ExtensionEngine Blog

Recently I was on a panel at the LearnLaunch Across Boundaries conference. The panel — titled “Outsourcing Online Programs: The Shape of Things to Come or a Bad Moon Rising?” — was moderated by Howard Lurie, Principal Analyst at Eduventures and author of a soon-to-be-released research report on the state of the Online Program Management (OPM) market.  

I recently attended the 2018 ELI Annual Meeting, a conference dedicated to progress in higher education innovation, as most of them are these days.

One of the best sessions I went to was “Effective Educational Applications,” and it wasn’t the best just because we were introduced to an interesting application of virtual reality in the classroom.

Your platform is the face of your online learning business. It is not just a place for learners to access stored content and videos — your online learning platform is essentially the product that you are selling.

When building online learning — a program, course, certification, or degree —  a critical decision is what type of technology platform to use.

Choosing an online learning platform should be easy, right? Learning management systems have been around for 20+ years, this problem has been solved before, just pick one.

I have the unique privilege of viewing the development of online learning from three different lenses — as former faculty and program head at the Michigan Ross School of Business, as former dean at Babson College, and now as Principal Learning Strategist at ExtensionEngine.

One of the most important, and complex, decisions to make when building online training to generate revenue or impact comes upfront: what online learning platform should you use?

As 2017 has proven, online learning has been top-of-mind for many institutional leaders. Scaling offerings through online programs or courses has become an inherent part of growth for public, private, and non-traditional colleges and universities.

As an end of the year tribute to the evolution of online learning in 2017, here’s a recap of a few topics that resonated with us, our perspective on those topics, and a few topics that we hope to see discussed more broadly in 2018.

Roger Pao, J.D., is an attorney and educator with extensive experience in online education and an interest in dynamic, innovative pedagogies. He is currently Assistant Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the New England College of Business and Finance. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, magna cum laude, and Duke University, summa cum laude.

“Online learning businesses have it all wrong—they are not thinking like a product company.”

Every day, we speak to universities, nonprofits and corporations who are looking to put their training or education online with the goal of generating revenue, creating impact or influencing an audience. And these conversations are very similar – people usually anchor their thinking to the existing and ask “how do we create an online course.”

Recently I have had separate in-depth talks with high level administrators and faculty leaders at multiple schools—public and private, large and small, coastal and middle-of-the country—where the obvious conclusions, usually unspoken, were reached by all in the conversation. The difference was, each of these times the conclusions were spoken out loud:

One said “A school can work with a traditional revenue-sharing OPM if its goal is to simply get online. But given the financial implications of such a partnership, it would be just as effective but faster and put much less of a burden on faculty for the school to simply pile up a bunch of money in the middle of a room and light it on fire.”