Ep. 15: Online Learning's Outlook for the Fall

Paul Fain: Welcome to another episode of The Key with IHE, a podcast on the pandemic’s impact on higher education with a focus on vulnerable students. Many questions loom about what’s next for remote learning. How will online offerings from colleges evolve this fall? What steps need to be taken to ensure academic quality of those programs? And will short-term credentials become more popular? We talked with two experts with broad backgrounds in online learning to get some answers for these fast-moving questions. Lori Williams is president and CEO of the National Council of State Authorization of Reciprocity Agreements, NC-SARA. These state agreements provide a voluntary regional approach to state oversight of postsecondary distance education. She spoke with us about an op-ed IHE published this week on the role states should play in quality assurance in online education.

Sound clip: Half the states in the United States really do no distance education regulation outside of SARA.

Paul Fain: I also spoke with Marni Baker Stein, provost and chief academic officer at Western Governors University, an online education pioneer and one of the nation’s largest universities. Like Williams, Baker Stein weighed in on how online education is shaping up for the fall. She talked about how WGU has worked to help its students adjust amid all the disruptions, as well as how the university views the potential for short-term credentials.

Sound clip: What we are starting to see is students coming to us and saying, hey, can I just start with the certificate? Can I stack those certificates into a degree over time, but not enroll in the degree first, enroll in the certificate first?

Paul Fain: Now on to the conversation.

Paul Fain: Lori Williams, good to see you. How are you?

Lori Williams: I’m doing well. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Paul Fain: So before we get into it here, would you mind talking a little bit about NC-SARA, what it does, its role in the current online environment?

Lori Williams: Sure. NC-SARA stands for the National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements. That’s a mouthful. So we always say NC-SARA. It was established in 2013, not so long ago, and the purpose is to streamline and improve regulation of distance education. We like to think that we’re a constructive partner with the states. The states are our members, save for California, Guam and Northern Marianas. All the states and territories of the United States are members. And academic institutions participate. Currently, we have over 2,100 participating institutions. Before SARA, when institutions since 2010 wanted to provide distance education to their students across states, they had to go through a fairly arduous and costly process of seeking authorization to operate legally in each of the states in which they enroll. So, this reciprocity agreement allows institutions to seek that authorization just in their home state and then have reciprocity across all the other states in which their students are learning.

Paul Fain: Great. So, obviously, a very busy time for online education this spring. Can you talk a little bit about what you saw emerge in terms of both new distance education programs, ones that were in response to the pivot of shutting down campuses? What did you track?

Lori Williams: Well, it’s been really interesting to see the different kinds of new programs that are emerging, some in response to the desire for short-term, more workforce development-focused areas of interest, both credit-bearing and not. At NC-SARA, we currently include those programs that are both for credit and noncredit if the SARA participating institutions are accredited. We’ve not yet been approached by a non-accredited entity, so it’ll be an interesting challenge for us to consider how best to evaluate those requests. Of course, we’re also seeing this unprecedented number of programs and courses moving online in response to the safety concerns surrounding the pandemic. Some institutions are continuing to do what some are calling remote learning. Others are moving more into what I would call true online learning, which has a decades-long history of research and a literature body to support effective practices. Some are continuing to operate in the way they have in the past with respect to just putting lectures online and quickly getting whatever it was the faculty member was doing in the face-to-face classroom into a virtual environment. Others are hiring instructional designers and really thinking through the best way to provide assistance to faculty members to do the best. As those that have been involved in online learning for many decades can attest, students are just going to demand more sophisticated online programs. So, I think that they will become more sophisticated over time and not just the remote learning, or students are just going to transfer. So, right now, the big story, of course, is how many institutions will welcome back students to some sort of campus environment. This fall, it’s totally unclear. You know, given the spikes of the virus in many parts of the country, though, I think the money is starting to, the smart money is starting to look like it’ll be more online than maybe many had hoped.

Paul Fain: Do you feel that largely, we’re generalizing here, that institutions have prepared to offer a more sophisticated version, to your point, as soon as next month?

Lori Williams: I really think it’s a mixed bag. Many academic institutions that are primarily brick and mortar and face-to-face have some kind of an online set of programs or courses, and they can draw upon the learning that they have there. Others are more nascent to the field and are going to have a harder time unless they build in the resources to be able to support faculty to really engage in effective practices online. I worked to build online programs for many years, and it takes a long time to do it well, and it takes resources in terms of time, people and money. So, I think that it’s going to be a mixed bag.

