First and foremost, significant change is not about just driving new leads to the sales pipeline.  In most cases small to midsized schools are structured as relics of the past with poor systems and processes for today’s adult and online student.  In our Analytic work, we often find heavy reliance on print and billboard marketing strategies, followed up by many different points of entry into the institution where leads are lost and mishandled.  This is just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, a good lead generation group can fill the top end of the funnel, but strategists have to realize that is not the end goal.  The goal is matriculated students who persist to graduation.

On the front end, how do you handle leads? How many institutional touches occur and in what frequency?  How fast do you evaluate transcripts and package financial aid?  In short, what is your speed to relationship engagement?  Once engaged, the prospecting lead is off the market.  If the institution is not able to engage appropriately, it will be fighting a losing battle every time with another school that does this very well.

Strategic change in adult & online education is about a paradigm shift… and it is just that…very strategic.  It is a willingness to let go of the past and embrace a new very sophisticated population of students that are less impressed with your brand and more impressed with your ability to deliver and keep your promises in a timely fashion.  And it doesn’t stop there.

Faculty must be retooled as well.  In both the online and adult market, faculty are the retention experts.  If you draw many students into the institution just to lose them with a big back door, your ROI is terrible.  It is much better to recruit 20 and keep 19, than recruit 50 and keep 40.

Strategic Change in Adult & Online Education is a full circle revolution. Change involves pain and letting go of the past to embrace the present.  It takes strong leaders to persist and drive the tactical initiatives.  However, once accomplished it will keep your institution from fading away to irrelevancy in the 21st Century.

1. The number one driver for Adult & Online Learning is still “Convenience!”

Over the past decade, most institutions have at least attempted online education.  It is fair to say that most have also found diminishing returns while a select few have seen meteoric growth.  This begs the question of why? 

When faculty are just told to go and create an online course, institutions find a significant difference between courses and in delivery.  Often there are one or two maverick early-adaptor faculty who create successful online courses, however, they differ significantly between authors and in assessment.  The lack of an enterprise strategy and standardization translates into variability in academic quality, rigor, workload and assessment.  The balance of faculty often resist the movement toward an online delivery format due to lack of developed skill sets and lack of ownership in both the process and the product.

The fundamental purpose of ES CourseCreator™ is three fold.  

1. Provide the consulting services to assess and promote institutional readiness, ownership and course development strategy
2. Provide the middleware bridge that spans the gap between faculty content expertise and online course creation through the use of web-application software and instructional designers
3. Provide the technology solution for portability into any learning management system on the market

One can not over emphasize the age old adage “Knowledge is Power.”  Yet in our experience within higher education, decisions are often made in a haphazard way that emphasizes intuition over intelligence.  Making decisions with solid business intelligence is not relegated to the halls of Fortune 500 companies.

Adult & Online programs have the capacity to launch a small or midsized college into a significant revenue stream and enrollment growth trajectory, but they are not for the faint of heart.  The appropriate combination of market differentiation from the eyes of the prospective learner with that of the right program offering and internal processes will make all the difference.

Here are some key questions to ask of your team players:

1. “Do you know how your institution is perceived by prospective learners and why they would choose your college over another?”
2. “What does it cost to get each prospective learner categorized by marketing channel?”
3. “What is your conversion ratio by lead?”
4. “What is your lead manager’s response cycle time and what are the established steps to close the deal?”
5. “What is the bottom line ratio of revenue dollars benchmarked against cost by student, by program, by department?”
6. “What are the best practices in your higher education industry for working with certain population sets?”
7. “What are your retention statistics by program?  At what point in both your recruitment and delivery cycle are you seeing the most attrition?”

These are just a sampling of many questions that a manager with acute business acumen must know by heart in order to defend and manage a serious Adult & Online program.

A recent study observed 179 large companies. Those that adopted “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity that was 5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors, including how much the companies invested in technology.

Here are some responses and testimonials from Education Strategy’s Analytics:

• Quite frankly this gives me the ammunition we need to make changes. 
• I was thinking we should probably pursue that opportunity (live chat, etc.) and now I have data to support that initiative. 
• There’s no arguing with unbiased data.
• We thought we had systems in place that were working; we are so surprised to see how we are actually operating from a potential student’s perspective.
• There are changes we can now make immediately without any additional expenses that will make a difference for us.
• I now have the evidence I need to ask for funding to support certain efforts that are critical to our recruitment process.

