7 questions for the CEO of Emeritus
Ashwin Damera is the founder and CEO of Emeritus, an online program management company.
He graciously agreed to answer my questions.
Q: What is Emeritus? How come the Emeritus name is not so well-known in the U.S.? And why should higher ed people know about Emeritus?
A: Emeritus offers online certificate courses in collaboration with leading universities. We follow a SPOC model (small, private online course) with a high-touch student experience. In the last 12 months we enrolled 9,500 students; our courses saw an 87 percent completion rate. In the next 12 months, we will triple our enrollments to 30,000 students.
Seventy-five percent of our students are non-U.S. and this is perhaps why we are less known in the U.S.
As more students learn online, there is a huge opportunity for higher education institutions to reach global audiences through a platform like Emeritus. We can provide a 360-degree solution to our partners — course creation, marketing and enrollment, tech platform and student success.
Q: What universities does Emeritus currently partner with? What courses and credentials does Emeritus offer?
A: We partner with MIT, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Wharton and the University of California, Berkeley, to offer online certificate courses in areas such as management, digital business, design thinking and entrepreneurship.
Q: How many learners have received credentials from Emeritus? Where do these learners live?
A: In the last 12 months we enrolled 9,500 students from the following regions:
- U.S.: 25 percent
- India: 14 percent
- Latin America: 16 percent
- Europe: 22 percent
- Southeast Asia: 18 percent
- Middle East/North Africa: 5 percent
Q: How does Emeritus differentiate itself from players like GetSmarter, 2U’s recently acquired nondegree program partner?
A: Emeritus is far more global in its enrollments. We will soon launch courses in Spanish and Portuguese. Also, we enroll students via both B2C and B2B channels. We have B2B sales teams based out of Singapore, India and Dubai. On the teaching front, most courses we offer have live teaching with either the university’s faculty or industry experts.
And we remain a private company without the worry of quarterly earning reports. This means we can have a long-term view on everything we do.
Q: My sense is that many higher ed people don’t like the online learning partnership model, as they dislike having the majority of revenues go to the companies (not the schools) and the long contract lock-ins. They also dislike outsourcing core competencies like instructional design. How does Emeritus answer these objections?
A: Emeritus bears all marketing costs. If you think of the revenue share as net of marketing, our partners keep nearly two-thirds. In addition, we make investments in technology and in course creation, which are up-front costs.
We don’t seek long-term contract lock-ins; we are far more reasonable on this front.
I think of ourselves as trusted collaborators. We regularly share our learnings with our partner schools. We have no issues if a school wants to do the instructional design and develop those capabilities. The online education space is still in a nascent stage. There is so much to learn. In our collaborative approach, we like to create — best practices and next practices — along with our partners.
Q: How much does a certificate from Emeritus cost? How does this compare with other options, such as a certificate with 2U?
A: Certificate costs vary from $ 1,200 to $ 3,750. These are much more expensive than MOOC courses, but then, the learning outcomes are far better.
Q: How is Emeritus funded? Is there an exit strategy for Emeritus to be purchased by a large, established OPM or publisher (such as GetSmarter was with 2U)?
A: Emeritus raised $ 8 million from Bertelsmann in 2017. We continue to make significant investments in course creation, learning technology and marketing tech. We intend to remain private. This gives us the ability to take a long-term view. Our university partners have established their reputation over many decades. By having a long-term view, we can ensure that we always think of what’s right for them and for the students.
What would you like to ask Ashwin? Did you know about Emeritus? What other OPM companies would you like me to ask these questions of? What are your thoughts about the OPM model?
Journey Mapping: The New Way to Brainstorm
Journey mapping is a technique long known to marketers at companies like IBM and Clorox but has only recently caught on in higher education circles.
Are the Professions (Disciplines?) of Educational Developer and Learning Designer Merging?
I’d like to share what I think I know about the professions of education developer, instructional designer, and learning designer. Then I’d like to ask your help in figuring out where my understanding is incomplete, or just downright wrong.
