Sustaining a Thriving Online Program: A Roadmap for Smaller Institutions

Hi, everyone. So thank you so much for coming to this presentation on sustaining a thriving online program, a roadmap for smaller institutions. So just a survey of hands here, how many people are from small colleges, at least how you would define it. Almost everyone. Okay. So we're all in the same boat.

Alright. I wanted to start a joke, but it was it was thrown off a little bit, but, one of the questions you often get asked to these conferences is where are you from. Right? So Grant, Pennsylvania is where I'm from. What's the logical next question? Do you watch the office? Seems like there's a lot of office fans here, right? Happy to humor you about that after the show. There's a lot of little says around the city to the office.

So it's it's pretty memorable. So anyway, lackawanna College is my institution. We're located in Grand Pennsylvania, we have an FTE of about two thousand. So if you look at Carnegie's measures, five thousand is the cut off for small colleges, so we're on the lower end of that. We are workforce driven school.

We provide a lot of career oriented degrees We're very innovative. We're, providing really family sustaining wage careers. We have a lot of non traditional students. We have a pretty sizable online population, which I'll talk about. But, just keep that in mind.

But I wanna share some stats about our college. You might not have heard about us, but check this out. We are ranked as the fastest growing private nonprofit college in the nation by the Chronicles in from twenty two thousand nine to two thousand nineteen. And we're on fast company's list of the world's most innovative companies for its level up program. So a little bit about level up, this is program, which allows high school students to earn an associate degree before they graduate high school.

So then they can continue their bachelor's degree, either at our institution, or another school. And this is a huge student loan, like it's it's preventing that burden on them. Right? So let's ask the question, how is a school with such low endowments? We have hardly any we have, you know, our, our, we don't get a lot of state and local funding. We're a private nonprofit we are only an undergraduate degree. How are we able to achieve this type of growth? Right? Let's look at our online stats.

Well, this is a little bit about me. So in my role, I oversee fourteen fully online associate and bachelor's degrees programs. I oversee one hundred online courses in sub term one and sub term two of every semester, me and my team, and I serve as the institutional LMS admin. And in case some of you were at the panel yesterday, I also serve a facilitator for this Canvas certified educator and Canvas certified technical admin programs. So I'm happy to talk to anyone who's interested in that.

But just, just think about that for a second, a school of two thousand FTE with those stats pretty interesting, right? So that's about six to seven hundred students online. Let's take a deeper dive into what I mean by a road map, though. So a lot of you I'm guessing come from school which is which are trying to grow your online populations. And that could either be as a stand alone thing, or it could be to support your on ground populations that might be struggling a little it. But while I don't have a checklist for you of specific things to focus on, what I can offer is this idea of a roadmap.

These are themes that if you instill in culture of your program, you're gonna set the foundation for a lot of scalable growth. So that's what I want to say. Lackawanna College, we are by no means, like many of the under other institutions here. We don't have a huge instructional design team. We don't even have an instructional designer, but we are making progress on that.

This presentation is really to show what small colleges can achieve. So take a look at our online growth here. So you look at the pre pandemic time period, we were hovering around one thousand unique course enrollments. So that means like one student might be taking three online classes, so that counts as three. After the pandemic, we were around seventeen hundred.

So that's pretty substantial in a matter of two years or so. Same thing for online course students. Now this might be students who are distance learning from another city, or it might be local students who are taking fully online courses. Right? So it's interesting how you can segment that out depending on how you look at it. But look at that.

It's around seven hundred before the pandemic, and now it's around eleven hundred. So huge growth there. So the question is, why is that? Why is it that we are able to achieve that? And what's our secret sauce there? So let me ask you a question first before we kind of dive into the why behind that is online learning a cash cow? And so what I mean by cash cow? That means the idea that you can have an endeavor that requires very little over that you just kind of brings in revenue without much like work. Right? On a lot of smaller colleges in the mid two thousands to early twenty tens. I would argue were doing that.

They were just basically telling a faculty member, hey, take your course, put it online, it'll bring in revenue. It'll open up a new market, but that's getting riskier because students are getting more and more prudent with which schools they you online learning at, especially after the pandemic. But it's interesting though when you think about early COVID, right? That was a conversation that was coming up. A lot of students attending these expensive schools were asking the question. Like, why am I paying the same thing for an online education when I can, you know, not getting that on ground experience.

