The Campus Blog

Faith and Flexibility: CampusEDU and Kairos University Partner to Expand Learning Opportunities

mark.shepherd@campusedu.com (Mark Shepherd) — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 16:22:40 GMT

CampusEDU is thrilled to announce a groundbreaking partnership with Kairos University , a leader in theological education.

This collaboration will provide students with flexible, affordable, and high-quality learning opportunities that seamlessly combine faith and vocational growth. Beginning today, students can earn an Associate of Arts in Christian Thought and Practice from Kairos University through the Campus Learn platform.

Experience the Kairos Difference

Kairos University is transforming education with its innovative, online, and self-paced courses. Students can now access a world-class education from anywhere, at any time, without the financial strain of traditional tuition. For just $300 a month, students can dedicate themselves to their studies without the worry of financial debt. Take courses in a wide range of subjects, including writing, theology, communication, and inductive Bible study.

Program Highlights

Learn on Your Terms: Kairos University’s courses are designed to fit into your busy life. Study whenever, wherever, and at your own pace.
Engaging Curriculum: Courses on the Campus Learn platform provide an immersive and interactive learning experience, leveraging the latest in digital technology.
Predictable Costs: With a flat-rate tuition of $300 per month, you can take as many courses as you want without any hidden fees.

Through this partnership, CampusEDU and Kairos University are not only expanding educational opportunities but also setting a new standard for the future of learning. We are dedicated to equipping students with the skills and insights they need to excel, creating an environment where faith seamlessly integrates with flexibility, and affordability.

To learn more visit start.kairos.edu .

About Kairos University

Kairos University is a global system of theological education offering students the opportunity to build entirely customized educational journeys that are affordable, accessible, relevant, and faithful. The University has students, faculty, and partners throughout the United States and Canada and around the world.

About CampusEDU

CampusEDU is a leading digital learning platform renowned for its innovation in software development, instructional design, videography, and creative storytelling. Our mission is to create transformative and engaging educational experiences that inspire and empower students, faculty, and administrators around the globe.

CampusEDU and Strategic Assurance Consulting Announce Educational Partnership

mark.shepherd@campusedu.com (Mark Shepherd) — Thu, 16 May 2024 12:44:32 GMT

CampusEDU and Strategic Assurance Consulting Announce Educational Partnership

CampusEDU is excited to announce an innovative partnership with Strategic Assurance Consulting, a pioneering educational consulting firm. This collaboration aims to expand educational opportunities and enhance learning experiences through the advanced Campus Learn platform.

The partnership will focus on the exchange of software products and services pivotal in the development and delivery of online courses. Strategic Assurance Consulting will utilize the Campus Learn platform to offer specialized courses, ensuring a seamless and enriched learning environment for their clientele.

Partnership Highlights:

Innovative Learning: Strategic Assurance Consulting will have the capability to build tailored courses within their expertise category on the Moodle-based Campus Learn platform.
Support and Training: CampusEDU will provide essential support, training in content creation, and management of enrollments and permissions.
Sustainable Growth: This partnership not only supports the growth of Strategic Assurance Consulting’s educational offerings but also expands the reach of Campus Learn’s robust platform to a wider audience.

Dale Hale, the Online Education Consultant at Strategic Assurance Consulting, has dedicated his career to enhancing the quality of educational experiences. He emphasizes, "I'm deeply passionate about pushing education to new heights, and I firmly stand by what I see as the three key ingredients for a top-notch faculty development program: giving faculty thorough training to design engaging courses, ensuring we maintain high quality standards, and providing robust support for our faculty. Throughout my career, I've made it my mission to prioritize these elements, recognizing just how crucial they are in creating a learning environment that truly puts students first."

This strategic partnership marks a significant milestone in the educational technology landscape, setting a new standard for collaborative success between digital learning providers and educational consultants.

Strategic Assurance Consulting is an institution’s partner in driving organizational excellence. With a focus on quality and a strategic approach to improvement, the firm specializes in crafting sustainable solutions for success, particularly in education and beyond.

Their mission is simple: to uncover, propel, and sustain excellence. Strategic Assurance Consulting holds to the highest standards, guided by principles of dedicated service, client-centeredness, process refinement, confidentiality, and knowledge sharing.

From accreditation support to program development, faculty and staff training, document management, and financial services, they are dedicated to equipping institutions for success.

Website: strategicassuranceconsulting.com

Email: strategicassureconsulting@gmail.com

Phone: (844) 227-7967

About CampusEDU

CampusEDU is a premier digital learning platform that uses its expertise in software development, instructional design, videography, and creative storytelling to create transformative and engaging courses for students, faculty, and administrators worldwide.

SBU Partners with CampusEDU for Online Dual Enrollment Courses

mark.shepherd@campusedu.com (Mark Shepherd) — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 19:06:41 GMT

SBU and CampusEDU Roll Out Dual Enrollment Program

Southwest Baptist University, in partnership with innovative online learning platform CampusEDU, is excited to announce the launch of a pioneering dual enrollment program - SBU Prep. This program is designed to offer high school students an exceptional opportunity to start their college journey ahead of schedule, enabling them to earn college credits while still in high school.

The SBU Prep dual enrollment program offers a diverse array of courses, ranging from Personal Cybersecurity to Art Appreciation, American Literature, Financial Strategies, Sociology, and more. Each course is crafted to provide a flexible and engaging learning experience, leveraging digital technology for an immersive and interactive educational journey. Courses are launching January 15 and February 5

Brandt Merritt, vice president for enrollment and marketing at SBU, considers the new partnership with CampusEDU’s dual enrollment platform a key piece of the university’s strategy to meet the needs of high school students and their families. SBU will specifically target Christian K-12 schools and homeschool families when promoting the dual enrollment courses.

“We know there is demand for a high-quality, flexible dual enrollment option for students and believe strongly that SBU Prep checks the boxes that families are looking for,” Merritt said. “I’m excited to see students excel in these courses and to become part of the SBU family while they are still in high school, which makes it more likely they will choose to continue their college education with us.”

Why Choose Dual Enrollment at SBU?

Flexible Learning: Our video-based courses are accessible anytime, anywhere, providing students the freedom to learn at their own pace.
Innovative Curriculum: Each course is designed to offer an in-depth understanding of the subject matter, using high-quality video and engaging assessments.
Affordable Education: At just $300 per course (plus applicable course materials), students can earn college credits at a fraction of the cost, paving the way for significant savings on college tuition.

Darren Campbell, CEO of CampusEDU, on the innovative aspect of the program: “This partnership with SBU is a testament to our commitment to innovation in education. At CampusEDU, we are constantly seeking ways to revolutionize the learning experience. This dual enrollment program represents a significant leap forward, combining advanced technology with exceptional educational content to offer students a uniquely innovative and future-focused academic pathway.”

We invite students to explore this unique opportunity and begin their academic journey with SBU. Enrollment is now open, and we encourage interested students to start their registration process today.

For more information and to register, please visit www.sbuprep.com

OBU and CampusEDU Launch Innovative Dual Enrollment Program

mark.shepherd@campusedu.com (Mark Shepherd) — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 15:22:53 GMT

OBU and CampusEDU Launch Innovative Dual Enrollment Program

OBU, in partnership with CampusEDU, is thrilled to announce the launch of their new online dual enrollment program. The program is designed to empower high school students with an impactful launch towards their future, by providing an opportunity to earn college credits in high school.

OBU, a Christian liberal arts university, and CampusEDU, are collaborating to give more students access to transformational Christian higher education. Together, they're offering immersive, high-quality, video-based courses that can be accessed from anywhere, anytime, giving students the flexibility to learn at their own pace.

For only $300 per course, high school students can get a significant head start on their college journey, gain real-life skills, and save on future tuition costs. The curriculum for this program incorporates world-class expertise with practical Christian faith integration.

Students can choose from a wide variety of courses, including Art, Communication, Financial Strategies, Sociology, Philosophy and more.

Dr. Heath A. Thomas, OBU President, commented on the partnership, saying, “OBU is excited to launch this innovative partnership with CampusEDU to equip the next generation of future shapers. Engaging high school students with world class education is a passion for OBU, and we are delighted to find a creative way to do just that with CampusEDU. This initiative is a game-changer and will help equip so many students nationwide. “

Darren Campbell, Founder and CEO of CampusEDU, added, "We are deeply committed to transforming the landscape of Christian education. Our partnership with Oklahoma Baptist University allows us to bring our expertise in creating engaging, high-quality digital courses to a wider audience. This dual enrollment program is more than just an academic venture – it's about setting the stage for the students' future success, in their academic journey and beyond. Together, we're empowering the next generation to become future shapers."

The program is set to launch Aug. 21, 2023. Registration is now open , and students interested in jump-starting their college journey can sign up today.

About Oklahoma Baptist University

Oklahoma Baptist University is a Christian liberal arts university in Shawnee, Oklahoma, offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees in over 80 areas of study. OBU emphasizes exceptional academics, a strong community, and personal growth in both knowledge and faith, empowering students to shape the future and make a difference in the world.

About CampusEDU

Campus and Kingswood University Announce Revolutionary Partnership to Launch “Kingswood Learn”

mark.shepherd@campusedu.com (Mark Shepherd) — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:33:26 GMT

Campus and Kingswood University Announce Revolutionary Partnership to Launch “Kingswood Learn”

Marion, IN June 12, 2023 – Kingswood University, a trailblazing academic institution, and CampusEDU, an innovative EdTech company, are proud to announce a groundbreaking partnership to create a revolutionary digital learning platform, Kingswood Learn. This initiative aims to empower the next generation of digital learners within the Wesleyan Church and beyond, providing education to both students and the wider community of believers.

In the age of digital platforms such as Uber, YouTube, and Instagram, the local church often grapples with finding its place in the digital landscape. Kingswood Learn seeks to bridge this gap, motivated by Jesus’ call to “make disciples of all nations.” The platform offers practical, story-based micro-courses on relevant subjects, available to every person in every congregation free of charge.

CampusEDU and Kingswood University’s shared vision, along with deep-rooted connections between their founders Darren Campbell and Dr. Steve Lennox, has fostered a collaborative environment for the development of Kingswood Learn. The platform encourages local churches to create and share their own learning content, fostering a sense of unity and collaboration within the broader Wesleyan community.

Kingswood University’s President, Dr. Steve Lennox, expressed his excitement and enthusiasm about the new partnership. “Kingswood’s mission has always been to prepare people to serve the Lord in the church and as the church. We want to help anyone, anywhere to grow as a Christian and in their capacity to serve the Lord. ‘Kingswood Learn’ will allow us to do this even better.”

Darren Campbell, CEO and Founder of CampusEDU, also shared his thoughts on the significance of the partnership, highlighting the shared vision and commitment to transforming education. “At CampusEDU, we are deeply honoured to collaborate with Kingswood University on this exciting project. Kingswood Learn represents our shared commitment to transforming the educational landscape. We believe that this partnership will open new doors for spiritual growth and lifelong learning, strengthening the bonds within the church community and beyond.”

As stated in 2 Corinthians 13:9, the ultimate goal is for believers to “become mature” Christians. Kingswood University, in partnership with CampusEDU, aims to achieve this by providing transformative educational experiences that inspire and educate the Church.

This partnership, which has been 30 years in the making, will leverage the strengths of both CampusEDU and Kingswood University to develop an innovative and cutting-edge learning platform. The exceptional team at Kingswood is excited to collaborate with Campus EDU to create a tool that empowers believers in their pursuit of spiritual growth and lifelong learning.

The highly anticipated official launch of Kingswood Learn is scheduled for early 2024. In preparation for the official release, a BETA launch is planned for this fall, offering a select group of users the opportunity to explore and provide valuable feedback on the platform’s features and functionality, ensuring a seamless and refined experience upon its official debut.

For more information about Kingswood Learn and this pioneering partnership, please visit www.kingswoodlearn.com

About Kingswood University:

Kingswood University exists to serve Jesus Christ by strengthening the local and global church through forming Christ-like servant leaders in a community that creatively blends academic excellence and practical ministry experience with intentional spiritual formation.

About Campus:

CampusEDU is a leading EdTech company dedicated to revolutionizing education through its expertise in software development, instructional design, videography, and creative storytelling. With a focus on creating engaging and transformative courses and tools, Campus is committed to delivering exceptional educational experiences for students, faculty, and administrators alike.

Three Takeaways From 2022

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 13:31:30 GMT

3 Takeaways From 2022

The end of the year is a great time to stop for a moment and reflect on the previous twelve months. Inflection points in general are potentially very helpful in this way. When we are endlessly pushing forward with no pause, we are prone to miss opportunities to improve or redirect. Without reflection, we can just rev our engines without realizing it. We can waste needless energy because we never stopped to recognize, well, we were wasting our energy.

1. Focus

I am a generalist by nature. I like everything. I’m a “Jack of all trades.” I want it all, and I want to offer it all. Jim Collins would say this is a problem, from a business perspective. [1] To be honest, I think some organizations use his “hedgehog” principle as an excuse to double down on losing strategies. “We just sell underwater basket weaving kits… it’s our hedgehog.” Nevertheless, I will begrudgingly admit that he is right about the need to focus.

Campus Edu is trying to change the paradigm of higher education. This is the land of innovation. Innovation requires trial and error. It requires constant self-examination and refocusing. The adage, “Fail fast, fail often, but always fail forward,” is often the name of the game. Sometimes you have to throw the net in more than one place before you start catching fish.

One of the biggest challenges for innovators is having too many ideas. But you cannot do everything at once. Without moments of focus, ideas just evaporate into the air like a space heater outdoors.

2. Persistence

Over the years I have frequently used the image of a running back trying to find a hole in the defensive line. Sometimes you have a general sense of the goal, but the path is sometimes blocked. Not everyone has the same vision. You keep looking and trying until that gap appears, and then you run through.

In our case, we are trying to make education appealing, accessible, and affordable to digital natives. Believe it or not, the academy often isn’t really wired for such strange concepts. To be frank, sometimes it seems the mottos of the academy are “Liver is good for you,” “The more friction, the more valuable,” and “We’ve dug our financials into such a hole we have to charge this much.”

Time and time again, we are finding that our first intuitions were right. Learners like the personal storylines we weave into each course. Digital natives like the visual appeal and intuitive navigation of the courses we build. Young learners aren’t going to pay for what they used to.

Our persistence is paying off. More and more schools are coming to us wanting to advertise their courses on our Discover platform. More are coming to us to help them design next-level courses, and collaborate to build new programs.

3. Communication

In an age where people sometimes work from multiple locations, communication is more important than ever. On the one hand, I reject any thought that it cannot happen at a distance. From Slack and Discord to texting, sometimes you can have more interaction with someone across the country than the person in the next room!

But communication is essential to an effective organization. It’s human nature to silo. We like people like us. We like people who think like we do. So we communicate with our group, while other essential players aren’t in the loop.

Obviously, this dynamic can cause problems. A project is full steam ahead until you bring in other essential players at the last minute. Suddenly there is a wall that is hard to climb. The right hand isn’t too pleased to know that the left hand has been shaking other hands. For example, the dreamers in an organization need the implementers at the table if the dreams are to become a reality.

There are other polarities where both ends need to be in communication with the other. Individuals who know how to convince others of a vision may not be as in tune with what it takes to make that vision happen. Similarly, individuals who know what it takes to manage a project may not be as in tune with the predictable illogic of real people.

I don’t mean to stereotype. Each individual is their own concoction of strengths and weaknesses. My point is that, as difficult as it may sometimes be, the different poles of an organization have to communicate with each other if something is really going to happen and happen for a long time.

So those are my big three takeaways from this year’s projects. Focus is almost always necessary for success. Similarly, ventures generally won’t cross the finish line without persistence. And better to communicate appropriately throughout a venture than to try to sneak projects by. That often ends in disaster.

[1] Jim Collins, From Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 90-119.

Southwest Baptist University is partnering with CampusEdu

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 18:36:29 GMT

Southwest Baptist University is entering into a strategic partnership with CampusEdu. This partnership will equip SBU to reach more students and enhance its online learning experiences.

“SBU is known throughout the Midwest for its innovative degrees in MBA, Nursing, and Cybersecurity, to name a few. Campus is now a partner with SBU in developing innovative practices and enrolling mission-fit students from high schools, churches, and the business community,” says Eric Currie, Campus’s VP of Enrollment Success. “This partnership is why Campus exists — to further expand SBU’s missional reach with beautiful online course experiences!”

There are three primary goals for this partnership.

Online Course Enhancement — SBU will work with Campus Studios (Campus’s Learning Design Team) to reimagine some of its online courses and programs. Through high-quality video, storytelling, and instructional design, these courses will educate students in immersive ways.
Course Sharing — SBU is joining the growing community of Christian colleges and universities that will share online courses through Campus Discover — Campus’s course-sharing platform.
Dual Enrollment — Students from across the country can access SBU’s dual enrollment courses through the Campus platform. SBU will also benefit from Campus’ strategic partnership with the Association of Christian Schools International .

“The challenges faced by Christian higher education institutions have been exacerbated by the extraordinary global events of recent years,” SBU’s Vice President for Online Learning, Ron Miller, shares. “In such a tumultuous environment, and with SBU’s leadership charting a bold course for the university, it is refreshing to discover a company that not only understands these challenges on a global scale but empathizes with the unique needs of Christian higher learning and is dedicated to meeting those needs specifically. Their products and services are particularly well suited for online learning and will allow us to ramp up more quickly than we could on our own.”

This multi-year partnership will further establish SBU as a leader in Christ-centered education around the globe.

________

Founded in 1878, Southwest Baptist University (SBU) is a Christian liberal arts university offering more than 100 areas of academic study at undergraduate and graduate levels throughout four physical campuses in Bolivar, Mountain View, Salem and Springfield, Mo., plus an online campus.

Southwest Baptist University is a leader among private universities in truly integrating Christ-centered academic pursuits with comprehensive professional programs at an affordable price. At SBU, the faculty and staff create a caring, academic community to prepare students to be servant leaders in a global society. For more information, visit www.SBUniv.edu .

It's All About Price

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 12:53:05 GMT

It’s All About Price!

Eric Currie

Price Matters

Recently, my family and I decided to order takeout for dinner. We looked at a variety of restaurants: Southern Barbecue, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, and Traditional American. We settled on pizza. Why? Because of the price! They have a special every so often selling all pizzas at 50% off. You should have seen the restaurant, it was full of hungry customers.

Now you may be asking, are you seriously going to compare a university education to a dinner meal? Why in fact, yes I am.

In the last few weeks, my rising junior has gone back to high school. Our home is inundated by marketing material from a great number of universities attempting to recruit my daughter.

I asked her: What are your thoughts on college? Now keep in mind my teenager received a National Honors Society Award from College Board, has a 4.0, completed three AP courses, and scored in the top 5% in one area of the PSAT.

My teenager shared quickly - “I am going to go local and probably go to the college that will be the least expensive.”

I asked why.

She replied, “I don't want debt and I really don't think the more expensive schools will place me further ahead than the low-cost options!”

Three Important Articles

In the last three weeks articles have been published concerning the cost of education and how families are responding.

1) Three weeks ago a key article asked the fundamental question: Is a college education worth it? One of the significant quotes from the story included "Sentiment is widespread even among Americans who went to college. More than four in ten bachelor’s degree holders under 45 did not agree that the benefits of their educations exceeded the costs , according to a survey by the Federal Reserve."

Wow - this is your younger alumni base who are influential for high school students stating the degree they graduated with is not worth it. How are you communicating with future students? How you are supporting your young alumni? Are you listening to your recent graduates?

How you respond to these questions is important because students are listening to these recent grads in the places they work, live, eat family meals with, etc…so is your college education worth it?

2) Two weeks ago I read of a college that has responded to the pricing issue by reducing their tuition by 62%. This may seem to be a drastic step but it speaks to the climate we find ourselves in within higher education. Universities know they need to respond to families' concerns about finances and with summer's rising inflationary costs are now taking significant measures to gain the attention of potential students.

3) The final piece that came out recently indicated a whopping 80% of high school graduates did not even look at a college if they perceived or viewed them as too expensive. The difficult aspect of this article is that the prospective student moves on from you even before they hear your message. I have often heard from institutional leaders that you need to tell the story of the institution and make the value proposition. However, this article indicates that if you are more than $30,000 a year, the majority of potential students are likely to tune you out because they believe you cost too much. For first-generation students, underrepresented minorities, and low-income families it was less than $10,000 a year (this is a growing demographic and opportunity for colleges).

Questions To Consider

As you seek to address the pricing challenge here are some helpful questions you can ask yourself

How do you message your cost on your website?
Do you have a marketing campaign for your prospective students to share your low-cost opportunities?
Do you speak with your key enrollment stakeholders about the costs and how students can come to your school for a positive financial experience?
Do you know how well your degrees do on the average pay scale formulas?
Do you have entry points for students that are cost-effective for them?
Do you offer financial coaching support?
Do you offer students plans on how to come to your school more inexpensively through internship or student worker programs?
Do you include the parents/guardians in this messaging?

Cairn University Widens Its Reach For Online Learning

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 18:42:42 GMT

Cairn University Widens Its Reach For Online Learning

Cairn University is partnering with Campus Edu to increase the reach and impact of its distinguished Biblical education. Cairn is sharing its online programs and courses with other Christian universities and high schools through Campus Edu’s innovative digital platform.

The Campus platform equips Cairn to manage and share its catalog of courses in an intuitive and streamlined way. Students and other academic leaders will browse and discover Cairn’s courses with ease and accuracy. This partnership gives Cairn access to a growing group of high school students who expect digital tools and courses that connect and inspire. Cairn adds its name to an increasing number of Christian colleges and universities partnering with Campus Edu to share faith-based courses and programs with new student audiences.

