessments because the faculty were very skeptical about this. What we found out -- and again it was counter intuitive to us at the time — was that the online students were outperforming the face-to-face students. Now, I think that there are a number of reasons for it. I've already alluded to some of them, which is you actually have the ability to spend more time with the material. The other thing I'll say about online students, in general that we're finding out, is that they're highly motivated.
I think everybody at the graduate level is motivated, but I think the online learners, especially because of their jobs — usually because of the requirements of their jobs -- it doesn't allow them to attend a face-to-face class. Yet they are still motivated, that they want to go ahead and sign up for a particular graduate program whether it's an MBA or information management degree or whatever. They really want to succeed. They're typically older learners. They're coming back to school, and this time they're going to do it right.
KnowIT: I'm wondering what impact this online model might have on a group of students who might include native English speakers and also students from other countries. Does this change the equation at all?
Phil Regier: The problem in a face-to-face class is, if you aren't a very talented discussion teacher, you will still end up with half or a third or a quarter of the students consistently participating, and you're having to pull the participation out of the rest of them. In online -- and faculty across the board comment on this -- nobody knows who you are, and the participation is much more natural. People are much, well I'd say less, inhibited. People can write onto a discussion board their thoughts. They can think carefully about something in a way that when you're I class, and you're reacting like this (clicking fingers), that classroom discussion rewards certain type of students. Discussion boards are a much more level playing field. So the international student who may not have quite the English proficiency is able to carefully consider what they say before they write it out.
Same with the Native American student who may be more hesitant to participate in a group discussion face-to-face. But in terms of discussion boards, the participation rates tend to be much higher, and I think the online learning is a — I don't want to say more egalitarian — but I think it is an approach that a larger population feels comfortable with than you get in a face-to-face environment.
KnowIT: Does this experience then translate onto the job or not? There's an argument that could be made that the classroom is a proxy for the world.
Phil Regier: I doubt if that's the case. You know I think there are some jobs, particularly in finance or investment banking or other things, where just the ability to be aggressive matters. I think that what most people want most of the time is really good written and oral communication skills and the ability to think carefully through something. There's no reason, and certainly no evidence, that online learning is at a disadvantage in that regard. In fact, a lot of the faculty that we talk with would say that the quality of the participation in the discussion boards, in online, actually allows students to develop critical thinking and communication skills better than what happens in the face-to-face classroom. I love teaching discussion-based classes face-to-face, but there's also the fact that some students are very good in that environment. Whether or not those are leadership skills, or whether it's just a comfort level with participating in a class, I think is not clear.
KnowIT: Do you think you could talk about how industry is welcoming of online graduates?
Phil Regier: There's a component of people who view online as a degraded form of education, but then there's another component who say, "Wait a minute. The technology is changing extremely rapidly. In our own companies, we don't do face-to-face professional education anymore. Everything's online, and we've gotten comfortable with it, and the learning outcomes are quite good. Why would we not think that in a degree program that couldn't also be the case?" So some people see advantages of online. The fact is that there are a whole lot of people that can participate in online course who aren't going to be able to participate in the face-to-face course either because they're place bound, or because they have job responsibilities or because who knows. They're single parents raising two kids, and they can't come to class twice a week from 6:00-9:00 at night. Then there's also a component of people who say the educational technology is improving very rapidly. We all know what's happened to professional education in the corporate sector, and they just don't do face-to-face education anymore.
Face-to-face market, you're confined to a radius of 35 miles around the school of business, realistically. The online market is unlimited, so I can have people who are in Santa Clara. I can have people who are in New Jersey. I can have people who are in Nigeria, and, again, we found that out with the online MBA program, and it's certainly true for the information systems program as well. So I have virtually no faculty member come back to me and say, "You know what? What happens in the face-to-face classroom is better." They say, "What happens in the face-to-face classroom is different and, in many ways, what happens in an online classroom is as good or better."
KnowIT: It's also interesting to note that companies are multi-national — many companies are multi-national now, and business is done enabled by these technologies that you're using in the online programs.
Phil Regier: Absolutely.
KnowIT: So it's —
Phil Regier: It's a way of 21st century learning. It's kind of funny, around the university, the one segment -- the one set of stakeholders that doesn't question that online learning is as good as face-to-face is 18-23 year olds. They sign up for classes at a very high rate. We're teaching over 100,000 seat enrollments this year at ASU online. By the way, I think students are very sophisticated consumers of educational product, particularly at a graduate level. They aren't going to sign up for something after the first section if they don't think they're getting value for the money. If it's a lousy program, they are not going to pay $30,000 or $40,000 in order to get a degree where they didn't get the content knowledge. People who are spending a lot of money said I'm going to continue spending money because this must be a value add for me.
I think that's what you'll see in the information management program as well. I know the faculty. I think they're very dedicated. I think they can pull this off in a very big way, and it will be great. They'll expand their reach. Graduate programs and information management have a very high demand, and I think they'll have a very successful program.
KnowIT: Thank you very much for talking with us today.
Phil Regier: You're welcome.
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