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From Reopen to Reinvent. Michael B. Horn
Читать онлайн.Название From Reopen to Reinvent
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781119863502
Автор произведения Michael B. Horn
Жанр Учебная литература
Издательство John Wiley & Sons Limited
SNHU realized that it was not enough just to enroll students; it had to support them to and through graduation. That meant focusing on the emotional and social dimensions around a student's journey. SNHU's online school began assigning students a personal advisor, for example, who would stay in constant contact with students and pick up on red flags, in many cases even before students would.
This also changed how SNHU measured success at each step of the student journey. For example, SNHU would have formerly measured how it responded to student inquiries in terms of how many packages were mailed out. It would then wait for the interested students to call. But now SNHU Online's goal was to call a prospective student back in under 10 minutes.
The move to give the online division autonomy allowed it to see online learning not just as something to try and stave off an existential threat, but as a great opportunity for SNHU to serve the millions of working adults from around the world who need more education to improve their lives.
The team seized that opportunity. From serving roughly 500 online students in 2010, SNHU grew to serve roughly 17,000 students in 2012, 35,000 students by 2014, 60,000 in 2016, and over 130,000 by 2018. What's more, the success also helped the brick-and-mortar campus grow from roughly 2,500 students in 2010 to 3,913 students in 2018.11
When COVID hit, LeBlanc decided to seize the pandemic as both a threat and an opportunity. The threat to traditional brick-and-mortar campuses was clear. LeBlanc intended to use that threat as an opportunity to reinvent the collegiate brick-and-mortar experience, which in his view had been flailing for years and was increasingly out of reach and unsustainable from a financial perspective for both students and the colleges themselves.
The team at SNHU had long been convinced that there must be a way to reinvent the campus experience. The goal was still to allow students to enjoy the coming-of-age experiences that college is so good at providing, but also to leverage online, competency-based learning—in which, as explained in the Introduction, students would progress based on mastery of the material, not seat time—to create a more robust learning experience. In so doing, LeBlanc also wanted to dramatically lower the sticker price of college, a stop sign for so many who question whether college is right for them.12 COVID allowed SNHU to accelerate and inject urgency into planning that had been underway for some time.
In April 2020, SNHU announced that all of its incoming freshmen would receive a one-time “Innovation Scholarship” that would cover their full first-year tuition. In turn, the freshmen would take all their courses online while living on campus (assuming it was open during COVID) and participating in college activities.
After the first year, SNHU's plan was to relaunch its brick-and-mortar program with a $10,000 per year price tag—a 61 percent reduction from its previous rate of $31,000 per year—and offer a program that mixed in-person with online, competency-based learning. The free first year would give faculty the opportunity to develop and test the program before relaunching the brick-and-mortar campus experience. It reopened ultimately with programs offered at two price points: one at $10,000 per year with a significant component of project-based learning and a second price point of $15,000 per year that would offer more traditional in-person instruction.13
To accomplish this, LeBlanc said that they pulled people from their day jobs and assigned them to the campus transformation team. The team was led by one of their deans, who was released on an interim basis from his previous responsibilities. SNHU also took its dean of students and placed her on the team full-time—and replaced her role on an interim basis. From there, SNHU added three project managers. All the roles were full-time so that the individuals could concentrate completely on the new experience, although LeBlanc recognized that some members of the team might transition ultimately back to their old jobs or to new assignments once SNHU entered full implementation mode.
The autonomy was critical so that the individuals would have the time, space, and freedom to design the new offerings—and not be weighed down with simultaneously balancing the demands of their prior jobs, which would always present themselves as more urgent and pressing given the day-to-day needs of existing students, faculty, and staff.
The pattern is straightforward. A threat galvanizes resources, but a leader must not stay in that framing. Creating an independent team to take on the threat enables the organization to reframe it as an opportunity. That allows the organization to escape a top-down, command-and-control response and reinvent the experience.
Southern New Hampshire University:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxYZgmoeIuM
WHAT THIS COULD LOOK LIKE IN K–12 SCHOOLS
When talking to K–12 education leaders, this framework can feel overwhelming and even impossible. How could administrators possibly grant the required autonomy short of forming a wholly new school? That's what the Hawken School, a prestigious private school near Cleveland, did, for example, to pioneer mastery-based learning. It created a school called the Mastery School of Hawken. And it's what another prestigious private school, Lakeside School in Seattle, did to launch a new microschool, the Downtown School, at a significantly lower price point.
Is this strategy out of reach then for public schools?
No.
In K–12 schools, an autonomous team could take many forms. A superintendent could free a group of educators in a district from their day-to-day roles and task them with reimagining what they might offer. This group might function as a separate team within a school and pioneer either a new classroom model or a novel way of offering a particular subject or grade. The independent group could also exist as a school within a school, a microschool, or a learning pod. It could also create a new school entirely.
The charge might be to design a more compelling experience that focuses less on the time students are taught and more on helping each child develop character and habits of success, like agency and executive function skills; ensuring each child has a strong social, emotional, and health foundation with a reservoir of social capital; and rather than simply focusing on the teaching of academic knowledge and skills, making sure each child learns and masters those that are critical and allows them to build passions and develop their unique potential. The traditional hierarchy in a district could continue to focus on operating schools as we've known them, while this group focuses on implementing different innovations designed to give teachers and students more support.
This model suggests a new way for districts to engage with microschools and learning pods. Many districts have viewed these emergent schools as threats to the way they have always operated or things that will create inequity. But the threat–opportunity perspective helps us see that districts could reframe microschools and learning pods as something they themselves could operate to make sure that all children have deep and healthy social relationships. They could envision them as part of a mosaic of offerings so that they are able to provide an array of options that fit the different circumstances of all students and families. And they could see them as ways to offer personalized learning experiences for children's particular needs so that children don't fall behind in learning to read or doing math or in the exploration of coherent bodies of knowledge.
The key is to escape threat rigidity by arming a relatively independent team of educators absolved from their existing responsibilities. However it's done, the autonomy and focus is critical.
As Jeff Wetzler, cofounder of Transcend Education, a school design consultancy, said, “[The work is] time consuming. We have yet to find a way for this to work without some protected time and space. If you just try to jam it into the existing schedule, it just doesn't happen.”