A Public University’s Online Journey: Hunt Lambert of CSU (Part 4)

SM: I imagine that at some point your friends at Colorado State University asked you to take on the online education product?

HL: By that time, I had already gotten the Entrepreneurship Center up and running and had just created the Office of Economic Development. That was done to try and grow the value of the Colorado economy by applying what CSU did as a land grant. The biggest piece of that was technology transfer.

When I was 14, I baked a solar cell in my high school’s metal shop. I created a working solar cell in 1972. I was into alternative energy in the 1980s. I quickly concluded that without subsidies, solar energy was nowhere near economical. It only made sense to do it from a social perspective. One day at CSU, I walked into a faculty member’s lab in engineering research and told him that what he had there was something that I had started looking for 35 years ago. It was the solution to cost-effective solar. I got him a CEO and his first $50 million in funding, and we launched AVA Solar.

Within a year, we had raised $350 million in vendor credits and private investments. A year later we had the first factory in Colorado, and the company became Abound Solar. It is CSU’s first billion-dollar startup. It will probably be a $10 billion revenue startup within five years.

After that experience, I really looked hard at the mission of CSU as a land grant university. I realized, once again, that tech transfers and startups were working, and I was not sure what value I was adding there anymore. I started asking myself what should come next, what would really matter? The answer to me was online education.

When CSU became a $300 million annual Carnegie research university, in many ways they stopped being the public university they were built to be. The grade point averages (GPAs) of incoming students had come up 2 points over two decades. It was a mature university, but as I told the president, I felt we that had left behind the students we were chartered to teach. I also looked at the capacity of education CSU had compared with the number of students who were going to need education in the future.

We had an environment in which there was a very large market for online higher education, where there were radical policy changes taking place that would demand public education to be delivered at a lower cost, and a technology and methodologies set that allowed for very high quality online learning to occur. We needed to put those aspects together and launch an online university as part of the overall university system. The board said yes, and we launched CSU Global Campus. I stayed with them for the business planning period and the first six months of startups. I got them their management team. In eleven months, the university went from initial funding to fully functional, taught classes.

SM: Let’s go into more detail about that process. Was there already an online program at Colorado that you were able to leverage?

HL: No. The private universities had developed very successful technologies for delivering courses. They also had high-quality teaching methodologies for delivering courses online. In many regards, University of Phoenix and its peers had taken all of their technology and market risk to develop technologies and techniques that worked.

This segment is part 4 in the series : A Public University’s Online Journey: Hunt Lambert of CSU
1 2 3 4 5 6 7