Paul Fain: How does NC-SARA, accreditors, state agencies, the federal government, how do the various entities that monitor online learning best assure quality and rigor while also trying to not close off access for students in these extraordinary times? Not an easy question, I know.

Lori Williams: Well, yeah, there’s a lot going on in that question, so I’ll answer it in a variety of different ways. First, I’d say that access will continue to be a really big issue. Not all of the students have the resources to be able to access online learning in the same way. They may not have access to the technology, they may not have laptops, they may not have consistent internet access. They may not even have a quiet place in their homes to study. Libraries aren’t open. You may risk your life sitting in a Starbucks in order to get internet access. So these are all really serious issues. With respect to the way the triad works, there’s the general way that things happen, and then there’s the way that things are happening under COVID. And I’m going to focus on under COVID at the moment. The federal government, through the end of this calendar year, has permitted academic institutions to be able to move online without going through the regular processes of being permitted to have distance education at their institutions. And this has been welcome news for a lot of institutions that needed to move really quickly. Now, it’s a different story with the states. You know, our Constitution has relegated higher education to the states over the federal government. The federal government is more concerned with the Title IV issue. States have responded in varying ways. I worked with some colleagues at WCET SAN to try to get a sense of, well, what is happening at the state level? How many states are also relaxing their distance education regulations? And I’m talking outside of SARA here, and which are not. And again, it’s really mixed. There’s not been a unified approach. Some states, like my home state of Colorado, have required that institutions seek a temporary distance education waiver, and there are eight different areas that they need to fill out on a form and attest to in order to seek this permission to go online. Others are just not really doing anything. And even when we called to try to find out at the state level whether they were relaxing their distance education requirements, we couldn’t get people to say anything on the record that we could publish for our constituency to help them really understand what they needed to do to be compliant outside of SARA. And so this is a concern. My sincere hope is that the states will go back to regulating distance education once the pandemic is over. One of the reasons that NC-SARA is so important is the protection that the institution’s students have when they participate in SARA. Half the states in the United States really do no distance education regulation outside of SARA. And a third don’t require an institution to be accredited in order to operate legally in their state. Of course, under SARA, you have to do all of those things. And so this raises the bar for consumer protection.

Paul Fain: You know, just hearing you talk, it does seem like a bit of a, frankly, a Wild West environment in some states. And I can understand why things happen fast. There’s enormous pressure on everybody, colleges and state regulators themselves, budget hours, you name it. Do you worry about mistakes being made that might actually hurt online education’s perception broadly?

Lori Williams: Well, being flexible at this extraordinary moment in time is really important. It’s absolutely the right thing to do. But at some point soon, this temporary period for new online learning is going to continue to be extended into multiple terms. So it’s really imperative that institutions shift their focus to the scholarship of teaching and learning, understanding what the effective practices are that have been studied for a couple of decades now. And states need to pay attention to what those are as well, so that the issue that you’re talking about with respect to rigor and quality is enforced at the state level.

Paul Fain: Absolutely. But on the flip side of that coin, and you’re well placed to watch this and even influence this process, I think we’re probably speeding up a lot of the lessons learned that we would have learned in online education. I know that none of this was totally new, but now that we’ve had this massive pivot, do you see states picking up quality assurance techniques, practices that might be beneficial in a faster way, given what’s happened?

Lori Williams: Yes, I do. Regulators really need to provide a foundation, like fundamental baseline for quality review, and that includes a policy review, an academic quality review, and financial stability review. And in order to participate in SARA, there’s a series of questions that are asked of each institution initially when they want to come in to participate and then later when they want to renew. And we’re seeing a deepening of the seriousness and probing questions and looking for documentation in order for states to begin to be able to understand that this is serious and they need to take it seriously. One area that I would like to see improve is that consistency across states. Some states put a lot of energy, effort and dollars into those roles, others not so much. And so we’d like to see more consistency. We’re going to begin to offer some training in the coming year to help states better understand what it means to do those reviews in a rigorous way. State regulators also need to align their reviews with those of accreditors. You know, accreditors do their reviews on a less frequent basis, but they do them at a deeper level and with more rigor. And so working collaboratively with accreditors, I think, will continue to be very important. Not all of the accreditors, however, are approaching the move to online learning in a consistent way. Some are asking for academic institutions that they accredit to submit additional information about this temporary period of online learning, and others are not. So it remains to be seen the way in which they’ll continue to approach this if the pandemic continues for a while.