Sali Kaceli, Director of Cairn Online and Educational Technology shared his enthusiasm for this strategic partnership.

“Cairn University is committed to keeping Christ and His Word at the center of all we do. This is reflected in our curriculum and our courses whether onsite or online. It is more than academics. It is educating our students biblically, no matter their major, to be His servants in the church, society, and the world. Campus Edu enables the University to exchange such education with many like-minded institutions in the Christian community. I look forward to how God will use this partnership for His glory.”

Campus Edu’s VP of Enrollment Success, Eric Currie, views Cairn as a leader moving forward. “Cairn has long been involved in online learning and is innovating to reach students through new technologies. To have them as a partner is a real win for Biblical higher education!”

Through this important partnership, Cairn University will continue to be a leader in onsite and online Christ-centered education.

About Cairn University

Cairn University is a biblical university intentionally centered on Christ and His Word. Located in Langhorne, PA, just 25 minutes from Center City Philadelphia, Cairn offers over 70 undergraduate and graduate programs with core Bible and theology curricula, faculty committed to mentorship, and diverse events for students and the greater community. Learn more at cairn.edu

New England Bible College & Seminary Enters The Digital Learning Space

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 19:51:01 GMT

New England Bible College & Seminary Enters The Digital Learning Space

New England Bible College & Seminary is partnering with Campus Edu to update its digital presence and connect with Christian institutions across the country. NEBCS will use Campus Edu’s innovative platform to improve its online catalog and adopt courses from other faith-based academic institutions.

Today’s digital learners expect tools and courses that are appealing and immersive. Through this critical partnership, NEBCS will become a leader in delivering strong digital learning experiences. NEBCS will use Campus Discover - Campus Edu’s visual catalog tool - to enhance its online catalog by adding visual imagery.

Dr. Terry Smith, President of New England Bible College & Seminary views Campus as an important partner in the days ahead.

“We have desired for a while now for NEBCS to be in the digital space, but had no idea how to do it or how to afford it. Now Campus has made that possible! We are excited about what possibilities lay ahead for this partnership and Christ's Kingdom!”

Eric Currie, VP of Enrollment Success at Campus believes in the mission of NEBCS. “NEBCS's passion is to train leaders and offer quality education for their community. This makes them a wonderful partner for Campus as they take their first step into the digital world. This is a significant moment for NEBCS and Campus is excited to help extend their reach in the Northeast and beyond!”

About NEBCS

New England Bible College & Seminary is a training ground for those called to ministry as a vocation, as well as for those called to ministry in their churches, schools and homes. A rigorous curriculum compels students to explore and wrestle with deep questions, to learn to study and handle the scriptures with integrity, and to develop the skills necessary to lead, teach and guide others to maturity in Jesus Christ.

8 Tips For Shooting Course Trailers

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 13:04:24 GMT

8 Tips For Shooting Course Trailers

Video trailers for your digital course are important because they give the learner a clear sense of what they will learn and who they are going to learn from.

Here are 8 simple tips for shooting quality course trailers

1. Shoot in a comfortable location for the professor, free of noise and distractions.

2. Make sure the main light (sun, ambient, or lighting) is facing the subject, instead of behind the subject.

3. Use a tripod or a gimbal to ensure the camera is stable.

4. Shoot using the rule of thirds.

- Subject centered, or on the left or right grid intersection

- Eyes at top 1/3 grid line

5. Utilize an external microphone/lapel with good audio levels.

6. Ask questions that prompt the professor to tell their story authentically.

7. Shoot a lot of b-roll footage.

8. Be creative with camera angles for b-roll footage.

Grace Christian University Partners With Campus

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 17:51:00 GMT

Grace Christian University and Campus Edu Form Critical Partnership

Grace Christian University is excited to collaborate with Campus to enhance and improve their online experience for students. Grace will utilize the Campus Studio team’s videography, storytelling, marketing, instructional design, and graphic design services. Specifically, Grace is upgrading three courses:

Ethics and the Good Life (PHL 213)
Life Communication (COM 140)
Cultural Diversity (SOC 243)

One of the most distinctive aspects of a Campus course is a theme or storyline that fits each course author and runs throughout the course. The Grace course authors have already started to explore what these themes might be for each of their courses. In that way, these are not just some pre-fabricated online courses off an assembly line but a truly customized experience for the learner, along with the signature videography that Campus brings.

Grace Christian President, Dr. Ken B. Kemper sees Campus as a strategic partner moving forward. "As a leader in Bible-centered online education, Grace Christian University is excited to partner with Campus Edu to reach more students with the highest quality of innovative online instruction while maintaining transformational relationships between faculty and students. Grace desires to use methods which are most effective, yet biblically consistent with our mission, and the Campus.Edu partnership accomplishes this. Grace is committed to expanding the reach of biblical higher education to students who otherwise would be unable to attend on-campus classes. In a world that needs more grace, Grace Christian University is making higher education more engaging, more inspiring, and more rewarding."

Ken Schenck, Campus VP of University Partnerships, echoed this excitement. “The excitement I have sensed among the Grace Christian faculty and administration has been amazing. The course authors are some of the most enthusiastic we have worked with. They not only see clearly the benefits this partnership can bring, but they are extremely eager to make their online courses the best they can be.”

The goal is to launch the first version of these courses this fall (Fall 2022) with the final versions available in January 2022. For more information on Grace Christian visit gracechristian.edu

Prairie College and Campus Announce Partnership

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 16:03:56 GMT

Prairie College Expands Its Influence With Campus Edu Partnership

Prairie College is excited to announce a strategic partnership with Campus Edu. This significant partnership enables Prairie to share its online courses with other faith-based academic institutions across North America.

Prairie will be utilizing Campus Discover to upgrade the look and feel of its academic catalog. Through Campus Discover, Prairie's catalog will mirror the video-rich platforms we use every day on our mobile devices while also providing functionality for smarter searching, sorting, and filtering options. Prairie college learners and their advisors can find online courses that match their exact academic timing, pricing, and modality needs.

Prairie will also be using Campus Link , Campus’ innovative course-sharing platform. Through Campus Link, Prairie will manage its academic catalog through a streamlined, easy-to-use interface. Schools from across North America will have the ability to view and explore Prairie’s online course offerings.

VP of Enrollment Success, Eric Currie is thrilled to have Prairie College as a partner. “Prairie has a long and storied history of developing and training leaders for strategic missions. Campus is excited to partner with Prairie in extending this calling further!“

Prairie's Director of Online Education, James Fraser shared his enthusiasm for the partnership. “Prairie has been expanding our online offerings over the last number of years and we are excited to partner with Campus and other institutions who share our vision for online Christian education.”

About Prairie College

Prairie College is a private, interdenominational Christian college in Three Hills, Alberta. With a commitment to academic excellence and spiritual discipleship, combined with a genuine and welcoming community, the school offers a formative life-changing experience.

Are You Hesitant?

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 18:51:25 GMT

Are You Hesitant?

The number of conversation partners with Campus gets wider and wider every week! We are not only working with more and more colleges, but our summer has been full of new course builds with the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) for Christian K-12 schools around the world. We have started collaborating with churches and publishers of content (e.g., video repositories). An increasing number of universities are exploring badges and certificates with us.

When we started two years ago, we provided our videography and instructional design services for free, working with a small handful of colleges at the start. The result was the spectacular courses of Campus Learn with which you may be very familiar by now. The days of doing those services for free are now gone. Our services are still less expensive than it costs for a college to do this level of videography itself (and much less expensive than other professional services). In the end, the academic partnerships between organizations like Campus and universities are increasingly the norm. Today’s interested partners are not just early adopters. [1]

But why have some schools hesitated? In today’s post, I want to address some of the reasons.

1. I’m Too Busy

It is not surprising that many Chief Academic Officers are barely keeping their heads above water. It is so often this way with “Tier 2” goals. They are far more important than the daily “whack-a-mole” of a Dean or Provost, but they sometimes do not get done until you get to the point of emergency. Registrars have a similar life of immediate urgency.

So it’s understandable that some academic leaders and registrars have been hesitant to take on another thing. In cases where someone else could take the lead, schools have joined more quickly. On our side, the recent launch of Campus Link has made it easier than ever for a registrar to connect to our network, and we do most of the work for courses on our Learn platform.

Our potential services are much more extensive than Acadeum or Rize, other businesses in our space. We are deep where Acadeum is wide. We provide a whole ecosystem with extensive enhancements to online courses. Acadeum simply connects colleges to courses. It does not enhance courses or really market them. It does not have a connection to the Christian high school network. It also goes without saying that we are exclusively focused on Christian colleges that are explicit about the integration of faith and learning.

2. I don't want to cannibalize my residential program

We heard this pushback, especially in the early days. It was the kind of message I heard from those who published my books in the early days of Amazon. “Don’t send your friends to Amazon. Send them to our publisher webpage.” Amazon pushed the cost of a book down, and publishers predictably wanted to avoid that dynamic as much as possible.

It eventually became inevitable, as it will with course sharing once the dam fully breaks. Our work with churches may have this impact. I have blogged previously about using Campus to expand your markets, so I won’t repeat those arguments here. In the meantime, it is the high school market that is drawing many of the newest schools to join our platform. They want to recruit them out of high school to become full-time students at their universities.

Since the early days, we have added another tool that does not require a university to put their online courses into our LMS platform. We will display the courses that are on your Learning Management System (LMS). Campus Discover is a visual catalog that displays your existing online courses for sale to the world (can do onsite courses as well). Up till now, displaying your courses on Campus Discover has been free. We only asked for 10% of what you collect from a student at another college. However, with the Discover platform rapidly filling up with a host of quality courses, we will quickly begin charging for this service you might have previously received for free.

3. I’m unsure of the quality

I am amazed that a debate that was definitively settled two decades ago still pops up from time to time. The evidence is clear. The average learning of students in an online course is as good or better than a face-to-face class. [2] Are there bad online classes? Of course there are. And there are countless bad face-to-face classes too. A well-designed course is a well-designed course whether onsite or online. A responsive professor is good whether online or onsite. Let me be frank. Arguments against online education at this point in the game are simply unfounded.

Courses on the Campus Learn platform have more rubrics to measure learning than the vast majority of traditional classes. We even keep track of that antiquated measuring tool known as the “Carnegie hour,” which measures quality based on how warm your rear end makes a piece of wood (or plastic these days) in a physical location. In a previous piece, I even suggested that some resistance in this area may have to do with a subconscious classism. No matter, the people always win.

In the end, the courses in the Campus universe are as good as your university wants them to be.. We are a medium, a platform. Beyond our minimum learning standards, your university can make its courses as brilliant as you want them to be. You are in the driver’s seat.

4. I already tried that

Perhaps you feel like you have already tried something along these lines before. We would want to know more. What exactly did you try, and what were the goals you felt you did not achieve? How did you set up the experiment? Did you give the students what they were wanting in the way they were seeking it? Were any unnecessary obstacles put in their way?

Here are three tips on how to engage with Campus with success. First, what are the strengths of your school? What are your superpowers? Who are your most engaging professors? What is the best your school has to offer? You might also take a look at what is already on the Campus Learn platform. Are there gaps your university can fill with excellence?

Second, consider your market, especially in a 50-100 mile radius of your school. What does the Christian high school market look like around you? What are the subjects that those students are most wanting to take while they are still in high school? What are the ones that will best draw them to your campus to finish their degrees? Also consider whatever church tradition you are part of. What subject areas would be most attractive to your denomination or faith tradition?

Finally, don’t create unnecessary obstacles for your students. Participate in the Campus Consortium in a way that allows your students to count Campus courses within their load. In that way, they can get financial aid for the courses they take. These are hard times. Give your students access so they can make the choices they want to make.

A final thought on hesitation

My father was in World War II. He had some sayings that I suspect come from those Army days. “Indecision is the worst decision.” “He who hesitates is lost.”

It is not quite as serious as life and death, but the value proposition of Campus Edu is clear. I just shake my head when I think about what we offered some colleges less than a year ago and that they passed on. A whole new group of colleges has joined, all of whom see the potential. One new institution will be putting 20 Gold courses into the Campus Learn platform this fall. By spring, high school students will be able to get associate degrees through our partner colleges in areas like cybersecurity, business entrepreneurship, psychology, media/communications, allied health sciences and more.

It’s not too late to join!

[1] Cf. https://www.holoniq.com/notes/the-7b-global-opm-and-academic-ppp-market/

[2] Our Chief Academic Officer, Erin Crisp always points to www.nosignificantdifference.org for this clear conclusion. "The No Significant Difference database ... is a fully indexed, comprehensive research bibliography of 355 research reports, summaries and papers that document no significant differences (NSD) in student outcomes between alternate modes of education delivery."

Asbury University and Campus Announce Partnership

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 13:17:59 GMT

Asbury University will partner with Campus Edu to bring courses into robust online learning space

Asbury University is partnering with Campus Edu to enhance curricular offering in the digital space. This will begin with the transformation of six specialty Asbury courses for online learning. Through high-quality video, storytelling, and instructional design, these courses will connect with students in new and exciting ways.

The partnership launches in January 2023 with six initial courses:

• The Cultural Influence of Mass Media (COM 130)

• Give, Save, Spend (BUA 281)

• Single Camera Production (MC 302)

• Interactive Media 1 (MC 225)

• Principles of Management (BUA 211)

• Theater Stage Management (THA 313)

The course authors and Campus designers are collaborating to take existing courses and give them even greater visual and pedagogical appeal. The increasing digital-native generation desires learning tools and courses that are intuitive and easy to use.

Asbury University Provost, Dr. Timothy Wooster, sees Campus as a strategic partner for the university and a way to extend Asbury’s top notch in-person experience to a robust online platform to engage with even more students.

“This partnership will accelerate our goal to use emerging technologies to transform our curriculum, engage new markets, and bring the rich traditions of our on-campus programs into the digital space,” he said. “This will allow us to fulfill our mission to ‘enable students to acquire skills and attitudes that promote the holistic integration of faith, learning and living in a Christ-centered transformative community...’ in new and innovative ways.”

Ken Schenck, Campus Edu Vice President of University Partnerships sees Asbury as a leader in creating immersive courses for online learning. Schenck noted that “Asbury is a school that not only sees the current situation in higher education clearly but is taking clear steps to address the situation. They see the opportunity to engage not only their existing students but potential students with the kinds of interactive, multimedia experiences they already have online.”

About Asbury University - Asbury University is a nationally ranked Christian liberal arts institution in the heart of Kentucky with 15 academic departments offering more than 150 undergraduate areas of study, along with graduate degrees and certification programs in business administration, media communication and education and an online adult professional services program. More than 22,000 living alumni surround the globe, leading and serving in all 50 states and at least 80 nations. asbury.edu

NCCT and Campus Announce Partnership

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 18:17:26 GMT

North Carolina College of Theology extends its reach by partnering with Campus Edu

North Carolina College of Theology (NCCT) is excited to partner with Campus to grow its online learning experience and environment. NCCT will be working with Campus’ team of learning designers and developers to achieve a variety of institutional goals and initiatives.

Campus Learn (Campus’ innovative Learning Management System designed around Moodle) will serve as NCCT’s LMS. This visual LMS will improve both the faculty and student experience. NCCT also plans to migrate its current undergraduate and some graduate courses to the LMS for a launch this fall.

NCCT plans to purchase courses through Campus Link (Campus’ growing network of other Christian schools). Access to Campus Link broadens NCCT’s access to quality, Biblically-integrated courses designed by some of the best Christian colleges and universities from across the country.

Dr. Judy Cook, President of NCCT, is thrilled to be partnering with Campus. “The North Carolina College of Theology's motto is, "Reaching the World for Christ, One Student at a Time." Yesterday, that was just a statement, but today it has become a reality because of our partnership with Campus Edu. They have given us the keys to unlocking the doors beyond our borders to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the World.”

VP of Enrollment Success at Campus, Eric Currie, echoed this excitement. “A big part of our mission at Campus is to open doors for students to access quality education. NCCT’s desire is to raise up the next generation of leaders, and through this partnership, Campus is empowering and equipping them to better fulfill this important vision!”

This strategic partnership will equip NCCT to accelerate the development of its online learning presence, and ultimately continue the institutional mission of providing a quality, Christ-centered education.

For more information about NCCT visit www.ncctonline.org

It's All About Those Outcomes

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 16:25:59 GMT

It's All About Those Outcomes

Over seventy years ago, my Dad's dad took an ordination course with my Mom's dad, a teacher at Frankfort College. My Grandpa Schenck wrote papers and sent them to my Grandpa Shepherd. My Grandpa Shepherd wrote feedback back to him. There was nothing wrong with it. It was lively engagement. It was one-on-one interaction and learning. In fact, it was more direct interaction than many college students have with their professors today.

They weren't dirty words. They called them, "correspondence courses."

Somewhere along the way, these sorts of courses became objects of ridicule. Perhaps this way of studying did get abused at some point, an easy way to get a credential that wasn’t as rigorous as some other paths. But I also have a strong suspicion that there is some classism hiding in here. Correspondence courses related more to “blue-collar” learners, while the “more prestigious” white-collar learner went to a sit-down college the first time around.

Blue-Collar Version of Oxbridge?

Imagine this model of learning. You meet one-on-one with a “master” at something. Maybe once a week you go to a professor’s office and have a chat about some topic. Maybe you write something that you give the professor ahead of time. Then when you meet together, you discuss your work.

This was the Oxbridge model. It is the way that students at Oxford and Cambridge approached study for years. Lower-level instruction involved one-on-one tutoring sessions with a mentor. Upper-level work involved the kind of one-on-one interaction I just mentioned and in fact did for my doctoral work at the University of Durham.

Here’s another model. You work one-on-one alongside a master worker. You help them build. You help them wire or plumb. You do what they tell you to do. This is the apprenticeship model. It has been used since ancient times to learn a trade.

Now let’s say you are learning from an expert one-on-one in the year 1950. But you are older, have a family and you need to keep working to keep food on the table. You cannot move very easily to a seminary or a college to, say, train for ministry. Correspondence courses were a way to do it. You could not Zoom. It wasn’t even practical to talk on the phone. You had assignments. You sent them in. You received feedback in writing. You probably worked at your own pace.

All about Outcomes

The key question of education is learning outcomes. What knowledge, skills, and dispositions is a student supposed to take away from studying a particular subject area? If you are studying to be a nurse, what do you need to know? What do you need to be able to do, and what attitudes do you need to have?

The last type of outcomes has always been the most difficult to teach and measure. How do you teach a student to love people? Skills are also difficult sometimes to teach in a classroom. How do you teach a student to lead a church on a whiteboard?

An orientation toward outcomes is key. It is not what the professor knows that is the key element in the equation. It is whether the learners acquire the desired knowledge, skills, and dispositions. It is not how brilliant the content transmitted is. It is how well the knowledge, skills, and dispositions are received.

That is not to say that it is entirely on the teacher. Students often fail to put in the effort. Sometimes they do not have an aptitude for the subject. It is simply to say that the measurement of good education is more a matter of what the learner is meant to acquire rather than the brilliance of the teacher.

What this means, of course, is that the person who knows the most about a subject may not actually be the best teacher of that subject. Over the years, I have seen this dynamic with preaching professors. There are some incredible preachers who have a difficult time communicating how they do it to others.

This situation can easily happen in math and science. Richard Feynman was one of the most brilliant physicists of all time. He actually taught beginning physics one year at CalTech. It was a fantastical experience of a lifetime, but most of the students did not learn what they needed to know because he was way over their heads.

Measuring Learning

In the early 1900s, they invented the “Carnegie Unit” as a way of measuring the weight of a course. A one credit hour course is a course that meets for an hour a week for fifteen weeks with the standard expectation that a student will work for two hours out of class for every one hour they are in class. So a one credit hour course is meant to represent 45 hours of class and work.

To be realistic, VERY few college students put in two hours outside of class for every one hour they are in class. In that sense, online classes typically require more work of the student than a face-to-face class. Because online classes have typically been asynchronous (not meeting at a specific time live), the 45 hours per credit hour is usually much more concrete in discussion forms and writing assignments.

When we started Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University, students wrote the equivalent of a book by the end of a course, way more work than in a traditional classroom. The danger is of course that such accounting of hours can become busy work, just to reach the hours.

In the end, the Carnegie unit is actually a pretty poor way to measure learning because it doesn’t. It measures “seat time.” But from my own experience in college, you can sleep through a class and get little more than whatever lovely dreams you had while the professor makes noises. Just because a talking head is talking doesn’t mean even half the students are listening. At least in an online class, if you don’t participate, you’re not considered present.

But there are much better ways to measure learning than butts in a seat. Western Governor’s University (WGU) has largely work-at-your-own-pace courses, self-directed learning. It is sometimes objected that they got into some trouble for not having substantive interaction with teachers, but in reality only minor tweaks were necessary for them to come into compliance. [1] Competency-based education is a fully acceptable form of education in the United States.

The kind of feedback that my grandfather received in the mail counts as regular and substantive feedback. According to current government expectation regular and substantive interaction between the students and instructor “does not need to be face-to-face or even live; the interaction can be feedback on paper or responses to comments on an online bulletin board.” [2]

Similarly, an entire program can have some courses that are almost entirely self-directed learning. We used to call these “independent studies.” With the continuous improvement of AI and interactive features, the space for these kinds of experiences in a learning program will only expand in the curriculum.

Mediating Learning

The key to quality education is thus the outcomes, whether or not the targeted competencies of the course are achieved.[3] The medium is far less important. Research on online learning has shown that quality online courses on average are as good at achieving learning outcomes as the traditional classroom. [4]

Textbooks were invented to mediate learning when a master teacher is not present. It was the first kind of correspondence course, if you would. You got someone who not only knew the subject but could communicate it in written form so that a learner could get the knowledge outcomes of the subject matter.