My goal is not to provide a complete description of the work of educational developers, instructional designers, or learning designers. Rather, I’m trying to make sense of where these professional (disciplines) differ, and where they overlap. I’m also trying to figure out if it makes sense to hypothesize that these higher education roles are starting to merge — and in particular starting to merge in the work of learning designers.
Understanding the profession (or is it discipline?) of an educational developer is where I need the most help. While I work in a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), I have not yet been able to attend a Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD) conference. POD is the professional association for educational developers.
The academic home for educational developers is usually (but not always) within a CTL. Educational developers collaborate with individual instructors, academic departments, and larger campus units on a range of teaching and learning activities. This work can involve working with individual faculty members in consultations around teaching or educational scholarship (consultations and consulting), or it may take the form of designing and leading workshops or other programming.
The range of activities that educational developers include in their portfolios is too large to fully enumerate. They work at every level of the institution (and cross-institutionally), on tasks ranging from course development and improvement (through design, assessment and research) to organizational development. Educational developers may work with future instructors (grad students and postdocs). They approach the work with a holistic orientation towards human development and organizational effectiveness.
Educational developers often, but now always, come to the work with either a terminal degree in the field, or from a traditional discipline based Ph.D. program. Most educational developers that I know both teach at the university level, and conduct original scholarly research on teaching and learning. Given their administrative, teaching and research roles, educational developers occupy a liminal position between faculty and staff.
This brief description of the work of an educational developer is no doubt incomplete. I would be interested in a similarly concise but more accurate description of the profession (discipline?) of educational developers.
My main question is where and how educational developers overlap and differ from instructional designers, and if the professions (disciplines?) are coming together in the profession (discipline?) of learning designers?
The work of instructional designers shares many aspects of that of educational developers, but with many key differences. Instructional designers often work in CTL’s, but they are still more likely to be found outside of the Center for Teaching and Learning.
While instructional designers may attend POD, POD is not their primary professional association. (In fact, it is not clear to me that instructional designers have a professional association — at least one that accredits and recognizes graduate training programs and credentials).
When I think of of the work of instructional designers, I mostly think about the integration of learning theory and course/program design. Instructional designers are fluent in leveraging educational technologies to align with the research on learning, and in support of the educational goals of the instructors in which they collaborate.
Instructional designers translate well-established methods and frameworks for learning, such as backwards course design and the use of learning objectives, into course design. This collaborative course design work often, but not always, is implemented in blended or online courses — and therefore is mediated by technology.
Where educational developers work almost exclusively for educational institutions (and within higher education), instructional designers can be found wherever teaching or training may occur. Until recently, it may be the case that most instructional designers worked outside of academe (is this true?), designing face-to-face and online training materials and experiences in corporate, government, and other settings.
The growth of online learning in the past 20 years has been accompanied by a commensurate growth in the number of instructional designers on our campuses. Nowadays, instructional designers are part of the normal fabric of university life. They work on residential, blended, low-residency and full online degree and non-degree programs. They can speak as authoritatively about both Bloom’s taxonomy and the ADDIE framework, as well as about the latest developments in adaptive learning platforms, classroom response system, lecture capture technologies, and learning management systems (LMS).
A trend that I’ve observed across higher education, and one that is certainly present at my institution, is for the title of instructional designer to evolve into that of a learning designer.
A learning designer seems to do everything that an instructional designer does, save for somewhat less emphasis on managing and supporting educational technology platforms. The emphasis is squarely on learning.
Technologies such as the LMS, simulations and adaptive learning platforms remain important tools — but their use is analogous to how a social scientist might use a statistical package for their research. They are only tools. (Professionals with titles such as “educational technologist” are now taking over the selection, management, support and training for learning technology platforms — although learning designers are certainly still closely involved in this work).
Where I’ve observed learning designers more closely resemble educational developers is with the professions (disciplines?) greater focus on departmental / school / and organizational development. Learning designers are increasingly working across the institution (and cross-institutionally) to advance student learning.
Learning designers are also engaged in their own teaching (as opposed to only collaborating with teaching instructors), and in creating original research. Like educational developers, they not only read the SoTL literature, they are contributing to it.
My sense is that learning designers remain more likely to work in digital environments — on blended and low-residency and online courses and programs — than are educational developers. That technology remains more at the heart of the culture of the learning design profession than it is of educational developers. But I’m not totally sure this is right.
