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.

Winning the Thought Leaders

In SMARTHINKING's early days, I used to compare us to a well-respected art film -- we had won the art festivals, but we needed to show the box-office returns. Basically, the thought leaders and innovators of higher education agreed that SMARTHINKING was a great idea. However, we had to figure out a way to translate their approval into local sales. Fortunately, we did manage to show the returns for our online tutoring service.

Today, we are in the same situation for our new product, StraighterLine. We officially launched this about 2 months ago. Since then we have had rave reviews. Clayton Christensen, noted Harvard business school professor and expert on innovation called StraighterLine "disruptive." Richard Vedder, a former member of the Spellings Commission and noted expert on college cost and affordability, published an insightful blog post about our approach to academic labor. Tony Seuss a well-respected blogger and community college professor in Georgia published praise of the business model. For StraigtherLine, this is a terrific introduction to the national spotlight. Before you can win the popular press, you need to win the approval of the experts. We seem to have convinced the experts. Now, we need to convince individual students and schools.

While one would suspect that colleges might be very resistant to enrolling their students in someone else's developmental and general education courses, there seem to be a number of factors at work that could change that. First, state budgets are in woeful shape. This translates to budget cuts for colleges. These budget cuts are coming in a time of recession which usually causes enrollments to increase which means that colleges have to serve more students than ever before. With more students and less resources, StraighterLine is a powerful option to fulfill general and developmental education delivery. Second, the Gates Foundation just announced a signficant committment to community colleges. They are focusing on exactly the things that SMARTHINKING and StraighterLine have been built to support -- increasing student success, serving developmental students, and lowering costs. SMARTHINKING and StraighterLine are some of the few truly innovative approaches to these problems.

So, stay tuned as we try to take StraighterLine to a theater near you!

Is Higher Education for Students or for Professors?

The Chronicle of Higher Ed just reported on StraighterLine’s launch. Titled “Who Needs a Professor?”, the article takes a mildly peeved attitude toward the new product. In this article and in the comments and blogs that it has spawned, it seems the benefits to the student are being roundly ignored. Perhaps this should be expected from a publication that serves professors, however StraigtherLine’s benefits to students, the ones actually paying for college, are profound. Here are the primary ones:

1) Affordability – The media is filled with laments about the rising cost of college. Well, StraighterLine is a way to dramatically reduce the price of the first year to year and a half of college. At $399 per course (just imagine if the government subsidies that support public colleges were applied to this price), this is dramatically lower than most 4 year colleges, private colleges and for-profit schools. It is even lower than many in-state community college tuitions. The next natural question is what do you get for $399?

2) Support – Students in StraighterLine courses get up to 10 hours of 1 on 1 instruction. This is more 1 on 1 instruction than is provided in most other online or face to face courses. Further, this is instruction on-demand. By using SMARTHINKING’s tutors, StraighterLine students get access to an instructor with a master’s degree or PhD within minutes. In a typical course, office hours are often provided limited, inconvenient or provided upon request, if there are office hours at all. Lastly, every SMARTHINKING tutor is screened, trained, and continually evaluated. Colleges typically do not offer their own professors and adjuncts this level of pedagogical development. So, students get more instructional support that is more convenient, more immediate, and more consistent.

3) Flexibility – Students in StraigtherLine courses can start a course within 24 hours of deciding to enroll and they can complete anytime within 6 months. In a traditional course, students are confined to the start and stop dates determined by the school and typically have to wait to start after deciding to enroll.

In addition, it would be helpful to compare the StraighterLine courses with the construction of many (maybe most?) freshman and sophomore general education courses in both online and face to face formats. Given that these courses are frequently taught by adjuncts or teaching assistants, with little or no training, with little or no availability to students beyond the lecture, and students are being charged 2 and 3 times what StraighterLine charges, it seems to me that StraighterLine courses are a welcome option for students seeking to reduce their cost of education.

StraighterLine

On May 15th, SMARTHINKING launched a new product called StraighterLine. In many ways, this is the product that SMARTHINKING has been building toward for 9 years. While this may seem hyperbolic, I think this product has the potential to transform the cost structure of higher education. Here’s what it is, why SMARTHINKING is the one to bring it to market, and why it has so much potential.

StraighterLine provides general education courses – the ones that everyone takes in the first or second year of college – that are more affordable, better supported, and more flexible than most other online courses. Regionally accredited partner colleges agree to award credit to students that successfully pass these courses. Each course is $399 (without a government subsidy), comes with up to 10 hours of live one-on- one SMARTHINKING instruction, and can be started and stopped at the student’s convenience. McGraw-Hill (one of the world’s largest textbook publishers) provides the course content and Blackboard (the world’s largest Learning Management System provider) provides the course infrastructure. By inserting MH’s content into Bb’s LMS and integrating with SMARTHINKING’s online tutoring services, we have a course that is better than most of what is out there today. Partner colleges work with us because students taking StraighterLine courses will need to complete their degree somewhere. This becomes a lead generation engine for our partners colleges.

Offering online courses may seem a little far afield for an online tutoring provider like SMARTHINKING. However, when you take a closer look at the course ingredients, you realize that all of the course elements are, more-or-less, commodities except for the labor. For instance, college algebra course content is readily available. There are dozens of LMS providers. However, there are very few companies that can provide on-demand instruction. For the provision of online general education courses with on-demand instruction, SMARTHINKING is the only company that has the industry credibility to do this.