The apostle Paul preferred to be with his churches in person. But when this was not possible, he wrote letters. Paul’s New Testament letters are good examples of distance education. They were correspondence courses of a sort. The Corinthians sent Paul a letter with questions (1 Corinthians 7:1). He responded with letters. So before we completely dismiss such education, we should remember that those letters became Scripture, courses that we regularly take still today.

As we look to the future of education, the modality is far less important than whether the learning we craft results in the desired outcomes. More than one path can get the student to the destination. However, one thing is certain. If we begin with the end in mind, we are more likely to reach the goal than simply standing up front talking.

[1] https://tcf.org/content/commentary/need-retain-protections-scam-online-schools/

[2] Ibid.

[3] Certainly, there might be social and developmental outcomes to an education that go beyond the classroom.

[4] "Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies," 2010, US Department of Education, https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

Lessons From Belgium

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 13:15:06 GMT

Lessons From Belgium

After two years of limited travel, an invitation to share at the Media and Learning conference in Leuven, Belgium was a refreshing opportunity. Hosted by the Media and Learning Association , each year, this conference convenes people from across Europe and the US. Participants work in a variety of roles, but most have either an academic or professional interest in the design, production, delivery, and evaluation of media for educational purposes.

It is this diverse cross-section of practitioners that made the event a delight to attend. Lessons learned include the following and so much more.

Lesson #1: Campus is not alone (and neither are you).

If you have been experimenting with ways to use video, animation software, gamification, or storytelling to enhance the design of instruction, you are not alone. Colleagues around the world are similarly engaged in work to understand and test content at the intersection of media and education. Many people are asking and answering questions about quality, effectiveness, appeal, and scale. I met film and television producers who have transitioned into educationally focused companies and traditional academics who have re-skilled in the field of media production so that they could more effectively produce content for today’s media-hungry learners.

Lesson #2: Cross-functional collaboration is not optional for quality.

Each year the Media and Learning Association presents the MEDEA award. Institutions submit entries, and those entries are rigorously judged on 1) pedagogical quality (double weight), 2) use of media, 3) degree of innovation, 4) aesthetic quality, and 5) usability and technical quality. As I viewed each of the finalists and listened to their respective creators present, it was clear that combining technical, pedagogical, and subject matter expertise was a winning formula. When any of these three elements was missing from the team, the resulting product was noticeably less effective.

Lesson #3: Competing for a smaller pool.

This might be an overgeneralization, but based on the dozen or so university people I talked with, it seems that European universities view their primary competition as one another as opposed to the workforce or “other.” This is a subtle difference, I realize, but I think it has implications.

In the US, we see policymakers set goals for more high school graduates to enroll in university. We worry about fewer students applying to college in favor of joining the workforce or seeking alternative credentials. The EU university leaders seem content with the conclusion that only a certain percentage of people will want a college degree. There is little motivation to increase that percentage. Instead, the focus is on being the university of choice for the pool of students who have the desire for an academic credential.

This is a topic worthy of more conversation, but it seems that the result of this subtle shift in mindset is that colleges are competing with one another, not with the workforce or non-academic training programs. This simplifies the target. In US universities, there is often tension among faculty when new initiatives seem to chip away at the core identity of the university. If the goal is to increase the percentage of the overall population served by colleges, colleges have to diversify and do non-traditional things. If the goal is to continue to serve the existing percentage and let other kinds of entities serve the others, the traditional identity can remain more intact while people work to innovate within the boundaries of that identity.

I left inspired by the many examples of innovation and problem-solving in service of today’s college students. People around the world are:

Using student-created video to engage learners
Producing professional quality documentaries for educational purposes
Designing animated, branching scenarios to teach cause/effect in a variety of disciplines
Creating video trailers to engage students from outside the university
Engineering hy-flex classroom and online environments that facilitate modality choices with true equity between online and in-person experiences.
Launching online courses that are shared and usable by anyone
Creative re-use for physical spaces that are going unused, and
Generously sharing their challenges and learning experiences with one another.

The Media & Learning Association has much to offer those of us who work at the intersection of media and education or instructional design. Anyone can sign up for their newsletter , and if you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend the annual conference at KU Leuven in Belgium.

Can you do STEM online?

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 13:29:38 GMT

Can you do STEM online?

I like a challenge. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was charged to come up with a plan to generate 1.5 million dollars in emergency online revenue at a particular college. It was a crazy ask, and when I delivered a plan to the powers that be, they looked at me like I was crazy. My thought was, “You asked.”

Of course, I failed. If it weren’t for the CARES Act, things would have been pretty bad for a lot of colleges. That government money kept the doors of a lot of colleges and businesses going through COVID.

One of the passions that emerged coming out of that experience was a desire to get experimental science courses online, especially for dual enrollment high school students. I am repeatedly told, “It can’t be done.” I don’t like being told that. “You can’t do experiments at a distance,” I’m told repeatedly. I don’t buy it, at least not mostly.

Arizona State University (ASU) also apparently does not think so. The University of North Dakota does not think so. Nor does Portage , which partners with Geneva College and now with Campus Edu. During the pandemic, science courses had to go online. In that emergency situation, the outcome was not always as seamless as it might be. Nevertheless, here are some brainstorms for how a college might do STEM courses at a distance.

1. Weekend Experiments

They say that most online students live within 50 miles of the physical campus of a college. To the extent that this is true, there is truly an opportunity for blended STEM experiences. The concept here is that the students would watch and participate in engaging learning online during the week. Then on selected weekends, they would come to a campus to do experiments. The campus could be the main campus or a satellite campus.

There is a developing field of interactive learning possibilities online. WebWork is an amazing open source tool for learning math. It is almost impossible for a professor or TA to give quick and detailed feedback on complex math problems. WebWork evaluates one’s work immediately and can be set up to create a formative and not merely summative experience. For example, it can give the student more than one attempt to get the homework correct. Online proctoring services make it possible to make sure that cheating does not take place on exams.

zyBooks is another option for interactive online learning, especially in areas like computer science. If only homework had been this helpful when I was in college! There are other options out there. WoZ U was founded by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. It provides similar interactive learning possibilities in software development, data science, and cybersecurity.

2. Partner with Local High Schools

Another possibility is to partner with high schools in the vicinity of your online students. Most high schools will have biology, chemistry, and physics equipment available for their own students. If you have students too far removed to come to your campus, what about partnering with a teacher at a high school within driving distance of their location to do those weekend or evening experiments?

For Christian colleges, the opportunity to partner with Christian high schools is staring us in the face. How many smaller Christian high schools are lacking in quality chemistry, biology, or physics professors? This is a perfect opportunity for colleges in their networks to begin to draw potential nursing, medical, and science students toward their physical campuses.

3. Summer intensives

In one stage of moving toward completely online STEM degrees, ASU offered lab work in the summer during intensives. Students would do the theoretical work during the year and then come to campus to complete the experimental components of the learning. On the one hand, the separation in time may seem problematic. Will a person have forgotten the theory behind what they are doing by the time they come to campus? Another way to look at it is that a person will better remember for the long term what they might otherwise have completely forgotten. Reminders and repetition over time is memory gold!

The idea of intensives makes it possible to do the theoretical part of STEM degrees at a distance and then do the experimental part at key periods throughout the year.

4. Experimental Kits

ASU and other schools like Western Governor’s University have moved beyond requiring any face-to-face interaction in many cases. There are of course a number of virtual laboratory resources now available, like Labster . These can go a long way toward achieving the kinds of learning outcomes provided by traditional in-the-classroom experimentation.

Still, they probably are not sufficient for a hard core chemistry major. Companies have arisen that provide boxes with the appropriate materials to conduct experiments at home for many experimental science classes. Science Interactive has experimental kits that are only getting better and better, especially after COVID provided inspiration for rapid development.

I will concede that it seems implausible that one could get a superb chemistry, biology, or physics degree that did not at some point bring you to a physical location to do experimentation with equipment beyond what might be easily sent in the mail. However, much more can be done at a distance than is dreamt of in the philosophy of many a Horatio. Much of what we say is impossible is more a failure of imagination!

Warner and Campus Announce Partnership

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 12:20:16 GMT

Warner University and Campus collaborate to create a world-class Introduction to Agricultural Studies course.

Campus and Warner University are thrilled to announce a partnership to create an innovative course for current and future students. Campus will work with Warner to enhance its Introduction to Agricultural Studies course in a variety of ways, including:

High-quality video
Graphic design
Storytelling
Enriched instructional design
Photography
Accessibility

Dr. Hugh Moye, Assistant Professor of Agricultural Science, will be the featured author for this course. The Agricultural Studies major at Warner University prepares undergraduate students for a variety of careers in the agricultural industry. Through field experiences and a broad range of coursework, students who complete the program gain practical skills and knowledge in preparation for addressing challenging issues that face modern agricultural production. Courses include topics on specialty crops, animal science, herd health, plant science, agriculture policy, sustainability, global agriculture, and agribusiness.

Warner University President, Dr. David Hoag, expressed his enthusiasm for the partnership saying, “We are looking forward to partnering with CampusEdu because of their incredible position in the Christian College course sharing space. Adding our Agriculture program to their platform will allow for national and international exposure.”

Founder and CEO of Campus, Darren Campbell mirrored the same excitement. “Warner University is a premier Christian university. We are excited to bring this Agricultural Studies course to life in a way that connects with students.”

For more information about Warner’s Agricultural Studies program visit https://warner.edu/academics/undergraduate/agriculture-studies/

Dreaming Philosophy, Campus Style

Tue, 17 May 2022 12:11:19 GMT

Dreaming Philosophy, Campus Style

In 1997, I snuck into teaching at Indiana Wesleyan University on a one-year contract teaching philosophy. Duane Thompson had retired, the previous philosophy teacher. I frankly sensed that the Department of Religion was unsure whether philosophy was an essential piece of a Christian curriculum in the first place. I enjoyed a couple of years as the primary philosophy professor at IWU before I slid into my actual area of specialty, New Testament.

I love philosophy. Don’t tell anyone, but I often enjoyed teaching it more than Bible courses. If there were an inexpensive, quality, online, work at your own pace MA in philosophy, I would be very tempted to do it even today.

Such an animal is unlikely. Philosophy departments are some of the first ones to be closed in the cost-cutting environment in which we currently live. I know one college that effectively downsized three philosophy professors last year. As part of the liberal arts, philosophy professors are probably not the first to jump at the idea of teaching online. Master’s degrees are generally not inexpensive, and the idea of doing coursework at your own pace is not highly welcomed in the traditional academy.

How might Campus Edu make such an unlikely suggestion possible?

First, the Campus Learn platform makes it possible to share the load of a curriculum. Let’s say that an MA in philosophy involved 10 courses and a 6-hour thesis. Four or five universities could brunt a load like this by facilitating 2 courses a year each.

Cost could be mitigated by making these courses self-paced with a reference professor. The main overhead would be upfront in the creation of the courses. A “gold” course with Campus currently costs $10,000 to create. That results in a course creation investment of about $20,000 for each partner school, an amount that might easily be raised from an interested donor.

In such a gold course, the key instructional material would be videoed and front-loaded into the course. The reference professor would be available for feedback and some limited interaction. Although nothing would prohibit greater interaction, the set-up implies reduced cost and thus a reduced price. Professors would be paid per student, making the degree scaleable.

Courses might run as all-year courses, meaning that a person could begin and end at any point within that one-year period. Students with extra time (or beginning with a good deal of prior knowledge) could move quickly through the curriculum. Others like me might take a slower road.

So here is your new MA in Philosophy, shared by 5 Christian universities:

36 credit hours
10 core courses and a 6-hour thesis
5 core courses in the history of philosophy
Ancient Mediterranean philosophy
Global philosophy
Medieval European philosophy
Modern European philosophy
Contemporary philosophy
Get out of this requirement by passing competency exams.
Otherwise, choose from topical electives.
Say $450 tuition per course, making it about $8000 a year for a two-year degree.
Do the degree at your own pace

What do you think, CCCU? Do any schools want to get together so I can get this degree with you? Don’t underestimate how many geeks like me there are out there.

10 Reasons Why Stories Matter For Learning

Tue, 03 May 2022 10:00:04 GMT

10 Reasons Stories Matter For Learning

1. A story invites people to a space beyond facts…a space that blends the heart/mind/soul/guts.

2. A story crafts a space to nurture the imagination and explore thoughts and ideas with curiosity.

3. A story adds color, sound, and life to a concept or a space of learning.

4. A story allows people to use all of their senses (touch, smell, sight, sound, and taste).

5. A story connects the teller and the listener and then extends that invitation to the listener to connect the story being told and the story of their life to the stories in the world around them.

6. A story creates trail markers that guide the listener or the reader through the learning journey.

7. A story acts as a memory point that the learner can look back at to connect with what was being taught. I still have people from 20-40 years ago who sat in a class or a space where I was communicating (whether that be walking a sidewalk or desert path or sitting in a classroom, sanctuary, or around a common table) and they remind me of a story that I told and the learning they connected that story with.

8. A story allows people to catch their breath along the metaphorical trail of learning. It allows the expressions of laughter and tears and uh-huh moments that are rooted in emotions and the raw reality of life.

9. A story authenticates a relationship between the listener and the teller by humanizing both.

10. A story creates the space and pace for the listener to bring their story, perspective, interpretation, and dialogue into the learning experience…ultimately creating the opportunity for transformative inductive learning.

ABHE and Campus Work To Enhance Professional Development

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 10:00:04 GMT

ABHE and Campus Work To Enhance Professional Development

April 26, 2022

The Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) and Campus are excited to announce a partnership to advance biblical higher education. This partnership has three key aspects:

Conduct training for commissioners and team evaluators through the Campus Learn platform.
Create beautifully designed professional development courses using the Campus Studios team.
Migrate current training content for commissioners and team evaluators.

Philip Dearborn, President of ABHE, sees Campus as an important partner to help enable flourishing institutions.

“The Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) is pleased to partner with Campus to provide premier professional development programming for our members using their LMS,” Dearborn said. “They are always responsive to the specific needs we have and willing to go the extra mile to make it happen.”

Darren Campbell, CEO and founder of Campus, shared his excitement saying, “Campus is thrilled to partner with ABHE. ABHE’s passion for biblical higher education and Campus’s software and design services are a perfect match to empower ABHE’s vision of developing flourishing institutions.”

By using the Campus Learn platform, ABHE leaders will be able to train from anywhere, at any time, and on any device. Also, ABHE's commissioners and team evaluators have the opportunity to stay current on accreditation policy and emerging practices for assuring and advancing quality in ABHE institutions through the accreditation process.

Ultimately, our hope is that this partnership will empower ABHE to equip its leaders to develop missional students who impact the world for Christ for generations to come.

To learn more about ABHE visit: https://www.abhe.org

Courses I Wish They'd Let Me Teach

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 11:00:05 GMT

Courses I Wish They'd Let Me Teach

I have a weakness (sometimes it’s a strength). I’m interested in everything. Fortunately for all the students of the world, there are many courses that the accreditation commissions won’t let me teach. (YouTube of course is a different story.)

One of the things I love about Campus Edu is that we are interested in pretty much everything too. Every once and a while, I get to sit in on our design team as they work with course authors at different universities. How do you take a course that many students don’t think will be interesting and show them it actually can be? That’s the magic Campus aims to work.

So what are three courses I’d love to teach but am forbidden by the steady heads of the academy? Let’s do a little dreaming. How might you take a hard subject–or one that is just “misunderstood”–and grab the attention of minds that need constant stimulation?

1. The Physics of Superheroes

Combining my childhood love of comic books and my quest to know why I keep tripping over things, “The Physics of Superheroes” would teach first semester physics with the Supernerds in an interactive online format. Speedy’s trying to save someone from being crushed by a falling piano in 10 seconds, but she can only get there in time if you get the acceleration right. Oops, you got it wrong. Superjump is trying to squash the Blob, but he has to leap a tall building with the right starting velocity and trajectory. Twisty, Boing, Mr. I-Can’t-Stop-Punching-Things, and Unused Potential could be just some of the cast of characters whose math- and physics-challenged powers need your help to save the day (or cause a catastrophe).

2. Romancraft

Imagine a course on Roman history where your class teams up to build the city of Rome (and key outposts) in a Minecraft fashion. Each week of this 8-week online course, you build together a different time in history. It’s 753BC and Romulus is founding the city. Now Hannibal is coming for Rome on elephants over the mountains. The week ends by setting Carthage on fire. It’s 44BC and you are building the Senate where Julius Caesar is assassinated on the Ides of March. Horse races, the Colosseum–your class builds them all. It is AD64 and Nero is rebuilding after a fire they accuse him of setting. Animations bridge the gap between the things you build, and some of the best models of past students are incorporated. You learn about politics and religion while building the structures where events took place. Because this is a Christian college, key intersections with Christianity are included (Claudius expels Christians. Nero accuses Christians of the fire and puts Peter and Paul to death. Lions in the Colisseum.)

3. The Queen Hates Your English

Join the Red Queen and other figures with British accents as you learn American English online. Dangling participles–off with their heads! Split infinitives, you will be allowed to do so over the vehement protests of Shakespeare. Lady MacBeth will protest but will not be able to stop you from putting the commas and periods inside the quotation marks. On the other hand, they will be quite pleased to berate you if you can’t tell the difference between a direct and indirect object or if you don’t know the past participle of spring.

Obviously, I’m being facetious (or am I?), but I firmly believe that just about anything can be taught online and be taught well. Sometimes we just have a colossal failure of imagination. What about a PE class where everyone is running together at the same time even though they are at different locations. They talk while they run.

There’s an App for that. And when there isn’t, we can make one.

Erin Crisp, Ed.d. Speaking at Media and Learning Conference

mark.shepherd@campusedu.com (Mark Shepherd) — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 11:00:04 GMT

Erin Crisp, Ed.d. Speaking at Media and Learning Conference

Our Chief Academic Officer, Erin Crisp has been invited to speak at the upcoming Media and Learning Conference located in Leuven, Belgium. The conference will take place from June 2-3.

The theme of the conference is the "University of the Future". Media and Learning describes this theme further saying, "Events over the past 2 years have accelerated a process that had already begun – to re-think the structure, purpose and operation of universities and all higher education institutions to better fit the future. Re-thinking means reviewing and adapting all aspects of university life including the place and best use of media-supported strategies and the role and position of the services that support a move to more student-centered design and delivery of learning."

Erin shared her excitement by saying, "The Media and Learning Conference is a great opportunity to learn and share ideas that live at the intersection of education and media development. Conference presenters and attendees include visual media producers and directors as well as higher education researchers and instructors. I'm grateful for the invitation to share about evidence-based principles of educational video, and even more excited about learning from the other conference participants."

To participate virtually visit https://register.media-and-learning.eu/

Lessons From The Farm: Part 1

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 12:03:37 GMT

A photo of my daughter on our family farm in eastern Canada

Lessons From The Farm: Part 1

Written by: Eric Currie

When I was growing up on the farm in eastern Canada one of the constants was preparing for winter. We all knew the frigid weather was coming when we would no longer have access to food and needed supplies for our dairy cattle. We had to ensure we had enough hay/grain/corn stored to enable us to not only survive winter but to thrive during the season. I can remember how we worked in the springtime to be more efficient planting crops through new machinery and data metrics that allowed us to know the best years to rotate fields- when to plant crops and when to optimize the harvest.

These new innovations changed the game for our local farm, allowing us to work more effectively and timely. At first, my dad was skeptical of these new innovations thinking he knew the land best. However, through the encouragement of my brother and others, he took small steps and quickly found out the advantages of these “New Ways”! The first winter the herd had less sickness and produced more milk than had previously been experienced during those barren months. He quickly moved to these “New Ways” the next spring and never looked back.

A photo of the winter season on my family farm

These lessons from the farm remind me of Higher Education. Since the economic crash of 2008, we have been in one of the most tumultuous seasons in our history. We have seen declining enrollments and massive change in student interest from degrees in the traditional 4-year options (education, history, pre-law…etc) to new degree options in the STEM area. We have also seen the continued acceleration of students wanting more accessible options in where, how, and what they learn. So just like my dad, colleges and universities have to choose how they will respond to change.

Will they only use older methods and feel their way through this moment, or will they look at the “New Ways” powered by technology?

I have been in higher education leadership for the past 23 years and 15 of those years in senior-level positions. During that time three questions kept bubbling to the top looking for a response:

1) How does your institution deal with under-enrolled courses/degrees and their financial impact? This is an extremely difficult question to answer for leadership teams. I know the business world would say: “Just make the change”, however in higher education, leaders must answer difficult questions with nuance. Can we adjust a faculty person's role? How do we deal with curriculum changes to degrees? Those of us in higher ed have heard all the horror stories of these changes and the turf wars that ensue.

For a school in a close-knit community, these changes can seem insurmountable. So how can this challenge be tackled? I have never met a higher ed leadership team that did not see the problem. The issue was if they had the will to make the change. The question asked above comes with many considerations, one of the most difficult being will it change the mission?

But I wonder, are there ways through collaboration and partnerships that schools could find an answer and still not sacrifice their mission? Could some current degrees be modified to still provide opportunities but better complement a financial plan that works for all parties involved? How do you plan to deal with this opportunity? What solutions do you see? This does not have to be a roller coaster (when the ride is too difficult you simply close your eyes and wait for the end!)