Throughout this post I’ve written profession, followed by discipline with a question mark. The reason I’m doing this is that I’m unclear if educational developers are part of an educational development academic discipline. And I’m not sure if the field of learning design is coalescing into an academic discipline. One that offers a consistent method of advanced training and accreditation, grounded in well understood and generally recognized theoretical frameworks, and which is unified by a commonly accepted set of methodological tools and frameworks.
I know that educational developers get Ph.D.s in their fields, I’m not sure if learning designers do?
Might we see a merging of the work, profession and discipline of educational developers and learning designers?
Are we seeing the profession of instructional design forking into educational technologist on side, and the academic discipline of learning design on the other? And if so, how much does this learning design discipline overlap with that of the educational developers?
Is there a sociology of the postsecondary learning professions?
Do you consider yourself an educational developer, and instructional designers, or a learning designer? (Or all 3?).
What was your path to your academic discipline/profession?
How has your role changed at your institution during the past few years?
OPM Companies Should Think Like an Industry
This week I’m in Chicago, speaking at the Pearson Higher Education Executive Leadership Forum.
Many of you know — and some of you don’t — that Pearson is a major player in the OPM (online program management) industry. Currently, Pearson has about 45 campus partners and 250 online programs. Many of the schools that partner with Pearson to run online programs, such as ASU, Maryville and George Washington, are here at this meeting.
Unlike most representatives of universities at this meeting, my school is not a Pearson partner. While we have some small, high-quality, low-residency master’s programs in health care delivery science and public health, we have not gone the OPM route in building these programs.
While I am an online learning evangelist, I am also an OPM industry critic.
To Pearson’s credit, it is my critique of the OPM industry that largely motivated the company to have me come speak at their online learning event.
It is not that I’m against the idea of a partnership model. My openness to the idea of school/company partnerships in developing and running online programs already sets me apart from many of my colleagues in the online learning space.
It is more that I’m concerned about the direction of the OPM industry as a whole.
Today, the online programs management industry is fragmented and chaotic. There are few agreed-upon standards of transparency in contracts. We have no independent sources that I know of, aggregating data on both student and institutional outcomes from across all school/company online partnerships.
It is not clear, at least to me, how the different OPM providers in the sector are differentiated from another.
Every for-profit online program management company will tell you that they put the needs of the institution and the learner first. That they are willing to be flexible and nimble. That they know how to build quality programs and market to prospective students better than their competitors. And that their partner schools are not only happy with the partnership, but happier than the average school/OPM provider partnership.
This can’t all be true. Every OPM can’t be above average.
Like universities, the various OPM providers (and there are something like 25) must have strengths and weaknesses.
So I’m here in Chicago to advocate that the OPM players, including Pearson, begin to think about their industry as a whole — rather than only on their own business.
Leadership in the for-profit online learning space means not only building out a range of services that are both attractive to partner universities and serve the needs of students (and faculty), but also advance the OPM sector as a whole.
I think the various companies in the OPM space need to recognize that there is a growing level of distrust among many in higher education about the OPM model. Many people on campuses that I speak with are concerned about the revenue sharing, long-term contracts, and outsourcing of core capabilities (such as learning design) that characterize many school/OPM contracts.
The various companies in the OPM industry also need to recognize that the people (like me) who evangelize the development of new online programs talk to our counterparts at other schools. A bad experience with a single OPM provider can sour us on the model for the entire industry. The presence of bad actors in the OPM space, or at least bad fits between schools and companies, is not a competitive advantage for the other OPM providers.
In short, I think that individual OPM companies need to make the transition to thinking in terms of an industry. They need to focus on growing the potential partnership pie as much as competing with other companies. They need to move toward a middle ground in being willing to share data and methods that today they hold as proprietary.
This is the message that I’m delivering at the Pearson event, and again, to Pearson’s credit, they still invited me to their meeting. I’m hoping to participate in other OPM events and to spend time with other OPM providers.