So there's that still that assumption that online should be cheaper. It's interesting, right? And at the same time, we're seeing more and more call are closing in the US. This is a reality that we can't ignore. And what's interesting is a lot of these schools are ones that have higher endowments, they may be like middle of the road schools, but I think it's a unique opportunity for small schools, and we're going to talk about that. So as I was preparing this presentation, what I what I did was I really tried to go to the literature and say, what are the fundamental aspects of a quality program.

Regardless of size, big schools, small school, when you think about online learning, what are the three pillars? First is academic You can't beat around the bush about that. You gotta have great courses that provide value to the students. You gotta have workforce skills, you know, it's gotta have meaning to the students. It's gotta be worth their investment. Second is funding.

Can't beat around the bush on that. If you wanna attract non traditional students, you wanna, you know, retain students, you need funding for the appropriate tech technology, you need, you need all that all those things. And then finally, expertise. You need faculty who are SMEs. You also need expertise among instructional design skills, you need good leadership.

But the question is, how do small colleges achieve these metrics? And what I think a lot of people don't think about is that a lot of small colleges are located in cities where you may not have this type of talent. So how do you exactly achieve growth in an online program? Right? Well, this is what I think lackawanna's secret process. We have we came up with the small college pillars of online success. This is kind of at least my take on why we're successful. These are hidden strengths that can be cultivated among smaller programs.

So let's go through these individually. One is they are highly capable of being adaptable to change. Now, this is not saying all small colleges, colleges are, but with the right leadership and the right culture, they're absolutely adaptable to change. And what do I mean by that? Well, I can tell you, I mean, I facilitate the CCE CCTA. I've seen the types of workflows that are present in some of these bigger organizations.

They have huge charts of specific tasks each person has to do. They have very elaborate subaccount structures. It's very, well organized and that's amazing for them. But it also adds added bureaucracy to get changes done. They're less able to improve on fly.

So again, huge area to focus on. That's a strength that we have. Right? Second is a culture of trust. We know that attracting staff faculty to some of these smaller schools where the compensations are lower, where, you know, you you you can't attract the same type of talent. But what we do have is these last two elements.

People often think that, you know, you have more opportunities at a bigger school, not necessarily the case. If you create a culture of trust, you might be able to have employees who may not have skills yet that you're looking for, but you can mentor them over time. And then you kind of bridge that problem of attrition as well. So we actually have people on team who've been with the college for years and years, but because they actually want to be there, they feel value there. So It all starts with strong senior leadership.

It really does. So what this essentially highlights is the small college paradigm box. You have all these great strengths. Right? You have engaging courses. And and one thing I wanna say about that is a lot of us if you look at our on ground course experience, The thing we market is that we are so student centered.

We say that the instructor and student engagement is what makes our school better than the bigger schools. Right? So how do we capitalize on that in the online space? That's a competitive advantage that we can say is unique to our institutions. And and a lot of people think, okay, that requires more technology, not necessarily. So, but what are the challenges that we've already touched on? Budget, instructional design investment. That's it all takes money and ed tech skills.

Do we have the right expertise? So that's the paradox, right? I can give you a few tips before we kinda dive into more of the roadmap aspects, but one is mission fit. Don't make them stake of segmenting out your online programs as separate from your small college, feel. A lot of times what people think is Okay. I'm entering a market that has so many big players in it that I have to market my school as being something it's not. I have to say that it's better you know, in some sort of way.

I say that what's worked for us, we say, look, you're gonna get the same lack of wanna experience online as on ground. You're gonna have instructors who message you one on one. We we say, you know what? You wanna meet with our student support experience coordinator. You can make a one on one appointment anytime same day. And the the the one of the ways that we are able to promise that is because we do have a large non traditional student populations.

So even though we have a larger size and a smaller staffing capacity, we know the certain number will wanna reach out for help, but we can still promise that, right, in our marketing and whatnot. So leadership, a leadership committed to multi year plan in online education. So Make sure that your leadership understands your goals. Sometimes leadership can get in the spot of thinking, okay, this is this is our capacity right now, but we don't know where we want to be. So I would encourage you to set a clear objective in mind, make it something ambitious say, you wanna grow your online population by x amount, or you wanna improve your quality by x amount.