2) Is your institution investing in technology in ways that enable you to connect with and keep the students of this generation? I was recently at a financial officer’s conference and was able to have a conversation with auditors who review the financial records of colleges/universities. We had a wide-ranging discussion. One of their discoveries is that most institutions are not responding to the deferred maintenance issue on their campuses (physical building and their deterioration). I followed up this observation with a question: How are these same schools dealing with the area of technology? The senior auditor looked at me and replied: “They are not investing at all in the needed infrastructures and will likely be caught flat-footed by what is coming from more innovative institutions?”

So, let me ask you: Have you resourced your IT team with enough staff and budget to fully operate your Learning Management System (LMS), Customer Service Management, Advancement software, Financial Aid software, social media, website, alumni, and partnership connection systems? If residential is your primary focus, you must have a robust IT area. Students coming to us today are the YouTube/Apple generation. If schools do not soon adjust their budgets to meet these realities it is going to be very difficult for them to compete.

For example, I worked with a school that was utilizing four different systems to communicate to prospective students during the admissions process (the reasoning was cost). However, we could not properly track our communication stream with the prospective students. We had times when students did not receive timely information, or we over-communicated, which made us look incompetent. All the while our competition had a seamless CRM enabling them to provide timely and effective responses. This is one small example of an even bigger concern! So what does your investment look like in people, systems, and partners to meet this new reality?

3) How can your institution recruit and build future enrollment capacities? The traditional pipelines for recruitment are going through unparalleled tumult and they are providing fewer students to the market. In certain parts of the country, the demographic trough is leading to leaner sources to recruit than in years past. The old model was purchase names and if you did not reach your enrollment goals that year you increase to more names. So do you know where your students come from and why? If you cannot answer these questions, I would suggest an internal deep dive to understand your enrollment reach.

I remember one team that I was a part of purchasing names for leads. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and each year the vendor would celebrate adding five students through this process. The school needed to be enrolling 300+ new students and this was one of the opportunities to try and achieve the goal.

A suggestion for the budget marker is that whatever % you spend to achieve it should help you to the goal. So if you spend 40% of your budget, then it should at least achieve 40% of your goal…this was extremely short of goal! In my initial team meeting we raised the question- is this a positive number? We all knew the answer: of course, it wasn’t.

One team member suggested a deep dive concerning our traditional partners. What we discovered is that our previous pipelines had begun to walk away from us because we had adjusted money away from those relationships. We immediately started a campaign to rebuild engagement with those partners. One of those was a nearby private school that sent half a dozen students every year and now was sending zero students to us. I reached out to the school, met with the leaders, and found out what was necessary to build more effective communication with them. Over the next two years, they sent 18 students to us. The cost was only in the thousands of dollars, and we met our bigger goal each year because of following the data/metrics, and new communication tools to help reestablish old partners and develop new relational sources for students.

How are you answering these questions? Are you willing to embrace these “New Ways” or are you content with staying the same? Next week, I will share some ways you can respond to these considerations by engaging a “Platform” and how it can expand your possibilities! I’m cheering you on!

Hybrid Options after COVID: Part 2

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 12:54:34 GMT

Hybrid Options After COVID: Part 2

Written by: Erin Crisp, Ed.D.

In part 1 of this series we discussed one online learning option that gained exposure during the pandemic, “Hy-flex.”

First, let’s acknowledge the context. For many faculty, administrators, and students, they were introduced to hy-flex with urgency, when everyone’s lives had been entirely disrupted, and many people were afraid for themselves or their loved ones- not the ideal scenario to introduce a new model for teaching and learning. There were no carefully planned change management workshops, well-timed seminars, or well-resourced personnel ready to help. There were exhausting and valiant efforts to continue providing education.

So if the idea of keeping hy-flex for the long term produces anxiety, consider that part of the negative feelings associated with hy-flex could be the time and space in which it was introduced.

What did we know about hy-flex prior to the pandemic?

EDUCAUSE traces the origins of hy-flex to 2006 and first published about the model in 2010. Several universities had adopted the approach for strategically selected courses and programs. It was used primarily for graduate level education with working adults. Hy-flex courses often included an element of choice for learners (ie. should I attend in-person or can I be successful attending only online asynchronously?). These were mostly mature learners.

Successful hy-flex environments often had the following characteristics: more than one instructor, support from instructional technologies personnel, awareness among students that they are expected to take responsibility for their own learning, higher than average learner confidence and maturity, robust capabilities for online course management, and an institutional familiarity with support for online learners (ie. access to advising, library services, disability support specifically designed for distance education).

The visionaries who designed hy-flex were looking toward a future where learning could be more personalized. If learners could access the same learning content and activities either in-person or online, wouldn’t that solve a lot of challenges? The same instructor could teach in both environments at once, and students would be able to hop between ecosystems as needed. Between 2006 and 2019, many schools dabbled with hy-flex as a model, but it never reached high rates of adoption. COVID accelerated any adoption that had been percolating.

After COVID experimentation, many faculty have realized that a) it is challenging to maintain two ecosystems at the same time. Library services, student support channels, course materials, attendance tracking, financial aid packaging all become more complicated when the student type is not a simple binary (in-person or online). And b) the instructor workload to keep track of learning activity in two ecosystems simultaneously is extremely challenging. Any parent knows this challenge well. Mom thinks Dad is watching little James, Dad thinks Mom has him, and all of a sudden James is playing in the street.

Learners can easily fall through the cracks between the ecosystems, getting lost, missing classwork because they intended to do it online, skipping online stuff because they intended to be there in person etc. Even with these challenges, though, many are now taking a step back to reflect on what we’ve learned and how we might move forward in a way that serves all learners for the future.

Maybe hy-flex is an idea whose time has come.

When carefully designed and intentionally launched, hy-flex models can show success. For example, one study measured the impact of a blended approach on an MBA statistics course. Prior to the intervention, the course was taught either face-to-face or online (binary) with online students performing, on final exams, at levels below their face-to-face peers. Researchers sought to close the achievement gap by offering the online learners opportunities to engage synchronously on a weekly basis. The new model effectively closed the achievement gap.

If we’re hoping to make hy-flex models a permanent fixture of university offerings, here is a top-five list of considerations:

Create student-friendly communication that helps students understand the interaction options and expectations. For inspiration, search “Liquid Syllabus” examples and “Canva Syllabus” examples online.
Refine support and resource channels so that everyone (faculty, staff, and students) has equal access to and interaction with your institutional support channels.
Make synchronous learning opportunities interactive. If online students engage synchronously, they should not be listening to the equivalent of a video in real-time.
Maintain equity between the online ecosystem and the in-person one. Live-streamed versions of in-person classes are not equitable for the online participant who watches alone while in-person students interact with one another and their instructor.
Appoint, hire, or engage an instructional technologist or designer. Relieve the faculty instructor’s burden, and be ready to support them with someone who has the skill and experience to remove friction and delight participants.

To realize the dream of personalized learning pathways that meet a variety of learning needs while overcoming barriers, blended models hold great promise, but caution should be taken to avoid mistakes in search of a hy-flex silver bullet to increase enrollment with minimal expense.

1 Lightner, C. A. & Lightner-Laws, C. A. (2016). A blended model: simultaneously teaching a quantitative course traditionally, online, and remotely. Interactive Learning Environments, 24:1, 224-238, DOI: 10.1080/10494820.2013.841262

Hybrid Options after COVID: Part 1

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 13:34:56 GMT

Hybrid Options After COVID: Part 1

Written by: Dr. Ken Schenck

In response to COVID, the fall of 2020 initiated a lot of brainstorming in the academy. Some students would want to come to campus. Many others elected to stay home and continue remotely.

It was a difficult time for academic leadership. How do you do biology remotely? Most colleges did not have all their offerings online. How do you give individual lessons in oboe over Zoom?

“HyFlex” seemed the best answer. HyFlex refers to the practice of having students in a physical classroom along with online students present in the same class sessions at the same time. EDUCAUSE offers a brief summary of the advantages and challenges of Hyflex which has been in use in higher education since at least 2010. Teaching in this mode was a real dance. You might have Zoom up on the screen with the students who were remote. Some had stayed at home. Others might be in quarantine. A few stalwart souls would come to class masked, as the professor likely was. You recorded the sessions for students who were sick or were halfway across the world, confined to their home country.

Class time was a sometimes-awkward toggling between online students and the students in the classroom. You might use an “ OWL ,” which was supposed to rotate automatically toward any student in the room who might be talking. Some instructors and students navigated the dual environments with ease. Most found it incredibly frustrating.

The thought crossed some of our heads: might this be a way to expand our enrollment? Suddenly we can offer all or almost all the degrees online that we have on our residential campus. Think of the economization potential—large class sizes that have not normally been practiced in the online arena. Could it actually integrate online and onsite into one common (and thus less expensive) experience?

To back up a little, online courses have traditionally been asynchronous (ay-SING-kruh-nuhs), meaning that the student does not need to log on at a specific time. This approach is very attractive to working adults and students who may be in widely differing time zones. Since accessibility is a crucial dimension of online education, it seems important for online courses at least to be technically asynchronous.

However, bandwidth is now at a place where it is no problem to re-introduce live, synchronous options (SING-kruh-nuhs). Zoom and other possibilities did not exist in an accessible form when online education first began. It was almost necessary for online courses to be a seemingly endless to-do list of writing projects.

No more. Not only is it incredibly easy to re-introduce live components, but they can be recorded for those who cannot or chose not to attend. The course thus remains technically asynchronous while leveraging the benefit of “face-to-face” interaction. A small writing assignment for those who choose the recording can provide just enough incentive to drive students to the live session.

What about HyFlex now? Should it continue now that COVID is over? That is the subject of the next post.

Learner-centered Strategy: Price

ecrisp@campusedu.com (Erin Crisp) — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 12:09:48 GMT

A Learner-centered Strategy: Price

Written by: Erin Crisp, Ed.D.

Any learner-centered strategy for higher education institutions should include an analysis of the potential for variable pricing. At most US Colleges and Universities, there are two variations for pricing- in-state and out-of-state, yet the amount students are actually paying for the same educational experiences varies dramatically based on the aid package, scholarships, and discounts they receive. Variable pricing already exists. It just exists behind the curtain of financial aid packaging.

Every student in a college dorm is probably paying a slightly different amount to attend the same school, yet it would be rare for a student who is “shopping” for a school to have advanced knowledge of what the actual cost for them might be. They exclude schools from their list of potentials as “too expensive” when in fact they may not be, and they include schools where they think they may receive a decent financial aid package only to find out that they didn’t.

As the parent of a high school senior, it almost feels like colleges don’t really want students to use price as a deciding factor when choosing where to attend. And yet, learners and their families indicate again and again that cost is a major factor in choosing a college. A national survey with data from 55,000 students indicates that of the 6,000 students who were accepted but did not attend their first-choice schools, 40% of them declined because of cost.

What would have happened if those first-choice schools had been able to offer those 6,000 students an alternative model that comes with a lower price tag? What if those students could attend their dream school at half the cost because they agree to take half of their courses online? Several models for online delivery make it an affordable option for universities who can pass those savings on to students by offering reduced tuition for online courses.

But if online courses are cheaper, wouldn’t every in-person student just switch to online to save money? It is difficult to predict what students will or won’t do, but we can look at case study examples. The University of Central Florida has been an online learning leader for 25 years. At least since 2010, they have been offering in-person students the option to take courses online. As of 2019 (pre-COVID), 49.4% of UCF’s total student credit hours were taught in the online or blended modality. Even after nearly 10 years, half of all courses are taken in-person.

Many public universities do not vary pricing based on modality. The national average per-credit-hour rate for tuition and fees at public universities is $311 for in-person courses and $316 for online courses (online often includes a technology fee). Private universities are an entirely different story.

The national average per-credit-hour rate at private schools is $1,240 for in-person courses and $488 for online courses. 1 If the online course rate were available to students living on a physical college campus, students could drastically reduce their overall cost for the in-person college experience and many more of them might choose to enroll at small, private liberal arts schools that are struggling to fill empty dorm space.

Two other drivers should prompt higher education leaders to consider a strategy that includes variable pricing based on learning modality-- the student loan crisis, and persistent doubts about return on investment. Article after article has been written to explore data on the amount of student loan debt in the US. Today in the US, according to Forbes , 45 million people have student loans totaling $1.7 trillion dollars, a 144% increase from 2007. The huge debt dollar amount (more than US combined credit card debt) is partially attributed to a rise in tuition prices. Consumers might stomach the higher costs if they were assured of a positive outcome, but that too is in question.

Skepticism about the value of an expensive college education is increasing. Harvard-trained economist Laurence Kotlikoff advises against borrowing for school and writes, “Do what it takes, short of borrowing, to attend college if that’s your goal. But also know that two-thirds of Americans are leading full and highly productive lives without the aid of a college diploma lost in a box in the attic.” One could argue that there are plenty of data to show that completing a bachelor’s degree increases lifetime earnings, happiness, and life expectancy. However, the tides could be turning quickly enough that longitudinal data hasn’t caught up.

What if competency (knowledge and skill attainment) was more important to employers than credentials (degrees or diplomas)? What if employers had secure methods to understand the skills attained by applicants, without relying on academic credentials? Degrees have long been used as a proxy for the complex web of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that each person has achieved. What if employers had a better proxy, a more precise and reliable one? What if they had better ways to sort and filter to find ideal employees? How quickly would the currency of “degree” lose its value? This is the shift many families and working learners can feel coming.

When the big four (Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon) make announcements about ignoring degree completion in hiring; when they launch their own educational programs and sponsor free degree programs at local community colleges ; when they hire learning sciences researchers away from Stanford and task them with studying education within the corporate setting; and when they spend millions to develop the technology to manage a national infrastructure of discrete skills descriptions, these are signals that the public sees. They are signals that say “beware of the value of the high-priced academy.”

The signals around us every day tell us to question the value of a residential, private, four-year degree. Even for those of us who had life-transforming experiences at a small Christian college (*raises hand*), we may find ourselves questioning whether times have changed.

Survival for the residential, four-year, private Christian college model will almost certainly require new pricing. Instead of one sticker price and then a financial aid package that comes late in the college decision-making process, why not advertise a variety of prices for different types of learning experiences?

The mission of Campus is to empower Christian educational institutions to thrive for generations to come. To accomplish this mission, we need to think creatively about partnerships and course sharing. If your school has an interest in attracting a new audience of learners with a $10k/year degree option, the Campus team would love to meet with you.

1 https://educationdata.org/cost-of-online-education-vs-traditional-education

Kingswood and Campus Partner Together

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 15:26:19 GMT

Kingswood and Campus Partner Together

March 8, 2022

Kingswood University’s commitment to provide quality, flexible options for students to study online has reached a new level through a strategic partnership with CampusEDU.

Kingswood recognizes a growing number of students need the flexibility to take care of their family, work, and ministry responsibilities without the upheaval of moving for an on-campus program. With a focus on academic excellence, practical ministry experience, and intentional spiritual formation that uniquely prepares students to minister in a variety of contexts and careers, expanding access for students to study online is essential.

The team at Campus is employing their expertise in instructional and graphic design, videography, and story development to provide quality online courses through their new platform. Kingswood students will now have access to a growing catalogue of quality Christian courses that meet the academic and spiritual formation requirements that are hallmarks of a KU education. Additionally, Kingswood will be providing several key Bible, theology, and ministry courses to the Campus course catalogue, expanding Kingswood’s influence to students studying in other institutions around the world.

This new partnership will allow Kingswood to continue to deliver an exceptional experience while increasing course offerings, streamlining the delivery of course content, and maintaining the commitment to offering an affordable education. Kingswood’s certificate-level students will gain immediate benefit as the twenty-four courses required for ordination move to the user-friendly CampusLearn platform by summer.

“We are delighted to be able to partner with CampusEDU. Their creativity, flexibility, commitment to quality, and entrepreneurial spirit are just what we need to navigate the rapidly changing world of higher education.” – Dr. Stephen Lennox, President.

Kingswood University remains dedicated to strengthening the local and global church through forming Christ-like servant leaders. Having a partner in Campus that understands and supports this mission positions Kingswood for even greater effectiveness and impact.

The State of Christian Higher Education

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 12:59:43 GMT

The State of Christian Higher Education

Written by: Ken Schenck

I write this post after an intensive month of important conferences for Christian higher education. The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) Forum happens once every four years. The Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) also met last month for their 75th annual meeting. Along with these two meetings were a couple of other gatherings for Christian college leaders.

Several of us at Campus were present at these meetings, talking to a number of individuals playing different roles at their institutions. As I have reflected on the experience, three main patterns emerged. Together, these patterns give us a good picture of Christian higher education at this crucial moment in history.

Pattern #1:

Long-term financial stability

Many institutions are wrestling with the long-term financial stability of their colleges and universities. Leaders at these institutions want to remain faithful to their mission but are looking for innovative solutions to meet the demands of today’s students. Interestingly enough, the most recent data suggests an average 4.5-year duration for a college president at the moment. It suggests the immense pressure that our schools and their leaders are currently under.

Pattern #2:

New marketing strategies

Colleges and universities recognize the need for new marketing strategies, especially with the Gen-Z student as their primary audience. In general, I found enrollment and marketing leaders very enthusiastic to see the possibilities of putting their online courses into our visual course catalog (a service we will provide at no cost). You could see the excitement they had at the thought of marketing their online courses to dual enrollment students in high school, especially since Campus is serving as the learning platform for the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI).

Pattern #3:

Academic flexibility

The pandemic accentuated the need to give students flexibility in their academic journey. Students are desiring a variety of options regarding where and how they learn. As a result, academic leaders have a lot on their plates. I admire these faithful individuals. Despite the stress, they find time outside the short-term whack-a-mole of the urgent to think about what needs to be done for the long-term success of their institutions. They negotiate the competing interests and ideas of incredibly smart (and sometimes strong-minded) communities.

A Call To Prayer

We need to pray for all those who work in these communities of faith--from administration to faculty to staff! Christian higher education is as important as ever, so if you can, take some time right now to pray for our schools and those who lead them!

Learner-centered Strategy: Place

ecrisp@campusedu.com (Erin Crisp) — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 13:54:48 GMT

A Learner-centered Strategy: Place

Written by: Erin Crisp, Ed.D.

I have three teenage boys who are great friends and share a deep sense of connection. In addition to playing basketball or lifting weights together, they can often be found playing computer games from their separate bedrooms, together, for hours at a time. They use Discord to talk to one another through headphones while they each assume a different character in a multiplayer world. I asked them one evening if they felt like they could have meaningful relationships with people they never met in-person, and they laughed, “Absolutely!”

Some students of the future (and today) will have trouble understanding why we think there is anything special about living on a residential college campus. According to Rinn (2004) benefits include: managing emotions, becoming autonomous, establishing identity, freeing interpersonal relationships, clarifying purposes, and developing integrity. 1 Parents who prioritize a residential college experience for their learners are probably thinking about these intangible benefits along with Christian spiritual development and discipleship in our faith-based schools.

In today’s landscape though, there are dozens of reasons that the traditional, residential college campus doesn’t fit well for young students who have all of the same intangible desires for college as their parents. We will only explore two in this article-- mental health and work. Students with needs in either of these categories may have a desire for the intangibles of a residential college community, but they will be increasingly confused by a lack of flexible options for their location while learning.

First, deteriorating mental health is a pressing concern among today’s teenagers and young adults. A recent US Surgeon General’s advisory report states that “from 2009 to 2019, the share of high school students who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%, to more than 1 in 3 students.” The situation was dire already, but “the COVID-19 pandemic further altered their experiences at home, school, and in the community, and the effect on their mental health has been devastating.”

One could argue that online learning has been a cause of the deterioration in mental health, but it could also be argued that the tools of online learning are just tools misapplied. In the same way that a hammer doesn’t cause my thumb to throb all on its own, an LMS on its own doesn’t cause depression. It could be that we all need to develop skill with the online learning tools that we have at our disposal.

For some young students, the thought of leaving their support network is unthinkable. Providing flexibility means giving the learner time to choose the college entry point that works best for them without feeling as though they are falling behind their peers. Could a church group, community group, homeschool co-op, or other affinity network be that place of support a student needs while they study? A college’s online strategy might target learning and support through affinity groups with multiple on-ramps to an in-person college experience.

Second, for some new high school graduates, there is a need or desire to join the workforce immediately. These students have needs for flexibility because of workplace responsibilities. A group of 180 educators and researchers recently formed an NSF funded think-tank at Stanford University to research and publish effective practices for an applied science to support working learners . The nine recommendations for study indicate that the majority of learners’ needs in the United States are not adequately addressed with today’s dominant traditional, residential college model.

Today’s adult online programs were designed for the older working adult who likely enrolled in a degree to advance in a career or re-skill for change. As evidenced by the higher attrition rates in fully online programs, fostering motivation, encouragement, fun, relationships, curiosity, and a joy for learning were not high priorities for the early 2000’s era adult online education model. For online learning aimed at younger working adults, a new online course design framework is needed to increase persistence and a sense of belonging.

Residential college campuses that embark on a strategy to provide flexible places for learning have an opportunity to contribute to the research on working learners. For example, to what extent do 18-year-old working learners feel a sense of belonging when the majority of their coursework is online? What has been tried to intentionally include them? What works, when does it work, and why? What about VR or game-based environments for fostering connection to other learners, faculty, and the university?

A final word on place-- BLENDED (see blended learning toolkit here ). A flexible learning environment could provide a blend of in-person and online options.

Evaluate your current landscape at your institution, and look for the one-degree shifts that could provide blended learning options that are sustainable and robust-- not a response to an emergency. Collect evidence and conduct experiments to learn more about how to meet students’ felt needs for flexibility-of-place while also inviting them into authentic learning communities.