The work that I’m hoping to do with the OPM industry is motivated by my desire to see more high quality low-residency and online programs. As I mentioned, I’m not against the model of school/company partnerships. In many cases, it makes good sense for a school to work with a for-profit partner. Many institutions simply don’t have the resources, expertise or experience to launch a new online program. Some of the core competencies that the OPM providers have, such in figuring out where unmet student demand exists and in marketing, are not ones that many schools have. (At least for programs aimed at working adults).
We are at the point where the OPM industry needs to evolve. The industry as a whole needs to more closely mirror the values and norms of openness and transparency that characterize the culture of higher education.
As an industry, the OPM companies need to do what they can (through sharing of institutional and learner outcomes) to help schools make more informed choices about partnering (or not) with a company.
I’ll be looking to see which OPM player steps up as a leader in the OPM industry.
Mary Meeker’s Digital Learning Slides
Spending some time with the 2018 edition of Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends presentation should lead higher ed people to draw the following conclusions:
- Mary Meeker is not hanging out with instructional designers.
- Higher education is maybe less on Meeker’s mind than it is on ours.
- Money people want to talk more about lifelong learning than they want to talk about the future of higher education.
On conclusion No. 1, all that needs to be said is that Meeker gleefully violates all the guidelines that presenters are given for constructing their slides. As presenters, we are told that PowerPoint is a poor medium for information transmission. That dense materials with many data points do not lend themselves well to PowerPoint, or at least to presentations where PowerPoint is used. We are told that slides should drive emotional connections with a few big points or ideas that the audience will remember.
Well, maybe all that advice is wrong. Meeker creates perhaps the most important PowerPoint presentation of each year.
For conclusion No. 2, I can’t help but to feel a bit — well — left out. How is that we can spend all of our energy talking about higher education, only to have Mary Meeker not talk about higher education at all?
Why is it that higher education is more interested in Mary Meeker than she is in us?
Perhaps the answer comes down to the fact that Meeker is a venture capitalist. Higher education remains largely a nonprofit business. The ed-tech sector may be too small to catch Meeker’s attention.
Still, I’d argue that in not considering the role of the internet and mobile in how postsecondary education is changing that Meeker is missing one of the big technology stories of our time.
For conclusion No. 3, that Meeker is interested in lifelong learning, I think the best thing to do is to share all the slides on this topic.
Slide 232 introduces the topic:
Here, Meeker’s big takeaway is that lifelong learning is critical for employers, and that the tools to continually retrain workers are improving.
Slide 233 is all about Coursera:
Meeker highlights the growth in the Coursera installed learner base — which is now up to a truly impressive 33 million. The top courses for 2017 are also listed.
Here I wish that Meeker had included data from edX. Combining the edX numbers of 15 million learners with Coursera’s would have been impressive. I also think that Meeker could have integrated the open online learning story with the growth of online learning for degree programs. These two stories are intermingled in a way that is not very well understood.
In slide 234 Meeker shares some lifelong learning numbers from YouTube:
I had no idea that YouTube got a billion daily views for learning videos. This slide also shows the impressive growth of platforms such as Khan Academy and TED-Ed between 2013 and 2018.
The story here, I think, is impact. Online video seems to be where the action is when it comes to just-in-time learning. What is interesting to me is that YouTube and other video platforms are not all that important, from an instructional standpoint, for colleges and universities. Online and mobile instructional video lives in a largely separate and distinct world from higher ed instruction. Why is that?
Slide 235 highlights what AT&T is doing for work-force training:
Meeker thinks that AT&T is the model for how companies should invest in a future-ready work force. The $ 1 billion that AT&T has allocated for employee training is truly impressive.
This slide makes me wonder if a wide enough array of colleges and universities are doing enough to partner with companies. I’d argue that we know how to do education. That Coursera and Udacity provide a commoditized platform, and that higher education knows about authentic learning.
Some schools, such as Arizona State University, are doing a great job in partnering with companies for lifetime employee education. At other schools, this work with companies happens mostly in business schools, and in executive education divisions.
It seems as if the opportunity for partnerships between higher ed and companies is much bigger than most of us realize.
Slide 236 presents data on how freelancers are upgrading their skills.