When you make the case to leadership, you can actually get more of their buy in. And third, focus on competitive advantages. A big mistake I see is small colleges going the route of OPMs, This is my opinion. I think that that takes away from one of your best competitive advantages, which is the the fact that it's so specific to the instructor the student. Like you can say, this is something a faculty member created with their own connection to the mission of the school, and OPMs are great.

Don't get me wrong. But they may not be the best fit for our sort of institutions. And always connect it back to the why. So when you're saying you want to grow online, have a clear reason for just saying you wanna grow enrollment might not be the right why for you. For us, it was because we wanted to serve a larger demographic with our mission.

So our mission is to improve the lives of those in our community, whether that's family sustaining wages, or, you know, just just a general education aspect of things, but focus on the why. So where do we go from here? We have the tips. What's this what's like the first, like, component that we can think about? So this is this is really breaking down that into domains of focus. In my opinion, if you can master each of these domains, you'll have a quality online program. First is account management.

This is the idea that you have a well structured canvas account that the right people have access to each subaccount, division chairs, program directors. The second is instructional design, that your capacity, the courses are well structured. They have a consistent model. You might not be able to compete with some of the great stuff that, you know, like city labs is putting out there with some of these bigger schools, but you can provide a clean, consistent user experience, and that's something to be proud of. Third is end user training.

This is obviously training staff and and students, having a long term strategic plan that is based in innovation, student support considerations, and faculty and staff development. So this is a way to chunk out this almost insurmountable challenge of how do I grow my online program? Focus on each of these. So I can't focus on all of these today, so I'll focus on a few. One is faculty training. So this is something that every institution does, but we sometimes have to find unique ways to bridge this because we know that sometimes our faculty can be so busy.

They're wearing multiple hats, especially a teaching into They're teaching loads are huge, so they don't often have the time. Right? Well, let me give you a great example here. So this is the type of training that, in structure provides by default. Right? They provide that growing with Canvas faculty training course. And then for students, they provide the student experience video, which is like a twenty minute video, And that's, that's excellent.

That's a good base. They have the Canvas community. They have the help guides all of that. But let's ask the question. What does it mean to train a user? Especially at a small college.

I'll give you a great example. When we implemented Canvas in twenty nineteen, We had one of their on-site trainers come to campus, and just give this amazing presentation. She went through all the notifications, the the, settings for everything how to make modules, point values, and all that. But I could see our faculty member's eyes, like start to glaze over because it was so overwhelming to them. And why is that? I don't think it's because they're not enthusiastic or they want to embrace what we're doing.

It's just that this is probably one their first introductions to educational technology. So it's it's like bridging it's like trying to train someone on something that they don't see the value in yet. Right? So let me ask this question. What assumptions do educational technology companies make about our students and faculty? A lot of times, they assume that they know that technology is the way to educate students for the future, that, that all that as long as they know how to use the platform, they'll be able to bridge that next next, put this over here. That next step, right? So what did we do in response to that? So really, what we did is we tried to instead of, say, training for a tool We tried to train for a culture.

We're building a culture. Canvas is the ecosystem where we are going to scale the next set of growth in our online programs. So I'll say gain insight into your faculty. What are their apprehensions and vulnerabilities? Why is it that they are about these platforms. And what we did, like me and a couple of others, because we had these coffee chats with faculty.

We we we honestly went into it just saying like, Hey, do you wanna touch base? Do you wanna just like talk about how the semester's going. And then we kinda like dropped a few things. Like, hey, have you tried this new aspect of canvas? Like, it can help you to bridge this challenge. So this is going to kind of tie into a theme in this whole presentation about the importance of relationships to get buy in and grow at institutions. You have to have like rapport with staff and faculty and make that your selling point in your growth.

So I'll give you an example of this. So the purpose of LMS tools wasn't universally understood. For example, why is it important to have text on each page? Why do I need an assignment description? This is great example of like in the in person class, right? You would have instructors explain how to do an assignment, and then put a, assignment that's due on Sunday and not put any description for the assignment. Their their rationale is, Hey, I talked about it in class. They got a handout.

