A Public University’s Online Journey: Hunt Lambert of CSU (Part 5)

SM: Your thesis was that CSU’s charter was public education for Colorado, so you wanted to use proven online teaching methodologies and apply them to the Colorado brand. What were the mechanics of making that happen?

HL: I told the board that they needed to set us up as a separate campus and give us the hiring ability to bring in online teaching expertise. I wanted their full support to build the current online teaching methodology to not just best in the world, but beyond that.

We also needed to eliminate technology risk, so we said upfront that we would buy the most reliable delivery system, which was Blackboard. We also wanted to buy the most reliable and deliverable back office system, which was Campus Management’s CampusVue product. We just implemented those two without writing code. That kept costs low.

We keep quality high by using active mastery online teaching techniques. We also retain faculty who have both academic and industry qualifications in the areas in which they teach. We thought those three were competitive advantages would differentiate us.

SM: What is the pricing of your offering?

HL: Undergraduate programs are $299 a credit hour and graduate programs $399 a credit hour. We only do degree completions, which are 300/400 level courses and master’s program courses. We rely on our community college system to cover the first two years.

SM: Are your students all Colorado students?

HL: No. About 20% are from out of state, but we do no marketing out of state either. The 20% who are out of state are usually connected to the state somehow. The only marketing we do out of state is to our own alumni out of state and to the military. Right now we are a Colorado concept as we launch, and I do consider us in launch phase.

SM: How many students does your online program have right now?

HL: We have 1,000 students. Our goal for September 1 was to have 1,000 concurrently enrolled students. We have 1,300 students who have enrolled in at least one course. For the fall semester, we hope to have 1,000 enrolled at the start.

SM: What is the TAM in Colorado? How many students will join when your program is full scale?

HL: We consider three segments. There are people who dropped out of four-year schools with 35 or more credit hours, there are people who graduated from community colleges, and there are people who are adult learners who want to come back and finish their education. The market size in Colorado is about 500,000 students.

I call that the group of people who are qualified to complete their degree or get a master’s degree but cannot do so because of a barrier of geography or time. They have to stay in their community for personal or work reasons or they have to shift their time to a schedule that campuses cannot accommodate.

We start all of our programs every eight weeks, and concurrent enrollment in courses is not required. We are very accommodating to our students. Our goal is to have them graduate. If they have a family or work crisis in the middle of their course, they can stop the course and pick it up again the next time it starts. We try to be extremely accommodating to adult and non-traditional learners.

SM: What about lecture times? Are you using recorded lectures?

HL: There is very little video. That is what I call distance education and I consider that passive. We have active content online that may include expert video snippets. We have hot linked courses that take you from textbooks to articles, lecture pieces, voice and video recordings, and active quizzes. We offer active online content.

A meta-study was released a few weeks ago on online learning. The point of that study was that learning efficacy was higher for people who use active online learning. That same study found that learning in a hybrid mode was even higher than that.

This segment is part 5 in the series : A Public University’s Online Journey: Hunt Lambert of CSU
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