More Controversy...

A follow-on article to the StraighterLine controversy was published by Inside Higher Ed today. Once you get past the sensationalism, the article is very complimentary toward the StraighterLine courses and model. I hope this leads regional accreditors and others to compare our courses and prices to existing online general education courses at institutions that they already accredit. On the other hand, the implication that this is somehow outside the lines of legitimate accreditation could diminish schools' willingness to work with us. We'll see. Lastly, I can't help noting that the first two comments (there are 3 as I write this) seem like they were written without having read the article. Our courses meet all the requirements listed and our faculty aren't questionable. These commenters clearly read the headline and then drew their own conclusions. Here's are two other thoughtful posts about StraighterLine's impact on college composition classes by Doug Robinson:

1) Response to the follow-on Article
2) Response to the original article.

The iPod of Higher Ed?

National Controversy

As I expected, StraighterLine hit the national radar and has created quite a bit of controversy. Earlier this week, Inside Higher Ed ran an article about a controversy at Fort Hays State University, one of StraighterLine’s partner schools. The controversy was precipitated by a couple of students creating an anti-StraighterLine Facebook page and a critical article in the student newspaper. This article was followed by a rebuttal from FHSU’s provost. All of this was picked up by Inside Higher Ed and a lively debate ensued in the comments below the article. In turn, this spawned supporting blog posts like these:

• Center for College Affordability and Productivity suggesting that colleges might look to outsourcing as a solid educational strategy.

• Center for College Affordability and Productivity suggesting that a double standard is being applied to StraighterLine than to college’s own course quality.

• Tony Seuss’ blog that extols the virtues of SL.

• Michael Rizzo, a professor of economics at Rochester State University, identifies the hypocrisy of the claim that colleges always have control over their own credits.

• A blog called Educated Quest has this to say.

• Though it does not directly mention StraighterLine, Kevin Carey wrote a very relevant opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed comparing higher education to the newspaper business.

It spawned a critical post, like this:

• A blog from Kairos in the writing community suggesting that this is a threat to higher education

For me, the opposition to StraighterLine boils down to the fact that StraighterLine is new, for-profit, and explicit about cost savings to the student. As I will discuss below, none of the elements that comprise StraighterLine are unprecedented in higher education.

Quality Courses?

Despite the fact that most, if not all, of the anti-StraighterLine contingent have not seen the courses, they suggest that these courses cannot be quality courses because they are not expensive enough, do not conform to an ideal educational model, are delivered at a distance, are not managed by people with appropriate credentials or are driven by a profit motive. It should also be noted that two days after this article, the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC), a nationally recognized accrediting agency, stated that StraighterLine courses meet or exceed all of their standards for online education. Further, StraighterLine’s partner colleges are regionally accredited, and the regional accreditors leave it to the institution to determine what they will award credit for.

First, courses need not be expensive to be high quality. This is the “fine wine” fallacy. To check, go the National Center for Academic Transformation and look at some of the Course Redesign projects. Usually, cost per student for general education courses at these well known universities are between $100 and $200 before Redesign. After Redesign, they are frequently even less.

Second, courses need not conform to the single professor and small group model to be better than what most students are getting today. This is the “Platonic Form” fallacy. Detractors compare StraighterLine to a terrific educational model that is also expensive, difficult to scale and is unavailable to most students. The appropriate comparison, and one which I welcome, is a comparison to other colleges’ online general education courses.

Third, some have said that these courses can’t be good because they are delivered at a distance. While I think that comparing the efficacy of face to face and distance education courses is a fair question – particularly if one were to include the prices charged for each – it is not an indictment of StraighterLine alone. It would be an indictment of the accepted practice of the thousands of colleges that provide online courses, StraighterLine among them.