You can go after these questions internally and find some success.  Alternatively, many institutions find that an external set of eyes can significantly impact the quality of data.  Education Strategy can provide this to you with our suite of Analytics.  Take a moment and explore by clicking here.

In our travels across the country, we have found that there are four ways to grow your programs once your internal systems are in place and functioning well.   In the end it comes down to product differentiation and brand awareness.

1. Increase your marketing budget significantly so that your brand is the dominant program offering in the media mix.  This requires the most amount of upfront and ongoing “cash” and the least amount of internal change.  Its unintended consequence is that your cost to fill each seat goes up significantly and your ROI diminishes very quickly.
2. Create a satellite campus in order to reach an undeserved population at a distance from the main location.  This option will give you market differentiation, if you find a location without much competition.  Yet it will also more than likely trigger accreditation reviews and a significant commitment to the new location in order to create stability for the long term.  Our concern here is the shelf life of the new location as usually under served locations are under served due to low population mix.
3. Offering new programmatic majors is a significant option for growth in a saturated market.  This option combined with the right program that differentiates your college can be successful.  A word of caution though is needed.  Often colleges create new programs out of faculty interest and expertise rather than market demand.  Make sure you do your research first.  This option may also take quite a bit of time to roll out if you are relying on faculty to develop a comprehensive integrated curriculum that meets the demands of today’s returning adult learners.  Utilizing a third party provider of either the curriculum or instructional designers such as Education Strategy can expedite this event and streamline the accreditation concerns.
4. Changing the delivery modality of your curriculum.  If your institution is only offering classroom-based programs, moving online in short order can dramatically change your institutional reach.  Many institutions utilize this approach with blended or fully online programs in order to differentiate themselves with options of convenience and a broader net.  It is important to note, however, that changing modality of delivery should necessitate a change in marketing tactics as well and that is often a weakness in the knowledge base of today’s institutions.

Growing an Adult Program in a Saturated Market is possible!  Choose your partner well and move quickly.  Often the signs of program enrollment deterioration have been present for years, yet unnoticed or unprioritiezed.  The time to move is now and with the right data to assist your transformation process you can be successful once again.

Nathan

There is a solution!  Within the Adult & Online learner marketspace, institutions can make data-driven decisions.  For example, institutions need to know:

• What is the true experience of a prospective adult learner  when they engage your institution?
• How does my program and marketing compare to my local competitors and other benchmark standards?
• Is the curriculum utilized adult learner focused?
• Has the curriculum been converted to an effective online format that maximizes retention?
• Are the departments which interface with prospective and enrolled students utilizing processes that effectively support an adult & online learner?
• Does the institution’s online program actually solve a “point of pain” for learners?
• Are you measuring the “right” things?

It is critical to the mission of your institution to develop an Adult & Online Strategy based upon real data, not assumptions.  The answer to the question of “Why are Analytics critical to success in today’s Competitive Online Environment?” is relatively simple.  Your institution can’t afford a mistake as the appropriate use of institutional resources and the management of the diminishing resource of time will determine both voice and relevance tomorrow.

Education Strategy now offers a full suite of Analytics to assist you with attracting and retaining Adult Learners in today’s Competitive Environments.

The lack of real data to support change initiatives can lead to political infighting and knee-jerk reactions on campus. It is amazing to me how many decisions can be ill informed and it only takes a little time to see poor results.

This is where business acumen comes in. The lack of it can be the end of an otherwise good program. Adult & Online education is still at its infancy on many campuses. Having said that, many decisions on how to best implement it are driven by gut reactions and quite frankly are very suspect – hence leading to political infighting.

First and foremost, strategic positioning decisions need to be made based upon a deep understanding of the nature of adults, how they search for degrees and what makes them choose one institution over another. Secondly, an institution must understand real data. That real data includes not only how competitors in the market work with adults but also an understanding of its own true performance over perception.

Performance over perception can be mission critical. What is the true performance of your adult and online program in your market based upon mission critical factors? In our experience, that true performance metric can be significantly different than the institution’s perception of performance.