Why do I have to write the assignment description again? But we all know here, hopefully, that the reason you put the description is so that students have that consistent experience, right? So things like that. You can frame it a pedagogical exercise. So what did we do at lackawanna? We've we kept it simple. We focused on relationships. So we created what's called an in house training and and what is that? It sounds pretty ambitious, but it's really not.

What we did is we created our own Google Doc basically of different simple procedures that we want them to master, basics, like how do you copy a course? How do you, make a quiz? How do you make an assignment? We didn't get technical it. We knew that they'd get confused if you say different types of assignments, different grading schemes, and all that. We trained for a default, and if someone had a question about that, then we could educate them on the specifics. And each of these are bite sized. They're only two minutes long.

So, keep it simple. That's, that's a common theme in this presentation. Again, keep it simple. Take the material that EdTech these are giving, make it simple, because then you'll you're more likely to get them in the platform, then they'll start playing around, and then they'll reach out with additional questions. So that's one strategy.

The second is in house canvas guides. So this sounds again very ambitious, but it's really not. You focus on the specific steps, like, for example, copying an online course. We have five steps here of how to copy an online course and then, like, ten more for how to import course content. They can go to Canvas guides and read a whole article on it, which will give them make them an expert.

But this a way to bridge that gap. There's no excuse for someone not to read this and understand it. Right? So that's one strategy you can use. So so ask yourself this question as you're listening to this, what what are the untapped conversation possibilities at your institution? So for example, we have what's called CTL round tables. So what we do is instead of making it like a lunch and learn where you put a topic up and say, you know, I want to talk about rubrics today.

We set it up as just a conversation, just a touch base. Sometimes the conversation starts like how's your semester going, and someone will rant about grading or something or just vent. You know what I mean? And then it can kind of morph into something more than that. And it all goes back to that value of relation ships at small colleges. And same thing with student success.

Maybe you can bring some of those staff members into the conversation, so you can bridge that academic affairs and student success divide. Right? That's what the, that's what the real goal should be in all of this. And then finally, account management. This is an area that small colleges tend to really have a tough time with. And I, again, make it simple, but significant.

Right? It's Don Draper from Madman. He always said that. What so what's the ideal scenario when it comes to to account management? Do you have a dedicated account manager, like an LMS admin that they have a robust user management features? You have proactive account monitoring, troubleshooting streamlined processes for onboarding access provisioning. That last step we we probably need to do, but we really can't do a lot of these other functions, you know, in the most effective way. Because again, I've seen some of these big organizational charts of these big schools.

They have subaccount roles that are defined for specific program directors and center division directors. They have like ten different subaccount roles. So again, what I would recommend is, I went through the CCTA program. I found it to be extremely beneficial for me because you essentially create a account structure map for your institution. And that can be a great starting point to start conversations with people on your campus.

So, definitely check that out if you're looking for any professional development it. So look at this. This is our account structure map. It's kind of like a bubble chart, right? So what we did is we have our centers up at the top. So we have four satellite campuses, one in, Lake Region, Hazelton, three others.

And then under each subaccount, we have three other subaccounts, online, hybrid, and on ground. Those are the same three subaccounts that are under each sent here. So we have the same academic divisions under each. And the interesting part is we don't even have some courses that run under some of these For example, in some of our centers, we may not offer certain programs, for example, that we still create a subaccount for that, even if it has zero course because we appreciate just how simple that is. We can predict what subaccounts are under which area, and this provides a ton of nodes.

So if someone wants access to a specific aspect, of things, we just add them in as a subaccount administrator right there. So that's that's something I definitely emphasize. Now, course management strategy. Oh, the other thing I wanna Instead of getting fancy with subaccount, roles and all that, like creating like five roles, we just have one or two subaccount roles. So for program directors, center directors, whether it's like, other types of roles, I'm trying to think what maybe like a student support role, for example, we create a default set of permissions that work for us that we're comfortable with that we feel is not gonna jeopardize student privacy or anything like that, and we just make that the default for anyone who wants access.