Paul Fain: You know, just to go back to where we started, I’m obviously speaking with Marni Baker Stein from WGU for this episode. And you mentioned some shorter-term programs that have emerged in the spring. Looking forward, do you see a growth in sub-degree skills-based training offered by both traditional colleges and nontraditional providers? Do you think this period of economic turmoil and convulsion could lead to some different widely used programs in online education?

Lori Williams: I do. I think that noncredit-bearing and shorter micro-credentials absolutely are the future. I’ve been reading some of the reports that you’ve been putting out there and others like Strada showing that folks are looking for additional training, especially as they think about a new career post-COVID. They’re not necessarily looking for an entire degree. My own husband is doing a certificate program in cybersecurity to boost his IT skills. So it’s right here in our home. His is credit bearing. I think that there’s going to be a lot of focus in this area. And the traditional modes of quality review need to adapt at the state level and the accreditors. And we’ll be faced with this challenge as well at NC-SARA, especially competency-based. I think that competency-based is most important. I’m all for humanities, general education. I think that people need those critical thinking, creative problem-solving kinds of skills in every area. But I also believe that they can be taught in the context of skill building and competency-based programs.

Paul Fain: Well, Lori, you bring an interesting perspective and expertise to these issues. So I was really excited to have you join us here. And it’s going to be an interesting few months. So I hope we can keep in touch as this all develops.

Lori Williams: Absolutely. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Paul Fain: Take care.

Paul Fain: If you’re looking to go even more in depth in IHE’s news coverage, check out our special reports. These deep dives feature rich data and reporting, as well as thoughtful, substantive analysis you can trust. Visit insidehighered.com/special-reports to view the topics we’ve covered and to purchase the report that best supports your area of work or study.

Paul Fain: I’m speaking with Marni Baker Stein from Western Governors University. Thank you so much for doing this.

Marni Baker Stein: Hello, I’m glad to be here.

Paul Fain: So, Western Governors is obviously a very important institution that we write a lot about, but if you wouldn’t mind just giving listeners a sense of where the institution is and your role there.

Marni Baker Stein: Sure. Well, I’m provost and chief academic officer, and I lead our four colleges and many of the close-in practices like our design development team and our evaluation team. We are a nonprofit, competency-based university that was founded by a group of 19 governors a little over 20 years ago who really saw the opportunity to use technology and competency-based education to expand access, particularly to people who have some college and no degree. In the last 20 years, we’ve grown to serve over 123,000 full-time students. That is, we have 123,000 full-time students enrolled with us right now, and over 70% of those students are classified in one or more underserved categories. So they’re first-gen, they’re low-income, they come from rural areas. They’re students of color, as well as active duty and military veterans. That’s our model. And we really are designed to offer affordable, relevant, high-quality degree programs that are tagged to skills and certifications that are in high demand by industry.

Paul Fain: Not to be glib about this, but as the rest of your industry pivoted to distance learning in the spring, Western Governors was well prepared for the moment, both in the offerings that you have online already, but serving the students who we as a society need most to serve and protect. Can you talk about where you see the overall mix of online offerings heading this fall? Obviously, there was a lot of concern about whether or not colleges could really do it this quickly if they didn’t have experience with it, unlike WGU. And what’s your outlook for the fall in terms of what to expect?

Marni Baker Stein: Sure. Well, just to pause and say first that we were set up for online, but while many of our students continued with their online education with very little disruption, in many cases, their lives have been significantly impacted by the pandemic. And our focus over the last months has really been helping our working adult students, who 85% of whom work while they’re enrolled, very large percentage of whom have children or are caretakers for their family, to get through this time. It’s been very difficult for them. And we’ve learned a lot about what it takes for any university to serve students through this kind of unprecedented disruption. It hasn’t been easy, and I know it has not been easy for our brick-and-mortar, more traditional peers, who, in addition to really attending to the needs of the students who are going through this just like we are, are having to move hundreds, if not thousands, of courses online, and faculty who need to teach in those courses. So, I think what we’re going to see in the fall is that most institutions are still working at very basic levels to figure out how they’re going to execute digital education, and that’s not only inside of courses or programs that they’re offering dealing with the digital pedagogy concerns, but that is also dealing with creating a sort of digital community care around students where those students used to be able to access those folks face to face. So, there is a lot of work going on right now to develop the infrastructure to do fully online digital education. And I think that in addition to folks getting these programs ready to go live, getting these educational offerings ready to go live, getting these services ready to go live in a digital format, they’re also learning that maybe into the future, some of these efforts inspired by COVID are actually going to become mainstream in the years to come. And it’s interesting to be part of that conversation and see what they’re learning as they move along.