1 https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153&context=nchcjournal

Houghton College and Campus Form Innovative Partnership

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 17:23:39 GMT

Houghton College and Campus Form Innovative Partnership

Houghton College is elevating its commitment to provide a student-friendly, easily navigable online learning platform for both fully online learners and onsite students in Buffalo and Houghton, NY. To that end, the College will adopt Campus EDU’s online learning platform.

While both systems are built on Moodle, the Campus EDU platform will improve the student experience by providing access to a more efficient and robust layout that is based on industry best practices that combine visual appeal with comprehensive learning management. Using a staged approach to the implementation, Houghton will ultimately transition all online coursework to the Campus EDU platform.

“Most of my career in higher education has included some work in online and hybrid learning. The pace of change is rapid, and Houghton’s students expect and deserve a seamless, high-quality online learning experience. We are rising to meet that challenge,” said Houghton College President, Dr. Wayne D. Lewis, Jr. “High-quality online learning is not simply copying and pasting in-person content into an online platform. It is an intentionally designed online learning experience that makes content accessible in new and exciting ways for students, including non-traditional students who need flexibility. Houghton’s partnership with Campus empowers us to raise the bar and provide more flexible options for learners while controlling costs.”

This strategic partnership will empower Houghton College to accelerate the development of the online learning platform, ensuring that course content is accessible to all students, and continue the institutional mission of providing an academically challenging, Christ-centered education in the liberal arts and sciences to students from diverse traditions and economic backgrounds and equipping them to lead and labor as scholar-servants in a changing world.

About Houghton College

Houghton College is a nationally ranked Christian college of the liberal arts and sciences and the best-priced Christian college in the nation. With an enrollment of nearly 1,000 students, Houghton has equipped graduates for lifelong success since 1883 through customizable programs offered in Houghton and Buffalo, N.Y., and online. The College offers more than 50 undergraduate in-person and online programs, including equestrian studies, data science and biological sciences, as well as graduate programs in business, education and music.

About Campus

Campus is an ed-tech company that's building the future of online education. Campus is creating courses and tools that are beautiful, engaging and transformative for students, faculty and administrators. For questions or inquiries email hello@campusedu.com

Learner-centered Strategy: Program

ecrisp@campusedu.com (Erin Crisp) — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 11:00:04 GMT

A Learner-centered Strategy: Program

Written by: Erin Crisp, Ed.D.

Flexible Programs

A learner-centered strategy should include flexible on-ramps and off-ramps for learning pathways and academic programs, yet many course credits “don’t count” as students start and stop programs of study. How many skills go unrecognized? How many spent tuition dollars fail to move the learner any closer to a credential? It seems that weekly there are announcements of colleges and universities that are investing in providing affordable or free access to online courses. 1 A university strategy that includes creative on-ramps and off-ramps has a high probability of increasing enrollment. What do we know about flexible programs that continue to produce high-quality results?

Challenges of Online Programs

Critics of online-only learning commonly point to low degree completion rates and for-profit bad actors who have left millions of learners with loan debt and no degree. Harvard researchers Gabriele, Larned, and West 2 summarize the challenges of online learning well. “Troublingly, research indicates that historically underrepresented students and students without strong academic preparation are most likely to struggle in an online-only environment. Online learners face a variety of unique challenges, from time-management issues to a lack of clear structure to lower engagement levels. First and foremost, however, online-only students often struggle with feelings of isolation and disconnection.” Additionally, “The central problem appears to be the lack of adequate personal interaction between students and instructors, as well as among students” (Baum & McPherson, 2019). 3

Growth of Online Programs

Yet, even amidst the challenges, online program enrollment continues to grow at some schools. What factors lead to growth? We know the top two factors that lead to shrinking enrollment: 1) finances and 2) challenges balancing family commitments. Unsurprisingly, we see enrollment growth at schools that are more affordable and at schools that provide flexible modality options for the 70% of postsecondary learners who are classified as non-traditional. 4 Many leaders are implementing programmatic changes that address the weaknesses of first-generation online models. Learners who need flexible options have many institutional choices, and it is clear that they are choosing the universities that prioritize learner-centered models.

Where is the Growth?

Private, not-for-profit college and university enrollment shows a 5.1% increase from 2012 to 2020. However, if the three biggest players are removed (Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Liberty University), a distinctly different story emerges. Everyone except for these three has collectively experienced a 1.1% decline. The growth of WGU, SNHU, and LU should tell us something about the priorities of an increasing number of today’s learners. A 4-year pathway to an in-person bachelor's degree directly after high school is an increasingly rare priority for learners and their families. Continue to provide for this audience, but open the aperture of institutional focus to create on-ramps for learners with other needs and goals.

Five Approaches to Flexible Programs

There are many approaches to flexible programs that are made possible by online, learner-centered innovation at the institutional level. Here are a handful of ideas.

Competency-based education. Is CBE a part of your institutional strategy to provide more flexible program delivery? C-BEN has a wealth of resources on this important delivery philosophy. The model has academic and consumer value when implemented well. Launch a CBE program with courses on the Campus platform.
The 60-year Curriculum. Some learners want to intersperse seasons of study with seasons of work as described in the research around the 60 Year Curriculum . For a productive workforce and healthy middle class, people need to prepare for a lifetime of “repeated occupational change and transition.” Launch a lifetime approach to learning with courses from the Campus platform.
Stackable Credentials. For the learner who doesn’t have a lot of motivation or time for a full college degree, a shorter path that leads to a desirable job is attractive. For example, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) certificate online takes 3-4 months to complete and costs approximately $150. Arizona State is offering a free 5 course sequence that stacks into a credential upon matriculation. 6 Colleges are rapidly incorporating these short-form credentials into their program offerings. Partner with Campus to create on-ramps from online courses to credentials at your institution.
Programmatic MOOC Options. Institutions and MOOC platforms team up to offer Bachelors degrees built around shared MOOC courses. Launch a new degree program or major using online courses offered by a consortium of schools on the Campus platform. Launch new academic options to attract new learners.
High-impact practices (HIPs). High-impact practices- HIPs are well-researched by AAC&U , and they effectively help students persist to completion. Partner with Campus instructional designers, and use the Campus Learn platform to offer HIPs to your students through a Campus Unlimited membership.

Learner-centered, flexible academic programs that incorporate modality choices, stackable credentials, CBE, and options for interspersed internships are increasingly attractive to today’s learners. Many of these initiatives address the challenges of online programs mentioned earlier.

What’s Your Strategy?

Why is your institution engaging in online learning? Have you prioritized learner-centered programs and practices? An online learning partner like Campus can consult with you to affordably make your online strategy a reality. Without start-up costs or the need to hire people, we can scalably partner with you to create flexible learning pathways for new populations of learners.

1 https://www.wsj.com/articles/arizona-state-university-looks-to-enroll-100-million-more-students-

by-2030-11642674604

2 https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Taubman/PEPG_Duet-SNHU%20Working%20

Paper_10-15-2021.pdf

3 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Human-Factor%3A-The-Promise-%26-Limits-of-Online-

Baum-McPherson/dc7e427180440c71be3038d8938e67abbaecc93b

4 https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Taubman/PEPG_Duet-SNHU%20Working%20

Paper_10-15-2021.pdf

5 https://us20.campaign-archive.com/?u=13aed88a97949408dde781173&id=c5beddc3d5

6 https://www.wsj.com/articles/arizona-state-university-looks-to-enroll-100-million-more-students-by-

2030-11642674604

A Learner-centered Strategy: Pace

ecrisp@campusedu.com (Erin Crisp) — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 11:30:02 GMT

A Learner-centered Strategy: Pace

Written by: Erin Crisp, Ed.D.

Do you have a learner-centered strategy at your institution?

Some experts balk at the term “learner-centered,” but overall, when we see it used in articles and institutional strategy documents, being student or learner-centered is framed as a goal to aspire toward. If you explore a handful of articles describing learner-centered strategies, a common theme emerges pretty quickly- importance placed on flexibility.

Especially in postsecondary education, being learner-centered and flexible are concepts that are joined at the hip, so what are we saying? Do we mean that students get everything they want? Is the customer always right? Educators are generally deeply concerned about the unintended consequences of a consumer mentality in education. We want what is best for learners, and there is a sense that sometimes learners are looking for quick-and-easy instead of the best with regard to their education.

The intent for this series of four brief articles is to provide a structure to organize a learner-centered strategy that maintains the evidence-based priorities of the educator ethos. As you aim to become more learner-centered at your college or university, you might consider targeting any or all of these four factors. Provide learners with increased options for flexibility of pace, program, place, and price . In this series of posts, I will explore each of the four factors, and point to at least one stream of academic research in support of each.

Pace

We intuitively understand that it takes some people longer to master certain concepts than others. While I might master the unit on data structures quickly, you may need more time with that concept, and you may master the unit on visualizations more quickly than me. Yet, most schooling is structured with defined start and end dates for all learners in a course. Learners are graded on the extent to which they master the prescribed learning outcomes before the universal finish line each semester. It seems paradoxical because it is. You might even assert that these prescribed starts and ends produce anti-learning behaviors like cheating and plagiarism- gaming the system.

Why do we even have universal pacing for most formal education? About a hundred years ago the leaders of the country asserted that having an educated citizenry would be better than leaving education up to families alone. In the early 1900s, manufacturing in the US was heating up and the business industry needed a stronger pipeline of talent than what the apprenticeship model of the trade unions was providing. All the way back to Socrates and Aristotle, apprenticeship or tutorial models have reigned supreme regarding quality of education, but in a productivity-minded society, one-on-one education just isn’t efficient enough.

Enter digital computing and technology.

In 1968, educational researcher and psychology professor Fred Keller wrote “Goodbye, Teacher…,” It’s a great read if you’re curious about PSI. He describes his Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) that was more successful than the traditional lecture-discussion model. Modern researchers have recognized the strengths of Keller’s PSI and theorized that the failings of the model could be overcome through digital technologies that were unavailable to Keller and his colleagues at the time. There are hundreds of scientific studies to support the idea that variable pacing provides improved learning outcomes. We just can’t seem to make it work in schools. The transition from study environment to real life has been a challenge.

Fast forward almost 30 years and we can see some evidence of what became of PSI. Here is one report from a psychology professor, Sherman, 1998, “Some PSI courses have been prohibited in spite of their success. I know of several colleagues who were given "cease and desist" orders… the chairman of the Psychology Department at Georgetown declared by fiat that something on the order of 50% of class time must be devoted to lecturing. By reducing the possibility of self-pacing to zero, this effectively eliminated PSI courses.” We have evidence of the success of PSI in many places and the failure of PSI in some other places. What can we learn from the examples of success and failure? That’s a whole separate article, but overall, individualized pacing of learning provides strong learning outcomes and high learner satisfaction when implemented as Keller described in his original research.

Jump ahead again to today’s learning landscape in 2022, and you’ll find remnant’s of Keller’s PSI in many thriving academic programs. Individualized pacing has been popularized by Western Governors University, Capella’s Flexpath, Southern New Hampshire University and others. Similar to the findings of Keller and Sherman, the implementation of these programs has not been without fault, but for many accreditors, regulators, practitioners, employers, policymakers, and thousands of learners, there is sufficient evidence of success. It seems that video-based online learning options can help overcome the barriers Keller documented.

A major weakness of the industry’s early efforts at providing individualized pacing for learners by using online courses could be broadly characterized as a swing too far in the opposite direction. Asynchronous courses overcame the challenge of prescribed times and places for learning to occur, but they also created problems with student retention because online learners no longer felt connected to one another, their instructors, or their institutions. Transformational learning is hard work, and most people need encouragement, personal connection, fun, intrigue, rewards, or some combination thereof in order to stay motivated.

The good news is that after a couple of decades of experimentation, we have a much better understanding of the ways technology can augment our unique human ability to connect with one another. Video production connects learners to instructors through narrative and visual storytelling elements. Advisors and/or faculty are alerted when an online student’s pattern of behavior changes, and interventions can occur long before a student is in danger of failing a course. Online simulations and learning games can be created by individuals with almost no computer programming expertise. Verifiable achievements like badges and micro-credentials are gaining credibility among employers, and because of that, they make good short-term motivators for learners. Finally, hybrid programs that blend online and in-person experiences seem to produce the best results yet related to overall retention with flexible course pacing.

Variable pacing intuitively makes sense to us, scientific research supports it, and we have practical modern examples of success. Learners should be able to accelerate individually through modules where they demonstrate proficiency, rewatch videos, re-take quizzes, and retry entire units that were challenging. Video-based synchronous meet-ups help scale and operationalize the one-on-one, 5-10 minute student-proctor meetings that were key to success in Keller’s PSI studies. If Keller were alive today, he would immediately recognize the power of technology to implement his methods efficiently.

This discussion has centered on the educational value of providing flexible pacing at the course level, but we should also consider flexible pacing at the program level. What programmatic models could be offered to compliment the four-year model? Is a four-year bachelor’s degree journey still best for the majority of learners? What if periods of classroom study could be interspersed with periods of practical application in the workplace? What if the pace of postsecondary education was spread across a lifetime? These questions lead us into next week’s topic- flexibility of program .

Two Simple Ways to Keep Students Engaged Online

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 12:00:15 GMT

Two Simple Ways to Keep Students Engaged Online

Written by Dr. S. Brian Yeich

I have been teaching online since 2008 and I have discovered a few things along the way. One of the maxims of online education is maintaining student engagement and providing avenues for “high touch” elements since the teacher and the learner will typically never be together in the same physical space. Here are two practical ways that I have attempted to maintain engagement in my courses.

1. Personal Messages

This past semester I was teaching a hybrid course. It would have been easy to leave the personal interaction with the students to the scheduled in-person days. However, with a hybrid course, it is critical to keep students engaged before and after any in-person meetings. In addition to some limited discussion forums to maintain engagement, I also personally messaged each student through the LMS and asked them how their semester was going and for specific ways I could be praying for them throughout the semester. To my surprise, one student reported that they had never had a professor directly ask for prayer requests or personally message them in this way. The students reported that this simple effort really helped them feel a part of the class and that I had their best interests in mind as I was teaching.

2. Video Responses

Rather than simply giving written feedback to posts or assignments, I have a practice of recording short video responses. These are not lecture videos that might be used for several course sections, but rather focused videos. For example, for a group discussion forum, I will record a video response to the entire group where I can expand on their conversation, respond to each student and draw the elements of their discussion together. Students report that they appreciate this type of response since it helps them build connections with me as a professor. Another way I have leveraged the use of video is recording a short video that introduces the next module or updates the class on important information. Again, this seems to help build connection and rapport with students who may never see their professor face-to-face.

There are many other ways to connect with online students including Zoom office hours and phone calls. Regardless of the modality, the importance is providing a sense of connection when teaching an online course. As Jeff Selingo recently observed in his newsletter, Next, “Faculty are critical to students finding a sense of belonging and purpose in college.” Engaged and connected students are more likely to complete a course successfully and will also positively impact a school’s ability to retain students.

As a faculty member, what ways do you engage your students when teaching online? As a student, what have your professors done to keep you engaged?

The Writer's Table

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 13:06:16 GMT

The Writer's Table

Written by Erin Crisp, EdD

The Children's Television Workshop famously made edutainment for children. Sesame Street combined educational learning objectives with silly fun for kids and clever fun for their parents. Very little was accidental, as the story is told in the 2021 documentary, Street Gang .

For each episode, a group of collaborators gathered around a large conference room table. Collaborators included a composer, educators, puppeteers, actors, directors, editors, and artists. The individual designers around the table didn't always agree. Sometimes the educators thought the crazy antics of the Muppet characters were superfluous and unentertaining. Sometimes the directors rushed ideas that didn't work with kids. Overall though, they followed the principle- write what you would want to watch and it obviously worked. The show has won 189 Emmy awards! So what can we, as content designers for edutainment, learn from Sesame Street?

How did they do it? The educators provided a large binder of curriculum. The curriculum provided a framework for learning objectives to be taught but not a prescription. The creative team jumped in to brainstorm ways to make those objectives fun to learn. Remember Grover teaching us a letter of the day and Count Dracula teaching us to count bats "one… ah ah ah ah." Those sketches happened because one team member said to another, "we need a 2 minute song on the letter T."

What was the curriculum? It was literacy and numeracy but also social-emotional development. The team tackled the subject of death in the show when the actor who played Mr. Hooper died in real life. They also addressed difficult neighbors. Everyone who lived on Sesame Street modeled interaction with Oscar the Grouch- a character that represents the sad, angry, and frustrating aspects of life. Portrayed in story form, children learn that there are grouches in our lives and that sometimes we feel grouchy too. Big Bird was a perpetually innocent child, a character meant to speak aloud the questions, thoughts, and fears of many children.

Why the adult guests? Many famous guests appeared on Sesame Street. From presidents to musicians to athletes, real-life people wander onto the street to interact with Maria and Miguel and others. These famous guests were less for the kids and more for the parents. Designers learned that kids learn more when they watch the show with the caring adults in their lives, so they began including elements that would attract the nearby adult to come and watch with the child. The social rehearsal of ideas, songs, and questions that occur during and after the show proved to be the most impactful aspects for learners and learning.

What can today's designers of edutainment learn from the Children's Television Workshop?

1. Well-designed content stands the test of time. Episodes and clips from Sesame Street, Magic School Bus, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and School House Rock have been played thousands or millions of times, many years after it was originally conceived and recorded. Education can be appealing. Use the stories of real people in real situations. Use humor, music, and visual design. Instill depth of thought, and evolve characters and situations over time.

2. Storytelling matters. The human actors who lived on Sesame Street, along with the recurring Muppet characters, were compelling and engaging. Humans are more engaged, as learners, when our teacher looks and feels like a whole person complete with their own thoughts, feelings, motivations, and distractions. We don’t need recordings of teacher robots in front of white boards. We need to create content that causes learners to share a video with a friend or parent and say, “you gotta see this.”

3. Diverse creators make magic. Imagine if all of the CTW creators were musicians or educators. What if they all had a dark sense of humor, or if they all preferred quiet stories told from Grandma's rocking chair. Collaboration with diverse individuals is challenging, but it produces results that appeal to the broadest number of people. In fact, I wonder if it is true that the more diverse the skill-sets and opinions around a table, the more broadly appealing the end result might be? Today's CTW would probably include a TikTok teacher, Insta Influencer, and YouTube content creator.

What would you add? What did you learn from Sesame Street?

Why Campus: Spreading the Good News

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 13:04:50 GMT

Why Campus: Spread the Good News

Written by Ken Schenck

This is the sixth and final post in a series, "Why Campus Edu?" The purpose of this series has been to explore the many ways that Campus Edu can assist Christian colleges in this incredibly turbulent time in Christian higher education. We have suggested five ways so far.

Campus can help Christian colleges...

dramatically expand their markets
enrich their curricula
significantly enhance their online courses
for some, make quantum leaps in their infrastructure
soften the blow when downsizing is happening

In this final post, we want to step back and talk about the raison d'être for Christian colleges and universities to exist in the first place--to provide a context where education can take place within a spiritual, Christ-centered framework.

Campus Edu aims to facilitate the transformation of the world by bringing the good news of Christ to the hearts, minds, and lives of those within its reach.

1. What is a Christian education?

A Christian framework for education should be many-fold, and there is a rich literature on the integration of faith and learning. Interestingly, different Christian traditions approach this question with differing emphases. For example, some focus almost exclusively on the head when they think of faith integration.

However, faith should touch every aspect of a student's life at a Christian college or university. It should obviously impact the way subjects are taught. There is no such thing as an approach to truth that is "just the facts." This is a mistake even some Christian professors have sometimes made. We all have assumptions, presuppositions, and biases that shape how we look at evidence and how we form conclusions. Those who might think, "I'm just a scholar, wherever the facts lead," are unaware of themselves. Our assumptions shape where we look for evidence, and if our assumptions are wrong, the truth won't be within our line of sight.

So Christian education is "faith seeking understanding." It begins with certain assumptions about God and the world. It is deeply informed by the Scriptures. While a true education will not be indoctrination, a Christian university will start from and privilege Christian assumptions and perspectives even as it engages a full spectrum of ideas and evidence.

But the intellect is not the only part of a person. A Christian college should deepen a student's trust in God as well. It should deepen a student's faithfulness to Christ. We are not just intellect as people. Scripture centers our spiritual being in our "hearts" (e.g., Matt. 15:19), not our intellect, and our actions flow from our hearts. A Christian education is thus anemic and far from accomplishing its full purpose if it does not engage the hearts and lives of students.

Nor is this Christian context merely individual. It is relational and social. Jesus and the New Testament say that all of God's expectations of us are summed up in the commands to love God and love neighbor. [1] A Christian college that would not foster growth in love of God and neighbor would thus fall completely off its mark.

2. Taking the good news along

The posts in this series so far have focused on practical and economic matters. That's where the fire is most obvious in the academy. It made sense to focus on the water and foam Campus can bring to the fire.

But make no mistake. The founders and team at Campus see what we are doing as missional. We see young people increasingly abandoning Christian colleges for more reasonably priced public institutions. We see young people increasingly abandoning Christianity itself with a sense that existing Christian institutions are missing something.

At the secular school, they will not get "faith seeking understanding." They will get "seeking understanding apart from faith." They will have to seek out Christian clubs and organizations on campus if they expect to get any spiritual formation during their college days. The potential cost is much greater than most Christian parents and students probably realize.

Campus thus brings this Christian context to bear on this rapidly changing context. Taken in high school or independently, courses are meant to cost about what a community college would cost, and the cost to a Christian college makes it possible for them to charge significantly less. Courses aimed at high school students aim to draw those same students to Christian colleges at the very least to finish up associate's degrees. From there, colleges can try to draw them into finishing bachelor's degrees.