So this way, we just have one role to worry we bring that to our committees if people have any questions about that, and that's it. So course management strategy. Now, if you kind of really dive to Canvas' guides and all that, you'll see that there's many different ways that you can manage courses. You can blueprint them, like you can make a master course. You can blueprint that, then copy it over.

You can have templates. Now templates here, I'm referring to Canvas' feature where it'll automatically create a template in a new subaccount that you create, cross listing, common, it can get overwhelming. A mistake a lot of programs make is they try to say, okay, how can I use this feature at my school? How do I use each of these? My answer to that, you don't really have to use all of these. Pick one or two that work really well for you for us. We use blueprinting for our semester lead template that we map in, I should say shell because there's another template written here.

But cross listing, we rarely use as a smaller school because we only have two courses that have two sections by the same instructor. And that's by request only. So and comments, you know, we we have some supervision of that, but we that as part of our strategy or anything. But but try to figure out what works for you. Don't be afraid to say I'm not gonna use that, you know.

So So again, a course role strategy, account role strategy. You can break that down again. So course role strategies where you have different roles within a course under people. So some, some schools will put like a tutor role, for instance, or like a peer, you know, some, some kind of, a grad assistant type of supervisor type of thing, or there's a lot of different uses for that. But unless you really feel like that's gonna be used on mass scale.

Why even put that as part of your account plan? Like keep it simple. And that way you still over time when you wanna grow, you can scale that if you want, but you're not making a mess of things when you do wanna broach that. Right? So we use just purely an account strategy role. We have one to two sub accounts, And that's that. It works great for us.

Simple. And what I want to say is when you make something simple, then you set aside more time for yourself to focus on like strategic growth stuff and collaborating on things that actually matter to you. So now let's get to the topic of instructional design. So I was looking for some jokes on instructional design. I got got this tweet, right? Someone said, usually the punch line is what's an instructional design Right? And, you know, I think that's changed over the years, but this is from twenty fourteen, and that's really kind of holding true even today.

Right? So, especially at smaller colleges, I think there is some time bit of confusion about what the value would be for an instructional designer because budgets are tight and people often confuse it to think, okay, it's about the look and feel, like, who really cares about that. Right? But this can have a huge retention benefit if you put your investment there. So again, we a small colleges, I think this is how I see it. Maybe some of you resonate, but, you know, you attend some of these sessions and there's these amazing solutions that are pitched, but they often feel out of reach for us because of our budgets and all that. So this is what the ideal approach would be if we had unlimited fun or at least a sizable fund, dedicated instructional design with specialized expertise, so you know, learning management system.

We have that collaboration between instructional designers. So more than one, first of all, we have well compensated SMEs. We have the faculty. Ongoing assessment, you know, the whole Adi model and all that. I think in practice, you really can't even institute Adi at a smaller school because of how fast things move and how many people have, but that's the ideal.

And look at this diagram here. You have multiple roles within the online learning or e learning team. You have an you have an editor a content writer, project manager, content specialist multimedia designer. These are all important. But again, it's easy to get defeated and say like how are we gonna scale or improve when we don't have any of these things.

Right? So let's just look at some course design timelines that I found online. These are all public available of other larger institutions. Look at look at some of these stats. I mean, three to four months, that's on the lower end, but then you got up to eighteen months, I saw at Duke. I don't know if they're at this conference, but maybe we can talk to them about that.

But to me, this seems very robust. They have it right. Right? But how do we get there? Right? So we went through the challenges. What are the challenges? Lack of dedicated staff resources, specialized tools. Now let's look at our process.

This so again, I'm not saying this is ideal. This is where we started, and this is we improved. So three years ago, or two years ago, we were at two months for a course build and one month for a course update. And why is that? The reason for that is because we were letting the faculty member just update the course by themselves when we had to change to the textbook version or when we felt that there was a revision needed for the assignment. We could have gotten defeated at that point and said, this is not a quality course.

How are we going to, to, to scale this or make it great? But we, we, we set our goal the horizon, we knew in five, six, seven, eight years we would be where we want it to be. So we set an incremental goal. We set in a year or two. Let's be here. So now we're at a place where we're on a four month course build timeline and a two month course update.

