Thought Leaders in Online Education: Becky Takeda-Tinker, President of Colorado State University Global Campus (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What can you share about the demographics and psychographics of your student body? Who are these people?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: Interestingly, 40% are the first in their families to attend college. 27% are from underserved population – Latino, African-American, Asian, and Native American. 15% of our students are military affiliated. About 50% are male and 50% female.

Sramana Mitra: Is this because of how you market your program?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: Because we’re fully online, our program is asynchronous.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, that lines up well with the military story. I’ve heard that from many of the online education programs. Military is a very big segment. I’m trying to understand more about your students. One of the things about online education is that the people who do best in online education are the people who are self-motivated. I’m trying to correlate that with these first-time college goers. How is it that you have all these first-time college goers coming to you?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: Global Campus was created to serve the unique needs of non-traditional learners; those that are not going to school full-time, living on campus. When we look at that population, it’s about 75% of all students. When you think about students how have started college but did not finish, that’s a big population. They’re working. They want to finish their degree but they can’t at a traditional school. Global Campus with its format of fully online, asynchronous learning, and the ability to go to school year round and move at a pace of eight weeks gives the adult learner a huge amount of flexibility.

These are students who may have started to go to college, maybe right out of high school, but had to come back and work with their family or had family matters to attend to. When we look at the underserved population like first generation immigrants, they may really have to help support their family or are an integral part of the family where going to college doesn’t work for them.

Sramana Mitra: They’re working part-time and doing this on the side supporting their families.

Becky Takeda-Tinker: Yes. Mostly, working full-time, but some do work part-time. Because we only charge when a student is taking classes, that’s an efficient way to utilize their funds. We are always looking for a low-cost, high-quality way for people to get an education. Going to school continuously in order to keep up with your skills and abilities is going to be important.

Sramana Mitra: What other trends can you share? What else do you think is worth discussing?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: Competency-based education is a great way for students to earn credits in a way that suits them. For some students, this really works where they can go into a free learning environment with all the free resources and then pay to take a proctored exam. We call that competency-based exams. Competency-based education is really a strong trend because it reduces the standard cost of a class or of education. We are seeing a strong emphasis on workplace integration, whether it’s internships or apprenticeships. That integration is going to continue to be quite strong.

The return on investment of education is becoming more and more important, particularly to generation Z who really want to have real value in whatever it is they’re spending money on. That is increasingly more important. We also see a strong trend in adaptive learning. It’s very unique to online learning, making it affordable. Every student can really have his or her own learning experience based on what they want to do. A student may take a standard 8-week class for a Math class perhaps.

Then we look at a Management class and they’ve been a manager for 10 or 20 years. For that type of student, they can actually write a portfolio paper that integrates research, their own experience, and criteria developed by the faculty to demonstrate their knowledge of management. We’ll see that same student say, “I need to take this Statistics class. I already work with Statistics.” They’ll do some self assessment and pay the $250 to take the exam for which they get three credits. That’s $250 for three college credits, which for a standard eight-week class would cost them $1,050.

That trend of adaptive learning also correlates into technology where the student can say that they need help on certain areas or an instructor may identify  that they need help in certain things. They can stay in the classroom but then go into another online area and do some preparatory work. They don’t actually have to leave or drop out. They stay in. The system adapts to where they’re strong, allowing them to move forward quickly and giving them these other opportunities to learn in other areas inside of their virtual classrooms. Those are really up and coming technologies that will help learners where they’re at and provide an experience that they want.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Becky Takeda-Tinker, President of Colorado State University Global Campus
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