Some Advice for the University of Illinois virtual campus
In recent news, there was an article on how the University of Illinois is struggling with their online enrollment growth. I posted a recent article and talked on this exact subject matter in Las Vegas in September. With the latest news article on the University of Illinois challenges, I believe it also proves the point of my article that going online has it’s challenges for most schools. I can certainly feel for some of the pain that this university is feeling… having experienced to some degree similar pain. In fact, those challenges and pain are exactly what inspired me to write my article. In the article on the University of Illinois, President Joseph White said:
“I’m not mad at anybody about that. I think we’ve come to realize that we have a university faculty that is at capacity.”
With all due respect to President White’s observations, I would venture to say that, although his faculty might have some ‘capacity’ constraints, the more plausible reason for the lack of online enrollment at the University of Illinois is what I call “transitioning from tradition”. Many resident programs are driven and controlled by academic committees and deans that often embrace a “ground campus” type attitude. While not negating the great importance in offering a quality, student experience and assessing student learning outcomes, oftentimes a school can be governed by the mindset that believes that unless a student is sitting in front of a live faculty member, he or she is not learning.
Developing and implementing an online program at a non-profit traditional university is not an easy task. I have lived this firsthand over the last several years. After three successful years as Director of Resident….I have been fortunate to lead a team that has helped to launch a resurgence in our online programs. Some of our accomplishments include: an online enrollment of nearly 28,000 students, with growth goals of 39,000 students this year. My teams have initiated aggressive recruitment and conversion strategies that allowed the school to increase resident enrollment by 70% in three years and online enrollment by 110% in 24 months. In the past 12 months, Liberty’s online learning program was ranked 3rd in the nation by the Online Education Database (OEDb), online student conversion from inquiry to new student starts improved by 3.3% over 24 months. In addition to the increased conversion, under my leadership my admissions team was able to condense their sales cycle of inquiry to start from 68 days to 37 days.
There are very few people, like myself, that have experience in enrollment management leadership that have experience in a successful non-profit organization with a large online enrollment population. In addition to that, not many have the residential enrollment management experience to cross reference the differences and the challenges that are unique to enrolling both kinds of students. Please take some time and read my article on “Challenges Faced by Traditional Schools Entering into Online Education”. There are many pieces to the puzzle that all have to work together to make online education work. An aggressive enrollment team is only a part of that cycle.
University of Illinois, part II
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