And we were able to slightly increase the compensation for our, our, subject matter experts, the ones who update the course. So again, we can get defeated here and say, wow, we're nothing like these schools. That's not take that approach. Let's say where are we gonna be in four years and how can we be a little bit better next year? That's the approach that we take. So these are the solutions that we use that work well with that update timeline.

So we we actually try to bring faculty into the process. What we say is how can we train you on some instructional design skills? How can we help you to understand why this is an important aspect? We try pitch it as think of it as if you're standing in front of the classroom in a real live classroom. Would you just put up an assignment and say, there's your assignment No. You'd lead into it. You'd say, to, you know, last week, we talked about this topic.

Today, we're gonna talk about, you know, topic a, And this is the assignment that corresponds to that. Keep in mind, there's a few considerations you should use. Is that? There's that writing component, that elaboration right? It's continuous experience. We really try to educate them on why that's so important. And we use a course development timeline that has predefined templates and guidelines.

So if you look up instructional design best practices, what they're gonna what you're gonna see is you need a you need like a word document that has like a template where be SME writes in what goes in in each, module. And maybe that works well for your institution. We found that that gives faculty the perception that it's more work that they're having to do like a lot of back and forth, which is understandable, obviously, for a real proper instructional design process, but it works reasonably if you give faculty access to Canvas, let them update it themselves and do a final review via the e learning team to just make it clear, spruce up the grammar a little bit if needed, spruce up the formatting, and you're good to go. So This also goes back to that culture of trust, right? A lot of bigger institutions. Their ID teams will not trust their faculty to go go about designing course That's our competitive advantage.

Our faculty feel more connected to us because we we're putting that trust in them, right? So that leads into my final topic here, let's make sure I'm on time here, is maximize faculty investment in the program success. Big theme I've noticed in the online learning space across our industry is putting the emphasis on the staff of the e learning program, like, almost like they're the ones who are trained to grow online, like they're the experts at what works online, and faculty are just kind of like the experts on the subject matter. We try to make faculty feel like they are now the online pros and faculty for online growth. Right? So tap into their resourcefulness. Great example.

Sometimes an adjunct faculty member will teach with one of our master courses and comment about how one of the assignments didn't really work too well, or like students just weren't prepared. It would be very easy for us to just kind of dismiss that and say, okay, we'll kind of figure out our own process. We actually welcome that feedback, and we incorporate that adjunct faculty member into our meetings I mean, we can't compensate for them, but some sometimes they will want to be part of the process just because many of them are teaching because they want to teach and interact with students. So it's that implicit trust that we place in our faculty that I think they sense that is really helping us to make our team feel bigger than it really is. So that's a big tip I can give.

And the second, is package job duties when you're posting new positions. A lot of times, you know, you'll see, okay, I need to grow my e learning program now. So don't focus on industry roles, like just saying, okay, in instructional design or elearning coordinator. Think tactically about how that person is going to help your program. So shift from hiring for the position to hiring for the person.

Think about what sort of specific competencies do you want that person to do? So, for example, when we were looking at course improvements for us, we wanted someone who was a really strong writer That was a very important thing for us because we were noticing that some of our faculty in, in nonhumanities, courses perhaps could could could spruce up their writing a little bit. So that was something we kind of posted. We, we wanted someone with these skills. So we created a new type of position. I think it was like instructional, learning technologist or something like that.

It fit our needs. Right? So, you know, tap into people who have the right kind of disposition. Like, they want to learn, they want to grow because we've now noticed, we have two staff members in e learning who started out maybe beginner, right? But now that they've felt like we're investing in them, they're really leaders in our team, which is amazing to see. So it starts with the culture, right? I mean, I know there's a technology conference, but really this is the central part of it. So, so keep it I mean, that's my final thought.

Two themes that you can take back to your institutions. Keep it simple and value relation ships. So, that's that's my presentation for you. So now I thought we could use this time. We have some time here.

Any questions, Okay. Yep. Yep. Alright. Well, thank you so much for coming everyone.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Question. Yep.

Ask him a question. Sure. Thank you. Any other questions? Yep. Question on, when you're looking at the timelines for course design and building out a course.