While colleges are in the driver's seat in relation to what they author and offer, Campus has especially desired professors who are known for the way they bring a spiritual dimension to their teaching. Good content is essential, but good content with a teacher who loves Christ with his or her whole heart--that's what you should expect of a Christian college. A good Christian course should privilege Christian perspectives, consider what godly application of the subject matter looks like, and should be taught by a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ.

3. Go into all the world.

When I was in conversation to work for Campus, it was mentioned that Elon Musk and friends were soon going to have enough satellites around the world for anyone to get a Christian education on a smartphone. Campus aims to be there when that happens, with a Christian education available for all.

This is not to make money. This is missional. What did Jesus say in Matthew 28:19--Go make disciples of all nations. The goal here is not some neo-colonialism. It is to genuinely bring awareness of the good news that the salvation of the world has been accomplished through Jesus Christ! We want to empower people in local contexts to teach great subjects through our platform in the most fitting ways for their setting while embodying and sharing the timeless good news.

An individual college or university is not likely to be able to bring education to the world on this scope alone. It can only be accomplished by a collection of Christian colleges coming together. And that is what Campus is--it is a platform. It is not a college. It is a platform of colleges. It is thus the perfect medium whereby Christian colleges and universities can collectively bring the whole gamut of education together in a medium that can reach the whole world.

But the content on the platform must come from you, the Christian college or university. There can be no complaining about what is on the platform because you put the content there. If you don't like what you see, why haven't you put into the platform something the way you think it should be?

But the vision is there. Eventually, we expect to have the whole gamut of subjects and courses on the platform, on all levels. So when that smartphone in some remote part of the world comes on (they already are, for the most part), the good news will be there, available as part of any subject about which someone wants to learn.

And that course could be yours!

[1] E.g., Matt. 22:35-40; Rom. 13:8-10.

Why Campus: Softer Landings

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 13:10:02 GMT

Why Campus: Softer Landings

Written by Ken Schenck

This current season in higher education is not pleasant for most colleges. A few are booming, reminding us a little of the saying, "Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them" (Mark 4:25, NIV). Jesus was of course speaking of spiritual things, but there is a tendency of worldly economics here too--"The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer."

If it hasn't been clear to this point, Campus aims to empower the Christian college or university that is currently facing scarcity. Campus changes the entire dynamic of downsizing and hopes to provide a way forward in these new realities.

Campus sees no future where residential education ceases to exist. However, it is likely that the sustainable college of the future will have a new equilibrium, where online and distance education is a larger portion of a student population than any residential campus. The residential portion will likely contract and specialize for a smaller number of students who will nevertheless still expect greater flexibility in how they take their courses.

Campus aims to provide a coping mechanism during this season of managed decline and turnaround. Our assumption is that, in most cases, the decline is happening and is going to happen. The best approach is to get ahead of the curve and be proactive. "A stitch in time saves nine." Our assumption is also that decline does not need to be the end of the story.

1. Campus can provide alternatives to draw students to your campus.

We are currently working with one university to pilot a residential model where a certain segment of students will live on campus, participate in campus life, and yet take most of their classes online through Campus Edu. The goal is not to take away from the number of students that would come to the campus normally but to find, as it were, the "lost sheep" who would not have matriculated otherwise.

Who are these "lost sheep"? Some are students who want to come to the college but cannot afford the normal sticker price. Think students who might be eligible for Pell grants but who cannot come anywhere close to filling the gap left even after full Pell. The Campus “collective” experiment will make it far more possible for these students to attend financially.

But there are still other students. There are those who do not fit the normal "Sit in a chair, listen, and take notes" approach to education. If in fact Campus is providing enhanced online courses that are more stimulating to the current generation, the hope is that some of the students who don't fare well in the traditional academy may thrive in this different approach. These students will take some 80% of their courses online with Campus Edu, while having one-on-one mentoring on campus provided by Campus Edu.

This is an experiment in which Campus is taking the risk. The names we pursue will be names that the university's admissions office provides, keeping the university in the driver's seat. It's a kind of situation where we are inviting the admissions office to say, "We challenge you to recruit these students."

This venture is a clear indication that Campus can be a vital partner of the residential college. We are here to help. The residential college student of today expects to be able to take some courses online while they are taking courses face-to-face as well. Whether it be sports, work, or other pressures, every residential college should have some online courses available to their students. Campus is an easy way to do it.

2. Campus provides economical ways to fill in gaps left by attrition.

The most painful and yet substantial ways to downsize are to lay off staff and faculty. Because of issues like tenure, such cuts sometimes have to be done on the program level. Alternatively, seniority can mean letting go of promising young faculty who might actually have breathed new life into certain programs. No one likes making these sorts of hard decisions, and they are fraught with problems on every side.

In the short run, it is easier simply not to replace faculty who are already retiring. The problem here is that such moves are not strategic. You end up with random holes that are purely happenstance. And of course it increases the burden on those faculty who remain. The number of adjuncts often increases. These individuals are often as underappreciated as they are less expensive.

In our earlier post on enriched curricula , we anticipated some of the ways Campus can help with this managed decline. Rather than eliminating that Spanish major, why not collaborate with three other colleges that are facing the same declining enrollment in the major? The choice is no longer between letting all your Spanish faculty go or continuing to lose money with under-enrolled classes.

If they have not done so by now, all colleges should be doing a cost-benefit analysis on their course offerings. This sort of study looks at things like class sizes, how many sections of each class are being offered, how often they are being offered, etc. The bottom line is how much such classes and majors cost in comparison to how much revenue they bring in.

Because Campus courses are meant to expand markets , courses on its platform are intended to run around the year. This eliminates the old problem of a course you have to offer so that students can graduate even though it doesn't stand a chance of having enough students to break even. Faculty are freed up from necessary independent and directed studies.

Campus also has on offer a model where the functions of instruction are distributed in a way that larger class sizes become possible without losing effectiveness. In this model, the primary content is pre-created as part of the instructional design, with the subject matter expert (SME) creating beforehand highly crafted instruction in small bites. Then there is a facilitator of the actual class offering, a master teacher/mentor. This person is the living voice of the class. Then, for every twenty students, there is an assistant that helps grade and provide individual feedback or engagement.

The result is a class with the best content, facilitated by a master teacher, with timely, individual feedback by a dedicated assistant. This model reduces the number of adjuncts a college needs while providing a specialist for the specific tasks involved in teaching. This also eliminates the need for so many sections of a course each semester.

The "glass is half full" interpretation is that this model frees up the professor who can never teach what they want to teach, let alone do research, because they are teaching three or four sections of an intro class every semester. And when the market is the global internet, a course that couldn't get enough students to run at a local college has a real chance of going. Just maybe the professor can finally teach the course they really want to teach.

When demand for a particular residential class has dried up, what if a professor became an online teacher with a wider audience? Interestingly, I have sometimes found that professors who might not be considered dynamic in the face-to-face classroom become superstars online. After all, online teaching requires a significantly different skill set than face-to-face. These are worlds that Campus can help open up.

3. Campus provides infrastructure services.

In the previous post , we mentioned that a college could use Campus Learn as their entire LMS. Just last week, we took the cartridge of a course at one college and imported it into Campus Learn, just to see what it would look like. A couple individuals on our team spent about an hour each fiddling. The result was a better look than online courses I've seen at universities that use Canvas and Brightspace. I found the intuitiveness and simplicity of the result compelling. Instead of five backdoor ways to do something, there were one or two obvious ways.

Imagine what we are saying here. Most small colleges have an IT department with a staff that is overworked and underpaid. They may not even have the resources to hire an instructional design person, let alone a team. By joining Campus' subscription model, such colleges will not only get a platform that probably looks better than what they currently have. They will get our support staff with dozens of software and instructional designers, much more than what almost all individual colleges can afford.

It is the responsibility of each Christian college and university to be just and fair to its family in these deliberations. We have to trust that no Christian administration would abuse the resources of Campus to make unnecessary decisions for purely utilitarian reasons. That would not be very Christ-like. It is simply the case that colleges are facing these hard decisions. Wave after wave of cuts seem so normal that some faculty and staff begin to get a sinking feeling every year after Christmas.

It is into that climate of despair that Campus Edu offers a lifeline. Cuts may still have to be made, but we offer possibilities that can soften the landing. Indeed, the goal is ultimately not the landing, but the relaunch thereafter. Once the residential campus has reached its equilibrium, the online reach can continue to expand.

Why Campus: Quantum Leaps

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 11:00:03 GMT

Why Campus: Quantum Leaps

Written by Ken Schenck

For the last few weeks, we have been looking at reasons why a Christian college--any college--would want to join the Campus Edu platform. It is a way to expand into markets to which you do not have access. It is a way to have or retain those enriching courses and programs for which the budget might not easily allow. It is a way to enhance the quality of your online courses, making them more engaging to this generation of students. All of these opportunities are in light of the future of online higher education.

This week we mention a reason to join the Campus platform that will apply to a smaller group of colleges. These are the small colleges that have found it very hard to compete with larger universities. Perhaps they are late to online or maybe have not even started an online program yet. On the other end of the spectrum, perhaps they are just at the beginning of an educational venture and are wondering how they will ramp up to become fully accredited.

The Campus platform has the potential to facilitate a quantum leap for organizations that want to add significantly to their educational scaffolding.

I want to lay out a few case studies today, each of which represents a very real conversation that Campus is having right now.

1. Providing a Learning Platform

Our first post mentioned the recent partnership between Campus and the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), the global Christian high school association. The pandemic has dramatically accelerated the expansion of Christian high schools into the online arena. Some other institutions are already there in force, but other Christian high schools see a place for themselves as well in the online space.

This dynamic created an important moment. How can ACSI high schools ramp up together in a way that 1) doesn't wastefully duplicate resources, 2) is coordinated rather than haphazard and uneven, and 3) can thrive in a market where others are so dominant? What if there were a single platform where they could initiate a coordinated effort to go online together?

That platform is Campus Edu. Campus is providing a unified platform where ACSI schools can build next-level online courses together. Collectively, this approach will save these schools millions of dollars that they would have otherwise had to invest separately in course-building and an "LMS," a Learning Management System like Canvas, Brightspace, or Blackboard. And together, they will provide a real alternative to the existing behemoths.

(To reiterate a point from an earlier post, the ability to connect with this high school network in terms of dual enrollment is a reason why any smart Christian college will want to have "teaser courses" on Campus.)

ACSI is not the only organization that is likely to use Campus Learn as their platform. We are in the final stages of conversation with another Christian college that is likely to switch to Campus Learn for their LMS. It is a medium-sized, well-regarded Christian college that has not historically had a large online program. It is looking for a way to quantum leap its online program while addressing its infrastructure needs.

This college does not have the software designers or the infrastructure to ramp up its online program significantly. Its IT staff is already stretched beyond measure (sound familiar?). In this regard, Campus Edu is just what the doctor ordered. With over fifty employees directly or indirectly supporting software development, Campus is equipped to serve as that college's LMS with a personal touch you just can't get from the LMS giants. And our ever-developing interface is arguably more intuitive and more attractive than Canvas, Blackboard, or the default Brightspace.

2. Instant General Education

Campus is also in conversation with other schools that are at the beginning of their arc as undergraduate institutions. There are situations when a graduate school exists without an undergraduate wing. One area of possible growth for such institutions is to add an undergraduate arm. Yes, a seminary can have an undergraduate program too.

There are also long-standing organizations that are thinking of expanding to become Bible colleges and want to become accredited. They may have a well-developed set of niche courses, but not the full program that would be required if they were to take the quantum leap to the next level. Where can you get all those general education courses that any accrediting body will accept?

I know someone! Campus Edu has a full-blown set of general education courses from a network of institutions like Gordon College, Indiana Wesleyan University, and Lipscomb that can serve as an instant general education program. Take a moment to take in what we are saying here. These are not just "ok" courses. These are general education courses that are as good as or better than any you will take from any Christian online institution, instantly available to your college.

My grandfather taught at a Bible college in Indiana his whole life. As a rare person in the early twentieth century with a college degree, he was asked to teach all sorts of courses--math, history, Bible, even health. That Bible college just didn't have the resources to hire people with doctorates in general education areas. The students got what they got.

No Christian college need ever be in this situation again. Campus Edu is a way for the small Bible college, the start-up, the new undergraduate adventure to instantly have online general education courses as good as or better than any their students could take with the "giants" of Christian online education. Imagine that, the little school that has long lived under the shadow of the giants suddenly could have better online classes than they do!

3. Networking to Add Degrees/Programs

One of the key conversations we have been having with college networks is the possibility of collaborating together to create degrees and programs. For example, almost all churches have some system of training their ministers. For years, this was often done on two tracks, one of which involved getting a degree from a residential college/seminary and the other of which was done through some sort of correspondence or non-credit bearing pathway.

The result is a good deal of rich variety but also a fair amount of redundancy (see what we said about ACSI above). As many schools are forced to reduce their programs, you can end up with ministerial programs that are somewhat anemic in some areas. Or perhaps they are reduced only to offering introductory courses without any opportunity to go deeper into any area.

Again, I know a solution. Campus has been connecting with multiple denominations about the possibility of doing some consolidation into our platform. The goal is not to create monolithic ministerial training--monopolies only breed mediocrity and abuse. There should never be just one college, one professor, or one pathway.

What Campus does is provide a way for students who want to study online to get the best of all the partners in a network. Let's say one college has spectacular Old or New Testament professors. Another has a great preaching and worship professor. Still another has spectacular theology and philosophy professors. What if online students could sample from all of them? Wouldn’t that be better for the student? And no one school has to staff the whole baseball team any longer, a requirement that has become problematic in these days of attrition.

What I am saying can sound a little scary. The goal is not to cause trouble to existing faculty or programs at various institutions. It is the responsibility of each school to care and act justly toward its community. Rather, our assumption is that this attrition is already happening almost everywhere. Campus can help provide a softer transition to the new equilibrium that is inevitable (see next week’s post).

In the end, it is all about the students. If what we are talking about here is better for the students--or even the church--then we need to move forward with grace toward all.

These sorts of networking opportunities are not at all limited to ministry areas. Whenever you have a collection of individual entities in a network where training of some sort is needed, the Campus platform stands ready to help. ACSI will likely do a good deal of its faculty development in our space, for example. This is non-credit bearing work that will be shared across a network.

We have yet to see all the ways a platform can synergize growth. While in these early days Campus is investing a good deal in the creation of courses (sometimes the equivalent services of about $25,000 a course), eventually we see colleges creating and uploading their own courses at will. An Amazon-like effect will take place. One project in the making, Campus Studio, will provide a plug and play way for an individual professor to create a top quality course on their own.

There is a whole universe out there waiting to be built together! Campus stands ready to help

Why Campus: Enhanced Courses

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 13:13:16 GMT

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Why Campus: Enhanced Courses

Written by Ken Schenck

Not too long ago, some children of a friend took an online high school course with a university known for its online high school program. The parent was amazed both at how uninteresting the courses were, coupled with the fact that it was a university especially known for its high school online program. That experience was one of the sparks behind the founding of Campus Edu .

Another impetus for the existence of Campus Edu is to provide better quality online courses than are sometimes typical of online courses right now.

Interestingly, most Ph.D. programs do not include courses on how to teach. A Ph.D degree is about becoming an expert on a particular, narrow subject and making some small, original contribution to the timeless pursuit of knowledge. It has nothing to do with teaching that subject.

By contrast, the primary purpose of most colleges and universities is surely to bring about education, to facilitate learning. Accordingly, most colleges and universities should be student-focused. True, there are research institutions that focus as much or more on expanding the universe of knowledge, but this is a minority of colleges, especially Christian colleges. The focal task of most colleges and universities is that of teaching.

It takes a certain skill set to teach. It is a different skill set than the skill that distinguishes a good Ph.D. student. A good teacher not only needs to understand the subject. He or she needs to be able to break a subject down into appropriate bites, often down to an elementary level. He or she will also need some skill in communication and pedagogy. Perhaps surprisingly, the best teacher may not at all be the person with the most in-depth knowledge of the subject.

Additionally, students often do not take courses because they want to. The way the system is set up, courses are usually prescribed for them as part of some overall major or degree. As a result, the students in a class may not actually be interested at all in that class’ subject matter. A good teacher will know how to generate interest, not to mention have a sense of how to properly assess learning.

The best practice in instructional design, especially for the online context, recognizes at least three key roles in the educational process, each involving distinct gifts and skill sets: 1) the subject matter expert who knows the content (SME), 2) the facilitator who has skills at bringing about understanding and may be a good mentor, and 3) the person who is gifted at assessment, giving formative and summative feedback.

1. Campus courses are more engaging.

Much has been said and written about declining attention spans among youth. We live in such a stimulating world that a lot of higher education feels like everything is moving in hyper-slow motion. There have of course always been students who had trouble paying attention to our talking speed. Some of them turn out to be quite brilliant in ways we missed because we weren’t looking in the right place. In fact, we have sometimes shamed them for having a short attention span.

What if we are sometimes to blame? What if some classes actually are more boring than they need to be? What if we sometimes fail to make the relevance of our subject matter clear? What if some students’ brains just move faster than our play speed? They are off making connections or applications before we have finished our sentences.

Certainly, paying attention to boring things is a skill we have to learn in life. Most of life arguably is boring. But we sometimes forget that people are paying a lot of money to take these courses, and they have other options. What if we could do better at connecting to our students’ brains? If we could design courses where more students would learn more, why wouldn’t we? Isn’t that the purpose of the educational system in the first place? And students would surely gravitate toward that approach.

MasterClass is just one example of making learning more interesting. TED talks are a good example of holding people’s attention and keeping to the point. What if Campus Edu could help Christian colleges make their classes more interesting, with top quality videography and more intentional instructional design? What if Campus could help older online programs update their courses? What if our expectation of college was that students find their courses relevant and interesting?

When online courses first emerged, they were understandably heavy on writing. You practically wrote a book type-type-typing in endless Discussion Forums and never-ending submissions. These are good learning tools to be sure. Nevertheless, I have taken online courses with the “giants” of online education. My reaction is almost always the same. It can be done better!

2. Campus courses are actually about learning.

Those in the education business--the actual education business, not the subject expert business--have been talking about differing learning styles for a very long time. David Kolb famously suggested a four stop learning cycle in 1984--1) concrete experience, 2) reflective observation, 3) abstract conceptualization, and 4) active experimentation leading to a repetition of the cycle all over again. [2]

Since then educators have suggested that there are four learning styles [3] or maybe seven [4] or maybe even twelve [5]. Here are some of the styles that have been suggested:

auditory (listening)
visual (seeing images)
tactile (touching)
kinesthetic (involving our bodies)
experiential (learning by doing)
logical/sequential (deductive learners)
inductive/problem-based learners
narrative/storied learners
big-picture to details
details to big-picture
verbal processors/writing it out/teaching it
social/interactive learners
solitary/reflective learners

Almost certainly we learn in combinations of styles.

A quick glance suggests that the traditional approach to teaching is primarily auditory, logical, and detailed. Yet this is a relatively small minority of learners. Online education thus far has tended to go to the other extreme, heavy on the “writing it out” and reflect styles. What if learning was designed to engage much more of who we are? What if we could connect with students the system has more or less ignored, the “lost sheep of education”?

Here are some examples of how Campus courses engage more of who we are:

Our online courses have a very high visual component, with top quality videography.
Our courses build around a story. A creative team works with a course writer to develop a narrative that runs through the class. We aim for something personal to the professor, like canoeing or sketching or hiking.
The courses aim at shorter segments of instruction to hold attention, “learning atoms.”
The courses typically are videoed with outside components and involve the kind of movement that is untypical of most classrooms, even in person.
The online courses typically have opportunities for live interaction with other students and the course professor. (This kind of live interaction has been relatively unusual for online classes.)
Nevertheless, the writing learning style is still present, coupled with a push for reflection.

3. Campus courses will keep up with developments.

Campus is only two years old, so the educational innovation is just beginning. We had a discussion just this past weekend about how some online education might become more like gaming in the future. If you think about the learning styles involved in gaming, it involves hearing, seeing, moving, experiencing, storylines, problem-solving, and social-interaction, all at a fast pace. What if online education could, in many circumstances, be this engaging?

It is being done, and it will be done. Campus is committed to keep up with these developments. An individual college probably will not be able to do so on its own. Campus Edu provides a way for us to band together and do it together, powered by Campus.

[1] Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (Vol. 1). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

[2] https://sphero.com/blogs/news/learning-styles-for-kids

[3] https://educlouds.co.in/educlouds-blog/different-types-of-learning-styles/

[4] https://goodsensorylearning.com/blogs/news/multisensory-learners

Why Campus: Enriched Curriculum

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 13:05:59 GMT

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Why Campus: Enriched Curriculum

Written by Ken Schenck

Last week we finished videoing an online biblical Hebrew course for Houghton College . This course is a microcosm of one aspect of Campus Edu . Even though most of the Bible was written in Hebrew, it is not a language that most Christian colleges can offer. Similarly, we are using a software called Biblingo as the "textbook." It is interactive and brings the best of modern linguistic expertise to bear on learning the subject. The course is a wedding of old and new approaches, and it makes possible a pathway for those who had been learning Hebrew on their own to get academic credit for it.

This course represents another reason why many Christian colleges would greatly benefit from Campus Edu. There are a host of rich subjects that many colleges cannot offer either because they do not have the personnel or because they do not have enough students interested to make it cost-effective. These courses, programs, and professors are the first to go in a budget crunch.

Campus makes it possible for your students to take a wider and richer variety of subjects than is cost-effective for most individual colleges to offer on their own.