It is for that purpose Education Strategy has designed its Market Performance Report. You can find details on our website under External Analytics.

Nathan

There are more adult learners in orbit around your institution than ever before. Just check your census data along with a quick study of market trending and you will walk away without any question of this fact. But being in orbit does not mean they will choose your school to complete their degree. Adults seek a certain level of anonymity when in orbit and carry many characteristics of online shoppers. Consider how you might shop for something at Amazon or any other online vendor. You do your research through your computer, give out as little personal information as possible and may send the same search criteria to five different sites at once. You are in “orbit.” Your goal is to get as many different responses as quickly as possible and to compare. The prospecting adult learner is no different and may remain in orbit for quite some time until the perceived right fit is found.

So ultimately what draws that prospecting adult out of orbit and into your institutional gravity? To understand this transition, one has to recognize that we almost always meet adult learners at a point of need. Their lives are too busy and complex to add another large chunk such as formal education. Motivating them past the axis point of anonymity (shopping) to interaction is often all about appropriate messaging followed by personal connection. Getting that compelling message out to the shopper in orbit is the challenge. Once that learner steps out of anonymity and into interaction through filling out an online form, sending an email or even making that first call, a well trained program representative can make all the difference.

Creating a sense of gravity to draw the learner is often almost a counseling event. It is not about telling the learner how great your institution is. It is about listening for the learner to disclose his or her point of need (crisis) and demonstrating how a relationship with your institution can help solve or overcome a specific challenge. This can be a tough transition for the program representative since true gravity is created when the discussion is all about the learner, and very little about the institution.

It is an essential maxim to understand and embrace that moving adults through the fulcrum of orbit to gravity is about being the first to engage that learner in a relationship. This is a strategic event and must be well thought out and coached. Your institution might have the first message that anonymous learner in orbit may read, but if that message is all about the institution, that learner will never step out of anonymity. If on the other hand, your message is first out, with a fast cycle time of response, and it addresses the crisis and point of need…. you will draw that learner into your institutional gravity.

It doesn’t take but a brief search on the Internet to find out about this controversy.  The combination of rapid time to compliance along with the unknowns of the new governmental role has raised quite a stir.

In short, the Department of Education (DoE) will be holding accrediting agencies accountable as the gatekeepers for disbursement of federal funds.  This in itself is not new.  What is new is having the DoE define a mission critical element required in order to receive those funds.

The final regulations (per CHEA):

·         Establish a federal definition of a credit hour that is consistent with the Carnegie Unit (“one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out of class student work each week for approximately 15 weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time”).

·         Affirm that (1) credit hour determination is an institutional responsibility, (2) the definition is intended for federal purposes only, (3) the definition constitutes a minimum expectation and (4) credit hour policies and procedures will be reviewed by accreditors.

·         Describe credit hour as “an amount of work represented in intended learning outcomes and verified by evidence of student achievement,” establishing a “quantifiable minimum basis” and as a means to “quantify academic activity for purposes of determining federal funding.”

·         Do not require institutions to adopt USDE’s definition of a credit hour in lieu of existing institutional measurements.

·         With regard to accreditation, require these organizations, as part of accreditation reviews, to evaluate the reliability and accuracy of the institution’s assignment of credit hours and take action to address any deficiencies identified. Accreditors must report to USDE systematic noncompliance by institutions regarding criteria for assigning credit hours. Failure to do so may result in USDE restricting or removing the accreditor’s recognition.

The important “take-a-way” from Dr. Greeno’s interview was that the DoE is not looking for a strict formulaic response to this rule.  Education Strategy presented a possible model based upon numeric calculations and the DoE rejected it as not necessary.

The Department is looking for a “reasonable” equivalency in the amount of work required for a student to receive a credit hour regardless of the model of education. No preference was made about “in class vs. out of class” but that the sum total was equivalent.

According to Dr. Greeno the key will be documenting institutional equivalency models based upon the type of learning construct utilized.  In many cases this is not done to date.  Having a robust rationale for online and accelerated courses will provide reasonable security for the institution.

In the end, there is still much room for interpretation by the Department.   But the data collected in this interview provides significant tools for moving into this uncharted area.  Education Strategy has much more information on this subject as a result of this interview and would be happy to share it with you in conversation.