Paul Fain: You raise a really interesting point that I confess I hadn’t really thought of. You know, the traditional institutions where not to pick on an old school professor, but a professor moving to Zoom for the very first time comes to mind for me for the struggle for the pivot to online. And I didn’t really think a lot about the challenge for Western Governors. And, you know, you’re right, your students had massive life disruptions. But you have this model where you’ve got coaches, you have a team kind of teaching approach that’s fascinating. I would think that you would be very well set up to deal with that as well. But can you talk a little bit about adjustments or lessons you learned in the spring about that challenge?

Marni Baker Stein: Sure. So we have a team called Environmental Barriers Team that during any, you know, we have students in all 50 states and during any disaster that occurs, could be a fire, could be an earthquake, could be a tornado. We are there for students and faculty in the affected region to make sure that they still have access to the internet, they still have access to their computers. If they’ve lost their job or they’ve lost their domicile, that we’re helping them on that front as well. And so that team was set up and our community of care, our mentors and course instructors are all linked in to that effort always. When COVID rolled, it was like nothing we’d ever seen before because it wasn’t an isolated fire, an isolated tornado. It was tornadoes everywhere all at once. The problems that people had were problems that we couldn’t have expected. So the number one problem our students faced that impacted their ability to continue in their education was family care. And we have a very large percentage of our students who are essential workers or frontline workers, and they were being moved out of their apartments, they were being moved out of their homes, they were being asked to work overtime hours, and all of those issues had to be attended to in order to keep them going. And so from a technical point of view, from a service point of view, and from a policy point of view, we had to act very quickly to make sure that we weren’t unintentionally blocking them.

Paul Fain: Over the years, obviously watched closely how Western Governors structures its academic programs around the job market. It’s a strength of the institution. Tough to do right now, you know, 18 plus million newly unemployed folks. A lot of questions about what sort of jobs are going to exist in a recovery. How are you all shaping your offerings to adjust in this very difficult time to adjust?

Marni Baker Stein: Yes, it’s a really good question. Pre-COVID, actually about 18 months ago, we took a close look at all of our competencies that make up our programs and realized that even with our model that’s laser focused on competencies, and we had slid, we had slipped a little bit in terms of how those competencies, the relevancy of those competencies to employment outcomes. And so we’ve been working very closely with third-party labor insight providers, employers, groups like Emsi to reestablish our commitment to understanding marketable skills and competencies and making sure that every competency that we assess in our programs has a value proposition that we can surface to students. And we’re super happy that we started that work when we did because now we realize now more than ever making sure that the value of our programs and every competency a student achieves in our programs that that is linked to outcomes that are valuable in the marketplace, that are valuable in the world of work, and that we can surface those insights to students in ways that inform them if they are working while you are qualified for this job, even pre-degree, that that is an incredibly valuable asset for students as they’re dealing with COVID times. It’s always valuable, but in these times, as people are losing their jobs and having to shift in terms of the industries they’re working for, having that intelligence along the way to degree is really critical for their success.

Paul Fain: So, looking forward, what do you see the potential market interest in shorter-term credentials, stackable credentials, pieces that have momentum points along the way to a degree? Obviously, you all do a lot of that, but do you see potential there in the fall and beyond?