1. More Choices, More Students

Let's say there are two restaurants. One restaurant owner says, "It will be more cost-effective for me to only offer four basic foods: hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries, and mac-n-cheese." A restaurant like that could go, especially if people really liked the way they did those basics. [1]

But let's also say there's another restaurant nearby that offers those same four foods but also has found a cost-effective way to offer ten other menu items by collaborating with other restaurants. Maybe each restaurant in that partnership has a specialty but shares its basic item with the others. [2] Which of the first two restaurants do you think will get more business on average? It's the one with more options while also having a distinctive.

These last five to ten years have been a season of budget cuts at many colleges. The first to go are the "luxury" courses. I know a college that used to offer French, Latin, and German along with Spanish. Now it can barely afford to offer even Spanish. I know another school that came within a hair's breadth of eliminating its Spanish major in the last budget sweep. However, it has had a perennial problem finding professors to teach in its program.

These cycles of budget cuts and personnel scarcity can create a downward enrollment spiral. If a set of courses or majors like these are under-enrolled, it is logical to cut them and let a professor go in a budget crisis. It may initially be a net financial gain, even if you lose the trickle of students that were interested in that major.

But like the restaurant that only offered four foods, the lack of options in itself will increasingly drive students to other colleges. Eventually, you might find yourself cutting the department in which that major was located. A college can cut the "frills" to such an extent that it has nothing of any distinctiveness at all to offer. More than one college has cut until they find themselves asking, "Why do we even exist?" It is less expensive just to offer basic mac-n-cheese, but that restaurant probably isn't going to survive. [3]

Campus provides a way to cut those courses if necessary but still provide them as options to your students. For example, Gordon College has put a Latin course on the platform. Even big Christian colleges rarely offer Latin. I knew one that did every two or three years because it happened to have a professor who knew it and who was willing to teach it as an overload.

Now any college can offer Latin every semester. Lithuania Christian College is doing German through Campus. Campus is building a repertoire of language courses so that a student at any partner school might soon be able to get a minor in World Languages. Russian and Mandarin are on the way. How many Christian schools have anything close to offer on their own?

No need to cut that Spanish major now. A college can collaborate with two or three other colleges so that the major is possible between them on the Campus platform. The same could be done with engineering or computer science or any subject really. It is a way to cut budget if necessary without cutting the options.

2. Utility, the Enemy of Depth

There is a certain practical mindset that must take over in hard times. In a fire, you don't have time to go around saving a lot of items of great significance to you. The game is survival.

The world of the academy is often a never-ending struggle between the practical and the ideal. The administration is typically forced to focus on the practical, on the fiduciary. By contrast, most faculty are focused on a sense of quality education and depth. It is the way the system is built, and problems ensue if an administration gets too idealistic or a faculty has no sense of depth or quality.

Most people view education as a path to a job. That's practical. That's real. By contrast, the problems that ensue if a college is just about "training" with no real "education" are harder to identify. They're more intangible. They show up in a dysfunctional society that can't tell when politicians or the media are hoodwinking them. It shows up in a church that is high on emotion but has no substance. It can lead to a society where people are easily driven and tossed by the winds of the moment because they have no depth of understanding.

For example, practicality can understandably drive a ministerial program to just the basics. I've created these sorts of programs before. You can reduce most of the subjects a minister must know to a list of ten to fifteen courses. Biblical Greek and Hebrew are not on the list. The curriculum becomes a mile wide and an inch deep.

Yet there are a lot of weird things that come out of Christian pulpits out there. There are lots of popular understandings of the Bible that wither away under the eye of real expertise. Yet budget fires are the enemy of depth in these areas. You can survive easily enough without those classes and teachers in the short term. In fact, professors may never have actually taught those courses in a way that instilled the true depth anyway--another very real problem. But there are long term costs to removing the "depth" subjects.

What if Campus made it possible for networks of schools to provide not only the essentials but the depth as well? By dividing the task, not only can each school focus on its areas of strength in both teaching and subject matter. Together the network of schools can provide useful training and a depth of education at the same time, while saving the exorbitant costs of "depth."

3. Silos Breed Mutation

There's a reason why cultures don't generally let people marry within their immediate family. It has a bad effect on the gene pool. It weakens the next generation, making it less likely for that line of offspring to survive.

Siloing within education can have the same effect. Bad ideas can pass on if there aren't any outside voices to sharpen or challenge them. Students can be cheated of "stronger genes" from other sources. You don't always notice the weaknesses if you aren't exposed to anything else. You only know what you know. Individual professors themselves can go into a siloed tunnel that would be greatly enriched by knowledge in other subjects.

The book Range is about how those who only have knowledge of a narrow subject can be good at analyzing the past but have a poor record at giving recommendations in their field about the future. [4] The book shows how the cross-fertilization of multiple areas of experience and knowledge can actually result in better predictions and solutions than a subject-matter expert who has really deep knowledge of just that one area. It is actually a strong argument for the general education curriculum of high schools and colleges, even if they might need some significant overhaul in approach.

The chapter using American-Soviet relations as an example was particularly interesting. [5] A study in 1984 by Philip Tetlock basically concluded that the experts--who knew the language and the most about the past--were not particularly good at predicting the future in US-Soviet relations. This was especially true if they did not collaborate with others or only had a very narrow knowledge in one area. One year, a group of smart amateurs who had a strong general base of knowledge out-predicted the specialists by a significant margin.

The bottom line is that Campus is facilitating the interaction of Christian colleges and their professors around the world. This is an obvious win for students, but it is also a win for truth. The internet has helped burst the bubble of ignorance in one way--we cannot hide ideas from people any more. But it has also created an overload where we don't know who to believe or listen to.

The Campus network provides a context in which "iron sharpens iron" (Prov. 27:17). Although it is disruptive, bad ideologies will have less and less room to hide when students have the ability to sample multiple voices. I have often mused that professors and pastors sometimes forget that they are always hearing the same professor or pastor all the time, namely, themselves. It's easy to say dogmatically, "This is how it is and everyone else is wrong" when you're the only one talking in the room. Dialog shatters our blind spots and exposes “straw men.”

Networking in education is a strong force against the problem of intellectual blindness. The student will better be able to sift between what is idiosyncratic or fallacious and what seems to actually represent prevailing wisdom. In this way, Campus is good for truth. It means Campus is definitely good for students. And, in the long term, networking platforms like Campus are good for society.

[1] Consider Jim Collins' hedgehog principle in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 90-119. This restaurant's "hedgehog" might be, "We just do the basics."

[2] Thus its specialty would be its hedgehog.

[3] Macaroni Grill has a lot more than just basic mac-n-cheese, even though that is its hedgehog.

[4] David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (New York: Riverhead, 2019).

[5] Chapter 10.

Why Campus: Expanded Markets

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 13:08:12 GMT

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Why Campus: Expanded Markets

Written by Ken Schenck

A 2019 study suggested that about two-thirds of online students come from within a 50-mile radius of a college's physical location. [1] Some colleges with satellite campuses have encountered this phenomenon in a slightly different way. Putting up satellite campuses tends to generate even more online students for a university than students at the satellite campuses themselves. Other schools have closed satellite campuses and experienced a correlated drop in online attendance. This dynamic may suggest that online programs should be marketed in tandem with physical campuses and locations.

Behemoth online programs like Southern New Hampshire spend vast amounts of money and resources in advertising to overcome the fifty-mile hurdle. A former enrollment employee for SNHU anecdotally shared with me that the pressure required to maintain such a national audience is significant. Although it was the first powerhouse in distance education, the University of Phoenix did not maintain this leading edge of advertising and seems rarely mentioned these days among powerhouses like Southern New Hampshire, Western Governor's, and Arizona State.

Into this flow of the online story enters Campus Edu with its online platform, Campus Learn. For schools that already have online programs, one of the strongest reasons to put courses into Campus Learn is to expand your market , to blow out the 50-mile barrier. Colleges that are associated with church denominations already have at least some natural access to a broader audience. Then again, such churches usually have multiple schools in those expanded regions, and they arguably tend to compete more than network.

This background leads me to three reasons why Campus Edu should greatly expand the reach of the schools that participate in it.

1. The synergy of networking

What if your 50 miles were added to the 50 miles of all the other partners on the Campus Learn platform? Our contention is that this is not a simple addition equation but at least a multiplication formula, perhaps an exponential equation. In other words, you are not just adding your 50 miles, you are multiplying the number of likely students reached.

I wonder if a lot of schools think of these market questions as if it is a zero-sum game. "There are a limited number of students and if I share my market with you, I will just lose students." But this is not good economics. If the modern era of economics has taught us anything, it is that markets can multiply. The equation isn't about distributing a fixed number of apples. It's about growing more apple trees.

I was privileged to be part of a team that started Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University in 2009. In its first six years, it grew to over 500 students. Why did it experience such growth when most seminaries at the time were in significant decline? It did so because it did not aim at the students who were already going to seminary. It aimed at the 85% of pastors in its denomination who were not going to seminary anywhere.

Campus has likened its goals to what platform innovators like Uber and Airbnb have done in the transportation and travel industries. By empowering the individual driver or individual homeowner, these platforms have actually increased the total pool of riders and vacationers. [2] Sure, they have disrupted the traditional taxi and hotel market by putting the consumer in the driver's seat. [3] But they have also grown the number of customers by reducing the friction of getting a ride or finding accommodation in hot spots.

The bottom line is that Campus aims to help colleges expand their markets by networking together. This is a hard sell for some because of the "zero-sum game" assumption. "Why would I give some of my students to another college?" The answer is, "To get even more."

2. Learning appeal

The number of students going to residential campuses decreased by 6.5% over the last two years. [4] Don’t worry. The residential campus isn’t going away. There will always be residential campuses around, even if there may be fewer of them. Most will decline to some smaller equilibrium, with the healthiest institutions having a higher number of online students than students in residence. Further, students on campus will also expect to take a number of online classes alongside any classes in person.

Interestingly, a number of residential campuses are seeing record enrollments right now. [5] Arizona State University had its largest incoming on-campus freshman class ever. The same was true of Purdue. (Interestingly, both are now online powerhouses, possibly suggesting that online brand recognition goes both ways.) The biggest hit this year was at community colleges.

A number of Christian colleges are also bursting at the seams while others are scrambling in damage control mode. Columbia International University in South Carolina had record enrollment this fall. [6] They apparently had to house some students in hotels at the beginning of the semester. Some of that growth may have to do with their approach to COVID.

Nevertheless, this situation seems reminiscent of the situation when Wesley Seminary was founded. It apparently was not so much that Christians did not want seminary training. It was more that the seminary institutions at the time were not meeting the felt needs of many potential students.

Campus intends to partner with educational institutions of all stripes and flavors. After all, it has a Latin course already on the platform with Gordon College and spent ten days videoing an Art Appreciation course in Italy with the University of Northwestern - St. Paul. In the next post in this series, we will explore how Campus makes it possible to retain the "indulgent" subjects that many colleges have already had to eliminate.

But the real target of Campus is the majority of potential students who just aren't on the same frequency as the traditional academy. I hope there will always be honors colleges for the minority of students who thrive on that model. After all, I was that type of student.

But the classic honors college approach does not have the kind of broad appeal that meets the needs of millions of learners who have different goals and talents. The traditional honors college student population will not likely balance your university budget. More importantly, is it not our goal to bring a Christian education to as many people as possible? Is it not our goal to add value to the majority of the world by providing education? If so, the classic approach will dramatically miss its mark because only a minority will be in the room to hear.

Campus courses aim to partner with schools to provide an education that connects. How many students have walked away from college because it didn't speak their language? People still want to learn. Our failure to connect with them is a lack of imagination, not of need or desire. Use Campus courses to create margin among your in-person faculty- time and space for them to create micro-credentials, hybrid college programs, skills-based stackable certificates, local workforce connections, internship and apprenticeship programs and more.

One of the greatest appeals of the Campus approach is the price point. Students taking Campus courses through a college’s subscription model can pay as little as $199 for a course. Price is one of the biggest factors in college choice. I have heard of institutions that charged more because they thought students would pay more for higher quality. There is some truth in this idea, but not in the vast majority of cases. It works for Ivy League schools and other elite schools, but it won't work for the vast majority of small private Christian colleges. The cost of an education matters, and we have no choice but to make the math work.

3. The high school partnership

In my mind, there are four letters that explain why every Christian college should have at least one teaser course in the Campus Learn platform: A-C-S-I. Campus Edu has recently joined forces with the Association of Christian Schools International to help them build out a K-12 and professional development curriculum on its platform. [7] Part of the partnership will be dual enrollment courses provided by the Christian colleges also in Campus Learn.

ACSI represents 5.5 million students globally. When you talk about busting the 50-mile barrier, this is the ticket. One school, Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU), has already set up a path to an Associate of Arts degree in Integrative Studies that can begin with a high school student taking the bulk of the degree with several Campus institutions while still in high school. The student then finishes as a fully online IWU student after high school graduation and IWU has an opportunity to recruit that student into a 4 year degree in-person or online. Other schools are considering associate’s degrees in other subject areas. Schools can even partner together to build these sorts of “dual enrollment to associate's degree” pathways (basically a 2 + 2 arrangement).

The potential expansion of market is obvious. By partnering together, smaller Christian schools have the potential of becoming more competitive in a market where the likes of Southern New Hampshire and Arizona State overwhelmingly dominate. And the price point is just right.

The Campus Learn platform thus gives Christian colleges the opportunity to pitch their college to a large Christian market indeed. Ideally, each college would either pick a super-course with a super-professor to show off its superpowers, or develop a micro-credential that serves the dual purpose of preparing a high school graduate for an entry-level job while also stacking toward a degree credential. We can say anecdotally that some prospective students have already chosen a university in the Campus network because of the course they took in high school on the Campus platform.

In this time of fear, there is reason for hope. Campus is here to partner with you into the future!

[1] Doug Lederman, "Online Is (Increasingly) Local," Inside Higher Ed , June 5, 2019, https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/06/05/annual-survey-shows-online-college-students-increasingly

[2] See Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary, Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), especially chapter 2 on "Network Effects."

[3] In Uber's case, quite literally.

[4] Todd Sedmak, "Undergraduate Enrollment Declines Show No Signs of Recovery From 2020," National Student Clearinghouse , October 26, 2021, https://www.studentclearinghouse.org/blog/undergraduate-enrollment-declines-show-no-signs-of-recovery-from-2020/

[5] Michael T. Nietsel, "Initial Estimates Show Fall Enrollments Up At Several Public Universities," Forbes , August 24, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/08/24/initial-estimates-show-fall-enrollments-up-at-several-public-universities/?sh=5d72c94c4cb3

[6] Retrieved November 10, 2021, "Record Enrollments at CIU and Ben Lippen School," http://www.ciu.edu/newsstory/record-enrollments-ciu-and-ben-lippen-school

[7] Caitlyn Berman, "ACSI and Ed-Tech Company, Campus, Work to Create Dynamic Digital Content, Learning Opportunities for Christian Schools, Educators, and Students," Association of Christian Schools International News, October 25, 2021, https://www.acsi.org/news/campuspr

Create a Course with Campus!

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 20:52:27 GMT

Create a Course with Campus!

Online courses can be leveraged in a wide variety of ways to improve educational experiences for students of all ages. Campus is offering course development grants to help fund high-quality learning opportunities for students and faculty from CCCU and ABHE colleges and universities. Campus courses are designed to be efficient and effective learning experiences but also, to appeal to learners of all ages. Professional quality video paired with thoughtful assignment variety produces learning experiences that delight students and create raving fans of faculty who author courses with the Campus Studios team. See some examples of Campus courses here: http://www.campusedu.com/courses

Grant Objectives

Campus has 3 objectives to accomplish with the funding being provided:

Increase the diversity of schools and scholars represented in the Campus catalog of course offerings.
Resource creative ideas for the online delivery of science, technology, engineering and mathematics at the undergraduate level as well as dual enrollment high school students.
Identify faculty and institutions who are interested in innovating online course developments that are scalable while also maintaining effectiveness and high appeal.

Available Funds

Five grants in the amount of $25,000 each to assist with the development of online courses. Faculty and administrators from Christian colleges and universities are encouraged to apply. Grant funds can be allocated toward any of the following:

Stipend for faculty course author
Allocation for institutional overhead and administrative expense
Travel reimbursement
CampusEdu Videography services- editing and post-production
CampusEdu Instructional Design- including digital asset creation
CampusEdu Graphic Design- brand and visual design
Permits for video capture
Copy editing and eBook publishing

Grant funds should not be used for the ongoing delivery and maintenance of the completed course. See sample budget Appendix A.

Application Components

Complete the online form and submit the following attachments:
A general budget
A draft course syllabus or the syllabus for the existing course (in-person or online).
Note: If there is an existing online version of the course that can be exported from the institution’s LMS via a course cartridge, this can reduce expenses related to instructional design.

Evaluation process

Campus team members will use the Campus course development framework to evaluate proposals. Successful proposals will describe how the criteria described in the framework will be accomplished.

The general budget shows costs associated directly with criteria from the framework. Please review the course development framework carefully to ensure that you are prepared to address every aspect of the framework within the scope of your proposed course development project.

Timeline:

Collect grant proposals: November 15th -- December 10th, 2021
Evaluate proposals: December 13th -- December 20th, 2021
Deliver notification of accepted proposals: December 21st, 2021
Accomplish the proposed grant work: January 3rd, 2022 -- August 1st, 2022. Courses could be ready to launch anytime within this timeframe, no later than August 2022.

Final Outcomes

Produce online courses that will be made available through the Campus platform as well as possibly the author’s own institutional LMS. The institution retains all intellectual property rights for the courses. Campus licenses the course content from the institution and remits a percentage of the sale price to the institution and author for each enrollment that occurs through the Campus network of schools. The authoring institution and faculty author may choose to offer the course to their own students using the Campus delivery platform and their own institutional LMS at no charge.

Instructional Delivery

By offering a course on the Campus platform, authoring institutions agree to the following, provided a minimum number of enrollments is reached:

Designate a qualified instructor for the course (it need not be the author).
Provide compensation for the faculty delivering instruction (from generated revenue)
Create transcript records for guest students taking the course, and transcript grades for guest-student course completers.
Use data provided from Campus to ensure continuous improvement of the course.

Ongoing Revenue from Campus

Authoring institutions choose the wholesale price and course start dates for their courses sold on the Campus Learn platform. These start dates and charges are different from their courses delivered on their own LMS.

Apply Today!

Appendix A

NOTE:

Proposal budgets should also show how the elements of the course development framework will be addressed. As an example, bullet points from the framework are provided under each category of work.

The Future of Modality in Higher Education

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 16:47:48 GMT

The Future of Modality in Higher Education

Written by Ken Schenck

I read an article recently that highlighted some of the changes that the pandemic has brought to higher education. [1] I saw some of these shifts firsthand at the college where I was serving at the time. A professor of computer science--who previously would not go near an online class--suddenly concluded that he could teach the subject more effectively online, with the students sharing code on their screens with each other. Professors and administrators who thought they had no computer savvy suddenly found themselves masters of Zoom. We even found a way to teach lab sciences online.

The landscape has changed. Perhaps the direction of change is the same as before, but the timeline has accelerated. Initiatives that were very innovative two years ago are now business as usual. The good news is that this moment has made it possible for a college to catch up with the flow of innovation quickly, if they are only willing to jump into the rapids of change. There are more tools and know-how at a college's disposal now than ever before.

Traditional Online

It may seem a little strange to speak of "traditional" online. By traditional online, I mean the "type type type" course where you write a book before you're done. There were (and are) many advantages to traditional online. Courses are generally asynchronous, meaning that you can do the class at any time of day or night. This approach is a great advantage, especially to those who have to work during normal class hours.

Traditional online has made education available to more people than ever before. These classes are usually accelerated, with an 8-week class being very common. Now that the bandwidth of the internet has increased so much, some schools have begun to reintroduce some live opportunities into these classes, potentially a great enhancement to the online experience. Early versions of online courses also tended to lack video and a variety of learning experiences.

Studies have shown that the average learning of a student in an online class is as good or better as a traditional face-to-face class. [2] In a physical classroom, it is easy to zone out and disappear in the back of the room. Online classes typically involve discussion forums where everyone has to participate. Online classes typically involve more regular submissions than a traditional class, with a much higher expectation of timely feedback. Assignments usually aim to be "formative" as learning experiences and not just "summative" as a final judgment. A student in a good online class may very well get more personal attention than the typical student in a traditional, residential classroom.

The current leaders in traditional online are schools like Southern New Hampshire and Arizona State (ASU) in the secular world, Liberty and Grand Canyon in the Christian world. Western Governors is the leader in competency-based education, where you work at your own pace. These schools aim to make education very convenient and affordable. ASU even offers majors like chemistry and physics online, using creative new ways for students to do lab work. They use well-established learning management systems (LMS) like Canvas and Brightspace, which are self-contained universes.

Hybrid and Blended Online

While traditional online on average produces more learning than the traditional classroom, the optimal mode of learning is a mixture of live and asynchronous components. While the terms often blur into each other, I define a blended course as one that is sometimes face-to-face and sometimes asynchronous. For example, in the “flipped” classroom, students learn the primary content outside of class and then apply/unpack in person. A hybrid course then is one that has some students completely online and some students completely in person in the same course.

The pandemic pushed many campuses last year into hybrid or "HyFlex" mode, with some students in the classroom and others Zooming in. It was clunky, trying to shift between people in front of you to people on the screen. Many bid “good riddance” to that split-personality experience this year. However, I doubt we have seen the last of it. It just needs to get better.

What if you had online and onsite students in the same course with a common online platform --a blended and hybrid experience? Discussion forums might mean fewer face-to-face sessions for the onsite student. Many students will now expect residential class sessions to be recorded on days they are absent. The technology will evolve to meet the expectations of flexibility that the pandemic has created.