As I mentioned earlier, I think StraighterLine has the potential to transform higher education. I believe this because StraighterLine overcomes the three largest barriers to cost reduction in education. These barriers are
1) The deployment of an alternative academic labor model
2) The creation of a legitimate course provider outside of the traditional accreditation model
3) The delivery of cost reduction benefits to students (instead of to the institutions)

As I’ve noted in other posts, technology has the potential to dramatically reduce the cost and increase the quality of education. However, evidence to date points to the opposite. What technology should be able to do, in theory, is to reduce the price of content production and distribution to close to zero, the cost of software to close to zero, and the cost of communication to close to zero. In theory, the cost of course should only be the amount of academic labor consumed during the course. However, such a radical pricing model has never been tried because there has never been a labor model that could be implemented like this, and colleges are accredited at the degree level, rather than the course level. Enter StraighterLine

The StraighterLine model incorporates SMARTHINKING’s tutoring as instruction, thereby offering an instructional model that provides greater availability, better service levels, more consistency, and greater record keeping. Further, the amount of instruction is limited by how much the student wants or needs, rather than by how much the professor is willing to give.
The StraighterLine model only provides general education courses. By working with partner colleges, StraighterLine can carve out these high enrollment courses. The courses that are the best candidates for standardization and commoditization at volume. In this way, students that successfully pass StraighterLine courses can receive real college credit at a fraction of the cost of traditional college courses. If students buy these courses like we hope, then the cost savings will pass to them, thereby reducing the cost of higher education.

If all goes well, in 3 years or so, StraighterLine will be a primary provider of general education courses. Students will contemplate coming to StraighterLine first, and then continuing their coursework at a college of their choice.

Breaking Radio Silence

It's been a loooong time since I last posted. Why? Well, I said most of what I wanted to say in my first posts. Now, however, SMARTHINKING is about to launch a new product that warrants another posting explosion. We plan to launch a new product called StraighterLine in May.

Online Tutoring and VOIP

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is the use of two-way, voice communication – like a telephone – over the Internet. This technology has been around for a decade or so. For online tutoring, though VOIP will be a common feature in the future, its past and present have been characterized by more hype than usefulness.

Why the hype around voice? People are accustomed to being tutored in-person, implying the use of voice. Therefore, voice is assumed to be a required element of tutoring. It is not. Tutoring requirements for math and other subjects are the efficient communication of symbols (it’s hard to describe the quadratic equation over the telephone), graphing and drawing ability, and text input. In fact, when students are being tutored effectively, there are lengthy pauses while students and tutors are working through problems. The presence or absence of voice has no bearing on the length of these pauses. So, for the most part, VOIP neither increases the quality or efficiency of communication. It is simply more familiar. Though SMARTHINKING will offer voice in a limited capacity in some subjects starting in January, we have provided hundreds of thousands of tutoring sessions without it. In fact, VOIP can cause more problems than it solves. Among the challenges of VOIP are:

• Technical support – The number of students needing help with headsets, microphones, sound cards, bandwidth, processing capacity, voice installations, and simply turning the volume up, is significant.
• Bandwidth – Using VOIP requires more bandwidth than a whiteboard or chatroom connection. With the increase in broadband penetration, this problem is diminishing, but it is still present in dial-up and shared bandwidth connections.
• Archiving (Memory) – A whiteboard tutoring session can be archived by saving a single image or series of images. When a voice track is added, the memory needed for archiving increases exponentially.
• Archiving (Quality Control) – A tutoring session saved as an image can be reviewed in a couple of minutes or less. A voice track requires the reviewer to listen to the entire tutoring session (an average of 25 minutes long).
• Software installations – VOIP usually requires an installation of a program – rather than a flash or java download – onto the student’s computer.
• Glitches and Voice Quality – For many users, VOIP can result in tutors and students talking over each other, waiting for the other to speak when the other doesn’t realize it, and other barriers to the tutoring interaction. With students already frustrated with their academic work, adding communication and technical frustration can be the last straw.

For the most part, online tutoring companies that do use VOIP require students to install software locally, sometimes give away headsets and microphones, and do not archive tutoring sessions. Installation of software requires a significant amount of forethought on the part of the student/buyer. Shipping of computer accessories dramatically inceases cost and also requires forethought. The lack of archiving impacts quality control and dispute resolution procedures. Students using services that provide on-demand support to struggling students, like SMARTHINKING’s services, typically do not have the time or the patience to go through a significant installation process at the same time that they are struggling with their homework. Requiring such installation serves to limit, rather than increase, the number of students using these services.

Having said all of this, voice may be a requirement for effective live tutoring in some subjects. Foreign languages, for instance, would seem to require voice. However, on the whole, lack of voice has had no adverse effects on student tutoring demand or satisfaction. Once VOIP becomes embedded into operating systems and browsers and voice input devices (headsets and microphones) are standard computer accessories, it will be interesting to see whether students choose to use, or not use, VOIP. This is getting closer and closer to reality as more computers come with Bluetooth connections that can integrate with mobile phone ear-pieces. However, for now, in SMARTHINKING’s experience, VOIP serves to limit the market for tutoring rather than expand it.