Marni Baker Stein: We have always integrated third-party credentials and certifications into our degree paths. And we have always invited the best providers of those credentials to be integrated into our systems. So, in other words, we don’t teach all of these credentials and certifications. We get those organizations that are renowned for teaching these credentials to teach them inside of our degree programs. And then we credit those on our transcripts. And this has been an incredibly popular option for our working students who are looking for that degree, but they really need incremental value along the way. They really need to have those certifications so they can move up in their jobs and their professions and careers as they’re working on their education. So it’s always been a very popular feature of WGU. I am very hopeful that other universities will follow in our path because it is incredibly valuable for students across different types of programs and disciplinary areas. What we are starting to see is students coming to us and saying, hey, can I just start with the certificate? Can I stack those certificates into a degree over time but not enroll in the degree first, enroll in the certificate first? And that is what I think is going to start happening across the board in higher education. Students need value more urgently than ever before. They cannot, in many cases, wait four to six years to get that value, but they do still understand that that degree is important. So these types of models where we allow students to, in an open-loop fashion, get a certification or a micro-credential, work, get another, work, and build that up into a degree that’s meaningful to them. I think that’s what the future holds. And then, of course, those micro-credentials are also great educational assets for people who already have their first degree and don’t need another, but they need a specialized skill set.

Paul Fain: Recognizing that this is a complex question for a brief interview, but what are some of the keys to ensuring that a short-term credential is of value and also not a dead end, that it is stackable, that the student gets the adequate amount of value out of that short-term credential?

Marni Baker Stein: Right. So, many short-term credentials are already licensed, accredited, governed by professional associations and are well known and respected. And at WGU, those are the credentials that we really try to build into our degree pathways and have on offer for students because we are assured ourselves that when a student completes that credential, that that has a meaning in the workplace, that has a value in the workplace. And so, that’s where we are really starting on our journey of stackability. I do think there’s the need for different types of credentials out there, especially related to 21st-century skills, power skills, that are not accredited or governed by a professional association. And that is what we all need to work together in higher education to understand into the future: how do we measure the quality and the value of those certifications? That’s a question for us all to answer together and for policymakers to consider as well. We are certainly very bullish on that front because we think it’s important. In terms of the transferability or interoperability of these credentials with degrees, we think that’s important as well. That takes a lot of work and coordination. We have a large team at WGU that just works on transferability of certification experience and achievement into our degree pathways. That is a big commitment on our part, but we think it’s important for students and it makes their experience richer and in fact more valuable when they get out in the world of work. So that’s how we’ve done it. And that’s an infrastructure and a capability that every university would need to have in order to integrate this kind of approach into their degree pathways.

Paul Fain: Can you talk a little bit about the role for corporations in working with institutions of higher learning to do skills training pathways?

Marni Baker Stein: I guess the first thing I’ll say about this is that at WGU, we really believe that one of the most powerful ways to connect talent with opportunity is just to build awareness of the types of jobs and professions that are out there and that are employing people right now. And as part of this, we’re committed to making sure, as I’ve said, that our learners understand the value of all of these pathways, all of the choices that are in front of them—from degrees to certifications to skills training programs and apprenticeships that they likely do not know are available and they really don’t understand necessarily the credentials and experience that could truly transform their lives in the economies where they live, in the local economies where they live. And so, that’s our mission and our commitment. The work that we have been doing with industry across major national employers is to really try to understand when a student earns a competency or a certification in the higher education realm, how can we more easily share that or allow the learner to share that themselves with employers? And how can we get certifications and experiences and professional development achievements that workers have made on the job? How can we more effectively and seamlessly import those achievements into our educational system? And that is the work that WGU has been engaged in. It’s been incredible, and skills have really been at the center of it because one of the big issues has been that it’s hard to translate the credit hour into employer parlance or employer meaningful employee employment outcome besides the degree. The degree is a great proxy for readiness for employment, but when we’re talking about individual credits or competencies achieved, it’s been very difficult to share those with employers. And when you have skills as a new currency, all of a sudden it becomes very easy for an employer who’s tied roles and achievements inside the workplace to skills, an educator who has tagged learning outcomes to skills to really compare those things apples to apples. And we believe it levels the playing field for opportunity for everyone and are very committed to that work into the future.

Paul Fain: Well, even for my normal interview, I feel like I bounced around some really complicated, broad topics. But when you represent an institution with over 120,000 students, I guess that kind of comes with the territory. So, Marni, I appreciate you indulging these questions. I learned a lot and always, always interested in what Western Governors is up to. So let’s keep in touch.

Marni Baker Stein: Oh, sure. Thanks for having us.

Paul Fain: Thank you.

Paul Fain: That’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week for a discussion about possible college closures. Be speaking with Nick Ducoff from the college advising company Edmit and Barbara Brittingham, the just retired president of the New England Accreditor. Catch you then.