Yeah. Is is a longer time better or worse? So I think that the longer time you're right. From a scaling perspective, it's not ideal. Right? But I think from a quality standpoint, it suggests that there's more back and forth dialogue going going on. So the faculty member is pitching ideas.

It's being rebutted, you know, so want. So So on on that table where you have a Duke university, would you say, Duke is a gold standard? Or I haven't spoken to them. I this is all public information. So I'd have to learn more about their process, but that's an assumption I'm making. So, yeah, it's an assumption.

So, yep. That space. It's pretty building. Oh. Oh, the building itself? Oh, we're actually pretty tight on offices, actually, to be honest.

That used to be a YMCA one point, it used to be a Scran High School at one point. So we've kind of taken over that building. It's a we're actually a very old school, actually in Scran. We actually were one of the first schools in the region. We trained the coal miners in the region to, to get out of the coal mines and into jobs that actually were taking care of themselves a little bit.

So, we have a real strong footprint in the region. We're small, but we do great things for the region. So we so, yeah, as far as what we do with the building, I mean, we have, we have staff offices there. We have classrooms there. Yeah.

She's still offering, court like him. Oh, yeah. Most of our students are on ground. Yeah. It'll be on time Okay.

Okay. Yeah. Of course. So I have a question about compensating SME? Yes. I know you may not feel comfortable sharing, like, the the dollar value but do you say, like, you compensate them as if they're teaching a course? One load of course, because we have this struggle.

We're trying to find out -- Yeah. -- because of budget, you know, like, limitations, how much is good to keep them motivated. Right. If you can share any, like, you know That's a very good question. That's what I've been asking at this conference as well.

We do pay less than a, less than teaching a course. Yeah. But this is something that we're getting feedback from our updaters that it doesn't necessarily match the amount of effort that goes into it. So we're working through that. We're working through that as I'm sure many of you are, you know.

So, yep. Oh, back where you raising your hand? Yeah. What's your secret to your program for the marketing? We have a, we have a strong marketing program. We I can talk to you more about that you know, after if you want, but really it comes down to affordable tuitions, workforce oriented degrees and really getting into the high schools. We want our local students to stay local.

That's that's a big thing. So and So a lot, I'll I'll just comment one more thing. Most of our online students are local to our region. That's that's the reality. So, yeah.

Asynchronous? Or are they, Victor? Did they, you know, Zoom? Yeah. They're all asynchronous. Yep. Yep. And that's something we really kind of pitch as an advantage of our program.

So back. We have a three week online instructor onboarding course that they complete, And we have something called the Falcon's model, which is a very structured model of what each course's master course looks like. So, that's another thing I can recommend is have a structure that's consistent between your courses. Yep. Question.

When you were talking about the numbers beginning from before COVID to Yes. Did you notice much cannibalism from your face to face? We did have to cancel on ground sections, and that moved online. So there was some of that. Yep. Yep.

To to piggyback off that question? Yeah. A restitution has them who does online, but faculty who are terrible liners. Mhmm. They don't believe in the value of it. Right.

Those that have to capitalize from the face of the face, if you have any of them, we're kinda forced to go to online and finding you along the way? Or was it more like only the ones who would have to do it have to buy it? That's a good question. I I think we did have some who were resistant to the online model, but but I think going back to just having the right conversations with them and them. This is the reality. I mean, this is what students are preferring. This is a modality that has potential advantages.

And I mean, to answer your question, yes, we did get some pushback. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Any other questions? Yep. Believe to partake in actually completed.

So that's a requirement in order to teach online. So, one of the areas for growth that we're seeing trying to have some sort of renewal for that. Maybe every year, every two years, complete that again. Yeah. Who designs that course? Like, who's in charge of, like, team.

Me and my team. So, yeah. Yep. So, like, instructional design team. Yeah.

Well, we have one instructional tech. I guess she does an instructional design role, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sushi and I.

Yeah. Yep. Is there info about that first in your website? Yeah. I can share it. Yeah.

If, if, there's a way that we can get it out to them or I don't know. I'll, I'll, can I just email you or something? Yeah. If anyone else is interested, I, you know, yeah. Okay. I think we're good.

Yeah. Alright. Thank you so much everyone. I'll be here for questions.