It is an interesting question of how universities can become more relevant to gig workers. How many of our graduates will be freelancers? And what lifelong education opportunities are we offering to them?
Here is the full deck of Meeker’s Internet Trends 2018.
Higher Education’s Holistic Value: The Triple Helix
Triple helix systems are exemplified by global education hubs. Education hubs are collaborations between local and international higher education providers working in partnership to make their region more attractive and economically powerful for investment, student recruitment, and training.
Beyond the Brand: The Marketing Department of the Future
Higher education marketing departments should be able to bring data, insight, and an intimate understanding of the consumer to enable their institutions to identify future opportunities and forge new directions.
Guest Post: A Season of Strikes
As non-tenure-track faculty fight for better pay, students and teachers rediscover the value of liberal education in that very struggle.
Where do digital learning innovation evangelists gather?
There is a new sort of gig in higher ed: the digital learning innovation evangelist.
Who are these people? What do they do? Are their jobs really different from leadership roles that have come before? What is their professional home? What is their professional association? And where do they gather?
These are all good questions.
One place where I’ll be trying to get some answers is this summer’s SOLA+R: Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable.
This University Professional and Continuing Education Association event brings together folks who are thinking about digital and online learning through an institutional lens.
I’ve gotten involved in UPCEA through my work as an (unpaid) fellow for the association’s National Council for Online Education.
Where does this convening fit in with other meetings for digital/online learning evangelists? I’d classify SOLA+R as a convening that is similar to HAIL Storm (Harvesting Academic Innovation for Learners), in that the event brings together a relatively small number of digital learning innovators to share knowledge and resources and ideas.
Unlike HAIL, which is purely a grassroots effort, SOLA+R is under a larger professional organization umbrella — UPCEA.
The reason that I’m excited about participating in SOLA+R is that I’m looking for a community of practice that recognizes online learning as a powerful lever for organizational change.
Over the past few years many colleges and universities have created these sorts of roles. They go by different names. Sometimes the position is a dean, provost or a director for digital learning innovation.
Other times the role of institutional digital learning evangelist falls to leaders in online and continuing education programs. Sometimes, the push for digital learning innovation comes from units such as academic computing or centers for teaching and learning (CTLs).
While those serving in digital learning innovation roles have different titles and different job responsibilities, they do have some things in common. Mostly, this is a community that is impatient with incremental improvements in postsecondary learning, issues of access, or business models.
This is a community that looks at digital and online learning as a means, rather than as ends. The ultimate goal is not to create more online programs or digitally enhanced blended courses — although those are good — but rather to drive big changes in the way universities fulfill their mission within a rapidly changing knowledge economy.
These big changes may be about bringing quality higher education to scale, shifting the economics of both learning and credentialing from scarcity to abundance.
Or these big changes may mean leveraging the methods of online learning, such backwards course design and partnerships with learning designers, to dramatically improve learning at traditional residential institutions.
Others who work as digital learning evangelists look at digital and online education as an opportunity to improve the resilience and long-term economic viability of the institutions in which they work.
What all the folks working in the digital learning innovation evangelist role need are communities of practice, colleagues and support/resources to do their jobs (our jobs) more effectively.
The June SOLA+R convening will be an important nexus for discussions at the intersection of digital/online learning and organizational change. UPCEA’s National Council for Online Education is dedicated to convening and supporting this emerging community of practice.
One of the advantages that I’ve found in my work with UPCEA is the associations focus on federal and state policy. It is difficult for those of us outside of the Beltway to understand how policy is made that impacts our world of digital and online learning — much less how to have any impact on the process. I expect that the role of government and online learning will be a big focus at the SOLA+R D.C. gathering.
From what I understand, there is still some space available at the June 18-20 SOLA+R convening in Washington. (Although space will not remain open for long, as this is an intimate and intense gathering).
It will be interesting to see if other professional organizations in our space carve out smaller and more focused convenings/organizations to bring together digital learning innovation evangelists.
Can anyone share what is going on with OLC, Educause, WCET or others in this space?
If you, like me, are searching for your people at the intersection of digital/online learning and organizational change then I hope to see you at SOLA+R this summer in D.C.