April 17, 2015
Barbara A. Bichelmeyer, PhD
Senior Director, Indiana University Office of Online Education
Executive Associate Vice President, University Academic and Regional Campus Affairs
April 17, 2015
Barbara A. Bichelmeyer, PhD
Senior Director, Indiana University Office of Online Education
Executive Associate Vice President, University Academic and Regional Campus Affairs
In March 2011, IU President Michael McRobbie and the Board of Trustees accepted a report and strategic plan for online education from School of Informatics Dean Bobby Schnabel which offered, as its primary recommendation, the establishment of a university-wide office of online education.
Acting upon Dean Schnabel’s recommendation, in April 2011 President McRobbie established the IU Office of Online Education (OOE), with the charge directly from Dean Schnabel’s report that the OOE provide:
strategic oversight of IU’s online education activities; serving as the “gatekeeper” for intercampus issues regarding online education, and as the point of final decision making (subject to presidential and Trustee approvals) upon input from the IU Academic Leadership Council; maintaining an IU portal for all IU online education offerings; coordinating with state and other entities that influence online education. Additional responsibilities in its first few years should include: working with campuses, colleges and schools to encourage exploration and implementation of programs that are consistent with IU’s online education strategic plan; determining overall university resource needs to support online education, needs of specific units, and ways to meet these needs including a pricing policy for IU online education; leading an IU conversation of criteria that should be used to assess new online degrees and programs; defining IU’s data collection needs related to online education and assuring that they are met; working with the bursar, registrar and other key units to improve the ease and efficiency of supporting multi‐campus courses and programs.
After extensive discussion with university and campus leaders, study of the broader landscape of online education at peer institutions, and needs analysis of online programs and operations at all campuses, in June 2012, the university-wide implementation plan for online education titled “Moving Forward” was approved by President McRobbie for presentation to the IU Board of Trustees (http://iuonline.iu.edu/_assets/docs/moving-forward.pdf).
Following on the presentation of “Moving Forward” to the Trustees, in accordance with IU's “Principles of Excellence,” and supporting a recommendation of the “New Directions in Teaching and Learning” report, in September 2012, President McRobbie announced the “IU Online” initiative, an $8 million investment in online education. As stated in the media release:
The new IU Online initiative will enable us to marshal our renowned academic and technological resources to expand existing online programs and develop new offerings that are geared toward improving student learning, encouraging greater undergraduate degree completion, strengthening the state's workforce and reaching new populations of students in Indiana, nationally and internationally. IU Online will address four priorities:
(http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/23061.html).
IU Online is now in its final year as an “initiative,” and over the past three years has become the brand name for IU’s online education programs. In this final year of the IU Online initiative, the IU Office of Online Education is also transitioning, moving from a cash funding model to the base funding model required to sustain the operations of the organization.
The purpose of this document is to provide a brief retrospective of the funding, expenditures, and activities of IU’s Office of Online Education in support of IU Online over the past three years, to outline planned activities for the future and to articulate a sustainable funding model to support future work, as well as to provide rationale and detailed explanation of IU’s plans for moving forward in the current context of online education, given the unique and complex organization that is Indiana University.
As explained on the website of the Executive Vice President for University Academic Affairs:
Indiana University is a single university and not a system; it is led by a single Board of Trustees and President, and all degrees are awarded in the name of the university as a whole. Yet, each of IU’s campuses is geographically separate, individually accredited, and has historically operated relatively independently, especially as an academic unit. (The core and system schools on the IU Bloomington and IUPUI campuses operate with greater, though varied, coordination.) …
the rise of information technologies … are changing the ways we teach, learn, and research; and [are creating] a “new normal” higher education environment of intense competition, fiscal constraint, and assessment. These forces together are making the actions of one campus more impactful on the others, and creating opportunities for collaboration that did not exist or were previously largely unrecognized. In this environment, a central mission of University Academic Affairs must be to maintain the academic excellence of individual campuses, support their tailoring of program to mission and location, and promote their strong sense of a community of teachers and learners – while at the same time facilitating positive interrelationships and opportunities to promote IU's academic mission among and between all campuses.
https://uaa.iu.edu/academic/academic-program-councils.shtml
Further, as explained on the University Academic Affairs (UAA) webpages which provide guidance for the academic program approval process, because online degrees are not bound by regional service areas (which are the traditional organizing structure at IU for campuses and academic programs) and because the faculty representing a particular discipline on any given IU campus are necessarily in relationship with faculty in the same discipline on every other IU campus, there are natural opportunities for faculty in the same discipline from the various campuses to engage in collaborative program development, and any program that fits within the historical missions of the various campuses has the potential to be a Collaborative Academic Program (CAP).
Because of the disruptive nature of online education to the historical organizing structure of academic programming among and across the campuses of Indiana University, and with respect for shared governance and the role of faculty in the development and delivery of academic programs, the most foundational and most critical role of the Office of Online Education is to provide strategic oversight of the autonomous development and grassroots growth of online programs across all IU campuses. In Dean Schnabel’s report and the original charter, this function was named the “gatekeeper” role of the OOE.
The first principles that are the foundation of IU’s online strategy, which were outlined in Moving Forward (June 2012), and which continue to guide the strategic directions for online education at Indiana University are:
The university strategy for online education has matured since the initial announcement of IU Online, as our understandings have evolved to recognize the complex impact of this “common pool resource” on all academic programs across all IU campuses. IU is moving toward a “curricular clearinghouse” model, in which OOE vets academic program proposals and assures agreement from all campuses, and convenes academic representatives from across campuses to develop Memoranda of Agreements for collaborative online programs that fit within the mission and strategies of all participating campuses. A critical service provided by OOE is to ensure that our campuses are not directly competing with each other in online programs.
Based on conversations with CIC peers, the alternatives to the curricular clearinghouse model for multi-campus universities or multi-university systems are outlined below, none of which are viable for IU (and please note that all of these models are in flux and changing rapidly at each of the institutions mentioned below):
For more details about the academic program approval process, see information at:
In addition to the first principles for IU Online that are outlined on page 4 of this document, the principles that guide the Curricular Clearinghouse / Seamless Shared Services” model are outlined below.
The strategy employed at Indiana University to move forward with online education recognizes the following features in the current competitive environment:
OOE has conducted a benchmarking study against CIC peers to discover how different multicampus institutions and multi-institution systems finance operations to support online courses and programs. The problem with making any direct comparison is that the models from these institutions for delivering online education vary greatly (as indicated in the section above on OOE’s funding retrospective); their funding formulas also change regularly as these institutions figure out their strategic directions with this mode of instruction. That all as caveat, the document titled “CIC Members Funding Model Information” indicates that the $30 credit hour student fee to be charged by IU for funding OOE is much friendlier to academic units than the funding models of most CIC institutions to support central operations for online education.
One institution that is not captured in the document is Penn State World Campus, which takes 50% of tuition and gives 50% back to the academic unit when the academic unit uses instructional designers from World Campus, and takes 30% when the academic unit uses its own instructional designers.
IU’s curricular clearinghouse / shared student services strategy for online education is the most internally rational, externally competitive, fiscally reasonable model to move the entire institution and all its campuses and academic programs forward in a mutually beneficial manner, given the unique context that is Indiana University. Not only is this the best way, it’s the only way forward that will in the long run help rather than hurt every campus and academic unit.
The $30 /credit hour student fee that will sustain IU Online and OOE in the future is a reasonable funding model to develop the remaining infrastructure that will position us well with our external competitors (rather than competing with each other) and to grow online enrollments to the benefit of all.