Educating Working Adults: Walden University President Jonathan Kaplan (Part 3)

SM: Your focus is to train nurse educators but not nurse practitioners, is that correct?

JK: Yes. We do not have a nursing licensing program. There are a lot of programs like that out there. Those programs have a challenge finding enough educators. That is where our program will help. We are doing our part to address that discrepancy.

SM: Was your choice to not address nurse practitioner training a part of your market segmentation strategy?

JK: Correct. We do not offer any programs resulting in licensing of new nurses.

SM: I am curious how you decide what segments to go after. Nurse practitioners seems to be a segment that would generate a lot of employment, and it also seems to address the philosophy of your school.

JK: I am not sure I can cite a reason we are not pursuing that particular area, although I will tell you that a lot of nurse licensing programs are pre-baccalaureate programs. Our primary focus has been at the graduate level, and we have only recently started going after the graduate programs. There are a range of programmatic areas such as associate degrees that represent a market that we have not entered.

We know what we do well as a university. We have had terrific success focusing on graduate education and enabling working professionals to pursue their graduate degrees. That has been our primary focus. We are now moving into some of the more serious undergraduate programs.

One of the other pieces with nursing is that we look at what types of programs are a good fit for online learning. For someone learning to be a licensed nurse, you would certainly need a hybrid approach. We are purely an online and distance-learning program. In that regard, certifying nurses is not a good fit for us right now. We have started some programs that have face-to-face components. We just have to be very careful to make sure we take the right approach and make the right strategic decisions.

SM: What are some of the other segments that your program has been focusing on? What graduate programs are working adults interested in?

JK: It is a range of areas. The first is teacher education. We have the largest school of education in the country. Teacher education has been an area where we have been very successful online and at the graduate and undergraduate level. Teachers are natural learners, which I think has led to a real appreciation to our approach.

One of the benefits to online education programs is that they can provide a better learning environment than face-to-face classrooms. A big part of that reason is the level of engagement that online learning enables. Teachers in our teacher education programs are so accustomed to going into school every day and trying to engage their students that the online programs really resonate with them. That has been a prime area for our growth.

Other areas that have been strong for us are psychology, mental health counseling, public health and health-care administration. We have added several new courses and new technologies to those areas over the years. We also have strong programs in public administration, management, and technology information systems. All of those programs have been very ripe for online growth, particularly at the graduate level. When working adults decide to pursue education, they are doing it on their terms. It is at a point in their career where they know what they want to get a degree in.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Educating Working Adults: Walden University President Jonathan Kaplan
1 2 3 4 5 6 7