Fourth, others have claimed that StraighterLine’s credentials aren’t sufficient. Despite my believe that the level of credentials and student success are only loosely correlated, SMARTHINKING’s tutoring services and StraighterLine’s courses are overseen by people with PhD’s and Master’s degrees in their appropriate subjects. All have significant teaching experience. Further, our team has authored numerous academic publications. Our credentials are as good, or better, than many colleges’ professors.

Fifth, others have claimed that StraighterLine is particularly susceptible to cutting corners, having relaxed academic standards, and letting students cheat because we are a for-profit company. StraighterLine has exactly the same propensity to do this as any other entity – not-for-profit, public or for-profit. If our standards are lax, we lose our partners and our business. Conversely, grade inflation, inconsistent courses, extremely low retention rates, and unchecked tuition inflation argues against the sanctity of the non-profit sector.

Lastly, all of the elements of the StraighterLine model, except for a couple of StraighterLine innovations, are already common across higher education. Colleges routinely accept credits from third party sources like the AP, CLEP, credit transfer, ACE credits, dual enrollment, and life-skills credit awards. Colleges routinely outsource whole courses and curricula to third parties like Bisk Education, Gatlin Education, Ed2Go, Higher Ed Holdings, Regis’ New Ventures and the Institute for Professional Development. The NCAT’s Course Redesign model explicitly states that colleges should redesign courses using 1) more interaction with content and less with a lecturer 2) on-demand academic assistance, and 3) alternative labor strategies where non-subject related course and student management duties are handled by lower-salaried people. The difference is that none of these pieces have been put together into a single model and offered directly to students.

Why is StraighterLine like the iPod?

While StraighterLine doesn’t have anything close to the ubiquity, the revenue or the “cool” factor of the iPod, its evolution is similar. The genius of the iPod business model is that it was revolutionary, but all of its elements were already available and established. The iPod created a complete system that allowed consumers to “rip” songs off of CD’s, organize them coherently using online song databases, transfer them easily to a portable memory unit, search and play them easily with a compelling user interface. Then Apple, in its only major innovation, added the $1 download model to further increase revenue. All of these elements were introduced at once by Apple in a coherent system.

Except for the $1 download, all of these elements were relatively well developed in isolation before Apple put them all together. Programs to rip songs off of CD’s and put them on the computer existed, but organizing songs was sometimes hard. Online song tracking databases existed for organizing a song library, but typically didn’t integrate with “ripping” programs. Portable MP3 players existed, but the user interface and transfer programs were difficult. Apple put it all together into a single, usable system.

StraighterLine, while not at Apple’s scale, does the same thing. Colleges already accept 3^rd party credits, though most of the 3^rd party credit providers aren’t explicitly consumer focused. Colleges already use Course Redesign models for general education courses, but the savings from these models are absorbed into the university rather than being passed on to the student. Therefore, there is little pressure on colleges from students to do more course redesign. Colleges routinely outsource curricula and staffing of academic programs to 3^rd parties, but usually not for general education courses and not to a company that also has a consumer model. StraighterLine adds a couple of additional innovations that colleges are not equipped to offer, namely the inclusion of on-demand, online tutoring as the primary instructional model and a subscription pricing model for courses. StraighterLine puts all of these pieces together to create a new general education course model where the quality of courses are as good or better than comparable courses, the dramatic savings are passed to the student, courses scheduling is extremely flexible for the student, and the cost of failure for students is extremely low.

Interestingly, the iPod music system was created by a computer maker which, at the time, was incongruous, but in retrospect makes perfect sense. StraighterLine is being offered by an online tutoring company which, because of the tendency to associate courses with content development, seems incongruous. However, digital content for general education courses and distance education software are essentially commodities. The SMARTHINKING labor model is what changes the equation. Also, the iPod’s success was enabled by limited buy-in of part of the industry that it eventually transformed. Select music companies needed to approve limited digital rights management and had to allow the $1 music downloads. The rest of the industry followed. Similarly, StraighterLine’s partner colleges see the possibility of driving additional enrollments by partnering with StraighterLine. Maybe the rest of the industry will follow.