The Platform

Campus Edu is one of several educational "platforms" that seem to be springing up overnight. For example, Acadeum is a marketplace where colleges can share their online courses with other schools. Courses remain housed with the college and its LMS, so the courses come "as is." It is hard to know what the courses are actually like on the inside, but students can now find courses they cannot get at their own school when they need them.

Outlier and 2U/Ed X are some secular organizations that are also providing a marketplace for courses from more than one university. What used to be a MOOC, not for credit, is increasingly available for college credit, and the studies show the learning is just as good as traditional face to face. [3] Outlier in particular has invested to make these courses incredibly engaging and graphically appealing, following the model of MasterClass. This is disruptive in the way that Amazon was for individual book publishers or Napster was for the music industry.

However, the direction seems inevitable. It will not be long before students will expect to take courses from multiple schools, perhaps with one lucky one serving as a final off-ramp. Even more disruptive will be the rise of internal educational credentialing that employers like Google and Amazon are creating for their employees, and it does not seem to matter whether a traditional degree is part of the package. [4] If a job is what the typical college student expects from a college degree, Google and others are poised to provide a shortcut.

Into this swirl of new alternatives, Campus Edu has created a platform focused on the Christian college and university. It is coming alongside them and providing a toolbox to be able to thrive in this changing landscape. Like Outlier, it is providing significant video, creative, and instructional design resources to the schools that join forces. It has its own LMS, Campus Learn, meaning that a college can outsource its entire online program to Campus if it wishes--or even start one for the first time. Campus has far more software and instructional designers than most colleges. Its aim is a Netflix feel and an Apple-like intuitiveness that is more outward facing than self-contained. Courses can be done asynchronously, but some online face-to-face components are standard and preferred. You can expect to hear more about Campus in posts to come.

The Beyond

We know that the possibilities for online education are accelerating. Darren Campbell, founder of Campus Edu, thinks of Campus Learn as something like a Mr. Potato Head. As the pedagogy develops, we will plug in the latest and greatest. No doubt some courses in the future will become more like playing a video game than anything like a traditional lecture hall where you sit for an hour.

Learning is no longer something you do for four or five years. More and more people expect to learn interesting things for the rest of their lives at their own pace. I have had a number of retired individuals audit my online courses. I have taught intergenerational online courses with a mix of high school, on-campus, traditional online, credential seekers, and retired auditors. What an incredibly rich experience! Never stop learning!

The student of the future will expect to be able to take classes anywhere at any time. People all over the world will want to be able to learn on a smartphone--they already are. Students will want to be able to sample from multiple universities. They will want to be able to take online courses while living on a residential campus--over 50% already do. [5] They will want to be able to see recordings of on-campus lectures and go on an internship in the middle of a semester. They will want to condense and expand the traditional semester in accordance with their needs and abilities.

And if there is demand, it will happen. verbum sapienti sat est .

[1] Michael A. Baston, "From Crisis Comes Opportunity," Inside Higher Ed , November 4, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2021/11/04/covid-has-spurred-four-positive-changes-campuses-opinion

[2] "Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies," 2010, US Department of Education, https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

[3] “Is online education as effective as traditional on-campus schooling?” UTEP Connect, November 2018, https://www.utep.edu/extendeduniversity/utepconnect/blog/november-2018/is-online-education-as-effective-as-traditional-on-campus-schooling.html

[4] Justin Bariso, “Google Has a Plan to Disrupt the College Degree,” Inc. , April 19, 2020, https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/google-plan-disrupt-college-degree-university-higher-education-certificate-project-management-data-analyst.html

[5] Suzanne Smalley, "Half of All College Students Take Online Classes," Inside Higher Ed , October 13, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/10/13/new-us-data-show-jump-college-students-learning-online

ACSI & Campus Are Joining Forces

mark.shepherd@campusedu.com (Mark Shepherd) — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 14:09:44 GMT

ACSI and Campus Are Joining Forces to Create Dynamic Digital Content, Learning Opportunities for Christian Schools, Educators, and Students

INDIANA - The Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) and Campus are excited to announce an innovative initiative and collaborative effort designed to provide Christian educators with access to dynamic online content, professional development courses, and digitally delivered student resources.

The joint initiative is aligned with ACSI’s Three Pillar Strategic Plan and Campus’ passion to meet the demands of today’s students, faculty, and school leaders. It is focused on advancing Christian education by providing more educators and students with access to quality Christian courses and materials.

Campus is an ed-tech company that is building the future of online education. The organization creates courses and tools that are engaging and transformative for students, faculty and administrators.

Leaders from both organizations share a goal of leveraging high quality digital resources for Christian educators and students at traditional schools, home-school communities and the growing market of nontraditional educational delivery strategies.

ACSI President Dr. Larry Taylor emphatically believes now is the time for ACSI to invest in the digital education market.

“Our motivation has always been to equip Christian educators in their mission to prepare students for a life with Christ,” he shared. “After seeing how nimble our schools have been over the past year in leveraging technology, we are looking forward to making a robust library, or ecosystem, of biblically centered digital content accessible for teachers, students and parents across the globe.”

Darren Campbell, Campus Founder & CEO, shares Taylor’s enthusiasm and vision for the union.

“Through the Campus platform, ACSI will seek to empower schools to reach the next generation of learners with video-driven courses, professional development content and digital resources,” Campbell said. “I’m inspired by ACSI’s vision to empower, encourage and equip flourishing schools that transform their communities, and we are grateful to be a part of that mission.”

According to Taylor, this effort brings strong pedagogy and relevant media appeal, accelerating global access to professional development, online classes, and print to digital textbooks.

ACSI Senior Vice President for Global Business Development Kurt Unruh is also excited about the new direction for the association and potential benefits for educators and students.

“Technology, leveraging strong relationships in the business community utilizing digital delivery and greater awareness of what works in schools makes this an exciting time for advancing new initiatives,” he said. “Everything we do is to help schools grow and flourish, while also providing more students with access to Christian education.”

To learn more visit www.campusedu.com/acsi

To view the ACSI announcement visit www.acsi.org/campus

About Campus

IWU-Marion provides Campus Unlimited to students

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 19:59:06 GMT

IWU- Marion provides Campus Unlimited to students

INDIANA- Starting in October 2021, students studying at Indiana Wesleyan University’s Marion campus will all have institutionally sponsored memberships to Campus Unlimited. A Campus Unlimited membership provides IWU-Marion learners with access to a pre-approved catalog of video-driven, online courses featuring award-winning faculty from across the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

Purposes for the project are three-fold. First, in keeping with IWU’s mission, institutional leaders wish to provide a faith-integrated, affordable alternative to the external course options students currently choose to complete and transfer into their degree programs.

Second, institutional leaders wish to learn more about the extent to which in-person learners desire online options. Leaders will closely monitor students’ levels of satisfaction with the courses as well as their performance in subsequent coursework. Both factors will influence the potential for expansion or continuation of the program.

Finally, one of the objectives of the Campus Unlimited program is to help our partner institutions create a more sustainable business model for instruction without sacrificing quality and satisfaction for students. After a trial period, a careful analysis will be conducted to determine whether expansion is in the best interest of learners and faculty.

"College students value the flexibility afforded by high quality online learning,” said Indiana Wesleyan University President, Dr. David Wright, when commenting on this innovative partnership. “By providing every IWU-Marion student with a membership to Campus's faith-based, engaging course options, we hope to address a variety of scheduling needs and modality preferences that we are seeing among students. These courses are professionally produced and authored by highly respected faculty from Christian colleges across the US. We are excited about the prospect of collaborating with other Christian institutions to make these outstanding Christ-centered courses available to IWU students."

The course development team at Campus has partnered with faculty experts, instructional designers, and creative personnel from across the country to launch video-driven courses for a new generation of learners. IWU continues to meet the needs of new generations of learners by providing greater choice and flexibility while maintaining a steadfast focus on developing students of character, scholarship, and leadership.

To learn more or to sign up visit www.campusedu.com/iwu

About Campus

From Course Management to User Experience

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 14:05:12 GMT

From Course Management to User Experience
After 25 years, the learning management system (LMS) is going through a major transition. Two decades ago, schools needed technology to manage courses-- student login access, document and gradebook access, class communication, registrations etc.. Today’s learners find this legacy mass management to be insufficient. Their experiences in every other realm of life have taught them that it is possible to be uniquely seen, heard, and valued as a learner, and modern technologies are emerging to meet those needs at scale.

Implications

As educational organizations shift their visions from managing learning to creating compelling user experiences, enabling technologies need to change in parallel. Viewing the infographic from Phi Hill (commonly referred to as the squid diagram) , the history of the LMS is clear. Shifts away from management and toward a learning platform approach have been occurring since the mid 2000s. For the past 10 years, Moodle, Canvas and Brightspace have been able to capture much of Blackboard’s market share because of their emphasis on breaking down the “walled garden” model that was the backbone of Blackboard. An even more dramatic shift is on the horizon today, and it is poised to displace the current big four LMS providers.

This shift is occurring because of a blending of industries- education and business. The benefits of corporate talent development and customer relationship management systems are being realized by educational organizations, and the longstanding barriers between business technology and educational technology are quickly evaporating.

Merging Business and Education Technology

What does it look like to move from a Learning Management System (LMS) to a Learner Experience Platform (LXP)? Here are three brief stories of Salesforce and Workday (popular business technologies) being leveraged for use in academic programs at universities.

Olivet Nazarene University

When Olivet Nazarene University decided to launch their tuition-free general education program, they did not choose their LMS as the technology system to support their innovation. Instead, they launched the YourWay program using MyTrailhead, a learning experience platform developed by Salesforce to develop their customer user community.

Olivet’s leaders were looking for technology that could help them “[flip] the focus from the course to the student,” and they had to look beyond the big four LMSs used in education today. The YourWay program is “a learning experience that is self-paced, offering bite-sized content to make learning more accessible, more hands-on, and more engaging.” The focus is on the user experience, and business technology is at least a decade ahead of educational technology in this regard. The central focus of YourWay is to provide self-paced, low cost general education courses as one option for learners. Scalable systems are essential for accomplishing this goal.

College for America (now SNHU)

When challenged to launch a degree program in four months, Southern New Hampshire University leaders turned to Salesforce- not just to manage the marketing and sales funnel, but to launch the entire learner experience. Salesforce is a customer relationship management system, not an LMS, and yet CfA leaders knew that they needed a think-outside-the-box solution for their new model of providing access to an affordable and career-focused education.

As opposed to building within a traditional LMS, the college “built its competency-based Learning Management System (LMS) on the Customer 360 Platform… It’s all invisible to the student. To them, it’s just a user experience that we’ve customized.” Every major student assignment completion was tracked in Salesforce and not in an LMS. Why?

Business technology is fine tuned to provide insight into the user experience. Who is getting stuck where and when? How have we intervened to provide help? What interventions helped? What does satisfactory progress look like? What predictions can we make to more effectively plan for the future? None of these questions is easily answered with existing (non-customized) LMS technology.

Workday Launches Student

Workday is a customer relationship management suite of tools commonly used in business to handle finance, human resources, and adaptive planning. Workday has added a specific focus on higher education with their Workday Student product. In a recent press release , they announced several new large customers including Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, University of Central Florida, University of Louisville, University of Maryland, and University of Oklahoma.

Workday doesn’t promote their technology as a replacement for the institutional LMS. However, their investment and rapid growth in higher education points to an unmet need for technology that resolves the individual needs of students. They propose that an “integral part of a modern student system is native engagement tools that can actively engage students throughout their educational journey. These engagements are not static; they can be proactive based on actions taken, connections made, and barriers removed—enhancing efficiency and supporting self-service for students.” An investment in this functionality points to the fact that there is currently an unmet technology need in education, a need that could be met with an LXP ecosystem.

Learning Experience Platform

Signals from all corners of media, culture, and business point to an unrelenting focus on the individual user experience. Some examples of these signals include:

Design thinking, with its emphasis on empathy for the user,
User experience and user interface (UX/UI) design as new fields of expertise complete with degree programs and career opportunities in companies large and small,
Universal design for learning (UDL) which promotes educational design that meets a wide variety of cognitive, social, and affective needs.
Cultural responsiveness that advocates for an awareness of the many ways cultural norms impact interactions among individuals.

These signals (and many others) merge and result in the societal expectation that as a learner, my individual needs and preferences are seen and heard. Students don’t want to feel managed as a part of an educational factory. They want their unique traits, needs, preferences, goals, activity, schedules, and desired modes of interaction to be valued. Each student wants to be the author and owner of their educational journey, and they do not want to navigate complex organizational structures to make simple choices around learning modality, intensity, and level of interactivity.

As educators, we can ignore these expectations, or we can recognize that this functionality has been the primary goal of many of today’s business technology systems for over a decade. Customizable interactions with predictive capabilities are central to many of today’s top industries. The technology of modern business needs to merge with the pedagogical and operational knowledge of educators for the benefit of tomorrow’s learners and learning.

The Platform Approach: Part 3

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 16:43:19 GMT

This is the part 3 of our white paper on the platform approach to higher education. If you haven't read part 1 or 2, go back and start there!

More Coverage

Historically, access to education has been a global challenge. Disparities among schools in the US have meant ample opportunities and resources in one district while the neighboring district struggles to pay teachers and provide textbooks. With internet connectivity and personal digital devices for every human on the planet, equitable access to education could become a reality in the next decade.

The educational value of Internet access and digital devices will be dependent on the availability of a platform that can adequately match learners with educational opportunities. Currently, 37% of parents and teachers in the US would choose a private school for their children if cost and transportation were not factors. The number of homeschooled students has doubled in the last 10 years and currently there are nearly 2 million students being homeschooled. Parents’ primary reasons for homeschooling are concerns about the school environment and a desire to provide moral instruction.

Campus equips educators to design engaging courses or lessons, and matches learners with the educational experiences that meet their expectations. Learners and schools could adopt an entire curriculum to earn a diploma or degree, or they could choose a singular lesson from a course for no credit.

While there are plenty of low-cost online learning options available today, many represent a two-dimensional course design model that does not meet the expectations of today’s learners. The Campus difference will be discussed in the next two parts.

Learners: Matching their Learning Expectations

Parents, school administrators, and students themselves are often keenly aware of what they want when adopting curriculum or signing up for an online course. Learners have expectations around the amount of interaction they will have with an instructor. They have expectations for connection with peers, ease of online navigation, workload, quantity and complexity of reading/writing assignments, grading practices, useful assessments, visual appeal, applicability to real life situations, and more.

As the number of platform users grows, so will the variety of learning opportunities available. An essential component of the technology is the ability for users of all types to be matched with a learning experience that meets their expectations for interaction, visual appeal, video content, workload, and progress toward a credential. The Campus Studios team continues to raise the bar for beautiful, appealing online learning experiences. Using the tools and support provided by Campus, all types of educators will have ample opportunity to build their own courses and compete on quality and appeal instead of pricing alone.

Current online learning environments facilitate poor matches between learners and educators which leads to unmet expectations and dissatisfied learners and instructors. Transparent course design means that learners and learning providers will know exactly what they are getting before they sign up. Equipped with a cell phone video camera, some basic video editing software, a bit of training, and a model to follow, educators can inspire learners in addition to delivering content. An open and public marketplace means that gaps in the catalog of offerings can be quickly filled by entrepreneurial educators.

(PART 4 COMING SOON!)

NEW COURSE! Sociology

mark.shepherd@campusedu.com (Mark Shepherd) — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 16:53:42 GMT

Course Title: Sociology (SOC-1020)

Author: Dr. Cynthia Tweedell

Offering Institution: Ohio Christian University

Credits: 3

Course Description: The scientific study of society, institutions, and group interaction, with focus on the sociological imagination and core theories. Topics include the sociological perspective, the individual in society, stratification and social inequality, social institutions, human ecology, and social change, with special attention to issues of diversity .

To learn more click here

The Platform Approach: Part 2

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 13:52:05 GMT

This is the part 2 of our white paper on the platform approach to higher education. If you haven't read part 1, go back and start there!

More Demand

Demand for high-quality educational experiences that are affordable and accessible continues to increase, year-over-year in the United States and around the world. This demand is driven by a VUCA world where every working-age adult experiences the need for continuous learning. While some predict the disintegration of formal educational experiences in favor of free learning experiences like the no-pay MBA or MOOCs, others promote a future where formal education is available across a lifetime of career and location changes. In our current reality where people will change careers an average of >15 times in a lifetime, better methods of preparing for the next step will only increase in value. To that end, Gartner and HolonIQ predict billions of dollars in spending related to educational technology in the next five years. It is a crucial high-growth sector.

Learners and employers need better ways to understand the skills and knowledge that employees have gained. The simple litmus test of the bachelors degree is not enough. Education needs to happen throughout a person’s lifetime which has created greater demand for efficient, effective, and appealing learning experiences that can be validated and shared with the world at the learner’s discretion.

For people desiring faith-based education, this is especially true. An increasing number of families are choosing to homeschool, and an increasing number of families would choose a Christian private school if it were affordable and available. Globally, enrollment in Christian schools continues to increase as well. Increased demand is the first ingredient needed for the inception of this two-sided network for education.

More Providers

As the demand for formal education and training increases t here is a shortage of teachers at the K-12 level. At the college level, there are faculty shortages as well but mostly in high-demand career areas like computer science and web development.

Highly-skilled educators have years of training and experience to design and deliver education effectively. Instructional designers are increasingly employed at the postsecondary level to partner with faculty to design online courses. The next ingredient in the creation of a platform that serves a two-sided network for education is increasing the number of qualified providers of education. Just like Adobe and Microsoft put graphic design tools into the hands of every computer user, the platform for this two-sided network puts learning design tools into the hands of anyone with the inclination to teach.

Tools alone are not enough to create a successful network. For a thriving network, each user’s imprint on the ecosystem needs to contribute to the experiences of future users. Both learners and educators leave traces of data that are ingested to guide future experiences. On the Uber platform, both rider and driver data are captured to inform future ride pairings. On Airbnb’s platform, both host and guest data are captured to inform future bookings.

Providers of education on the Campus platform will gain prestige and visibility through positive learner interactions, and learners on the Campus platform will similarly be rewarded for demonstrating a growth mindset, creativity, collaboration, spiritual formation, and professionalism. In the Campus ecosystem, everyone could be a provider and a consumer of education because everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.

(PART 3 COMING SOON!)

The Platform Approach: Part 1

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 19:03:10 GMT

“Anytime-anywhere learning is the only way I finished my degree. I loved online.”

“I can’t do online learning. It is just so boring.”

“Self-paced learning isn’t for me. I need the weekly due dates and accountability.”

“Online courses are just read and take quizzes. I don’t feel like I learn anything.”

“My online courses were just as challenging and interesting as the face-to-face classes I took.”

Ask ten different people what they think of online learning and you will likely get ten different responses, especially after a year of emergency remote teaching when the experiences of online learners varied considerably. One claim that is undisputed is that online learning is here to stay. An increasing number of learners of all ages continue to choose online options even when similar face-to-face options are available. To say that X group wants face-to-face, or Y group wants online misses the nuances that exist within every group of learners. The depth and breadth of online options continue to improve as researchers and organizations learn about what works in online learning .

Yet challenges remain. Quality is inconsistent, regulatory bodies are still learning how to evaluate and recommend improvements, and educators from kindergarten teachers to college professors are struggling to acquire new instructional technology skills. This paper describes a platform consisting of a two-sided network of providers (educators) and consumers (learners) of online education. For a platform to thrive, each user must make the platform more valuable for every other user.

In contrast, traditional pipeline business models maintain systems that were intended to control quality and ensure value for the consumer and the broader community. Education is a prime example of a pipeline business model. Centrally controlled systems of administration create policies and governance, recruit students, and award a credential to successful completers. As credentials continue to lose their value in the broader marketplace, so-to does the entire pipeline model that leads to those credentials. Millennials are drowning in debt , and big businesses are using non-college-degree methods of finding and keeping talent.

Campus aims to create an ecosystem for Christian faith-based online learning. The Campus platform will enable learners who desire faith-based online learning (credit and non-credit) to find educators who want to deliver faith-based online learning. The platform will enable many people to become providers and will empower many consumers to find exactly what they need.

According to Parker, Van Alstyne & Choudary (2017), successful platforms thrive when five elements work in concert with one another. These five elements create a symbiotic relationship- an ecosystem that reduces redundancy and friction for users on both sides of the network. Successful platform ecosystems consist of:

1) An increase in demand for a particular service. This provides opportunity for

2) An increase in the number and type of providers. More users and providers lead to

3) More coverage, which is our mission- to provide faith-based online education that is efficient, effective, and appealing. Then, parts four and five are the two sides of the network.

4) Learners need online options that match their needs and expectations.

5) Educators need tools, spaces, business models and delivery mechanisms that leverage their unique expertise and aptitudes. When these five elements of the ecosystem work in tandem, the inefficiencies and dissatisfaction with many of today’s systems are addressed.

Parker, G., Van Alstyne, M., & Choudary, S. P. (2017). Platform revolution: How networked markets are transforming the economy - and how to make them work for you (First published as a Norton paperback). W.W. Norton & Company.

(PART 2 COMING SOON!)

Introducing The Campus Blog

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 13:44:59 GMT

Welcome to the Campus blog. We started this blog to discuss the future of online learning.

We are so glad you are here!

Here's a snapshot of what you'll experience on this blog:

Innovative ideas
Testimonials
Course trailers
Course design tips
Much more!

Campus is a learning company headquartered in Marion, Indiana. We are building online courses and applications to transform online education.

Our passion is to help you meet the demands of today's studen ts!