StraighterLine’s Innovations

StraighterLine’s $99 per month subscription model is a true innovation in higher education (this model was first suggested by Ryan Busch, StraighterLine’s Director, during StraighterLine’s development phase). This is made possible by SMARTHINKING’s labor model. By having tremendous staffing volume in general education subjects, SMARTHINKING can provide very high service levels at any time of the day or night in any of the subjects that it supports. No single university or even most university systems have the demand to offer similar service levels. Note that the innovation in the labor model is not that it’s online, it’s that it is at scale. Though I do not think the implications of StraighterLine’s subscription model and SMARTHINKING’s labor model are fully recognized, I think they will be. The two largest implications are:

• Reduce the Cost of Failure: So far, 82% of StraighterLine students have either successfully passed the courses or are in process. Of the 18% that did not pass, 80% (or 14% of the total) enrolled in the subscription model and dropped out after the first month. So, for those that succeed, they are provided an incentive to finish quickly and the cost of labor and infrastructure provision more closely matches the price of the course. Even more interesting, those that fail are only out $99! If a student enrolled in a typical college and then failed out in the first semester, he or she would have thousands of dollars of debt and no degree with which to earn more to pay back the debt. The likelihood of this student returning to the system is very low. Why can’t a traditional university do this? In a traditional model, a university projects X students to start on a given date and hires Y faculty to teach them. To secure Y in advance, the university has to make semester or annual commitments to faculty and therefore requires full payment from students even if they fail. Personally, I think the cost of failure is one of the greatest and most overlooked failings of higher education today.

• Enable Unmatched Scheduling Flexibility for Students --Because SMARTHINKING’s online tutoring service has such a high volume of staffing, any new enrollments do not affect our staffing patterns at the margin. Therefore, any number of students (within reason) can start any StraighterLine course immediately. Further, they can take as long as they want to finish the course AND have a higher level of academic and course support than they would get in a traditional setting. There is nothing to prohibit a school or an individual to impose its own required schedule on the course, just that the schedule could be anything.

• Establish Service Levels as a Course Quality Benchmark – It has always amazed me that we have customer service levels in every element of our lives, but not as a quality benchmark for courses. Service levels make a difference in all other aspects of our lives ranging from our buying decisions to perceptions of the companies that serve us (think about your frustration with the service levels of the local cable company!). I suspect that service levels have never been a benchmark because universities have never been able to actually monitor and enforce service levels. StraighterLine changes that. A student taking a math class can get live help from a Masters or PhD level instructor 24 hours a day, 7 days a week within 3 minutes. A student taking a composition course has roughly five graded assignments and seven optional submissions to our online writing, submissions will be returned in an average of 18 hours. Compare this to infrequent professor office hours, long-return times for e-mailed questions and week-long or more waits for essay feedback and returned grades.

• Enable Unlimited Help for a Student – In a traditional course format, the amount of assistance that a student receives is not limited by the amount of help that the student needs, but by how much time the faculty member has to give. With commuter students, commuter faculty, adjunct faculty and high enrollment courses, the amount of time available is frequently very small. With StraighterLine, each course comes with up to 10 hours of 1-1 instruction. Students can buy more if they need it, effectively creating an unlimited amount of help. Opponents will argue that unlimited help isn’t free to the student. True, but unlimited help cannot be provided to anyone in any model unless the amount of help is somehow rationed and priced. When that happens, those that need more help can get it, even if they have to pay for it.

Hope

While it is far too early to compare the success of StraighterLine with the success of the iPod, the systems thinking behind their mutual development is similar. In the Kairos blog, it was said that some of the comments on this blog might simply be braggadocio similar to claims made 10 years ago during the first wave of online universities. It’s entirely possible. We do seem to hear the same themes at key-note speeches today that we heard a decade ago. However, innovation, cost-reduction, and quality improvement are not impossible in higher education. I hope that Kevin Carey’s insightful opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education proves accurate.