 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii, where we discuss the impact of change on workers, employers, and the economy. I'm your host, Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, inviting you to join in the conversation. Please call us at area code 808-374-2014 with your questions or comments, or tweet us at thinktechhai. Higher education has experienced some of the most significant changes in the way it operates. Most of us remember queuing on registration day for enrollment cards that told us where and when a particular course was being offered. We may have had to go through that process several times in order to ensure we could get the classes we wanted on days and at times that were doable for us. We turned in papers, literally papers, written on manual typewriters. We took exams on paper in silent classrooms full of anxious nervous classmates with a board professor sitting at the front of the class probably reading the newspaper killing time till the class finished the exam. Like it or not, those days are mostly over. There are many alternatives to the kind of education experiences that the baby boomers and Generation X survived. One of those alternatives is distance education where a student communicates with faculty and administrators via online communications media. The classroom is a learning management system and students and faculty may never meet face to face. Joining us today to discuss the distance education revolution is Rochelle Kim. Rochelle is the director of Aston American University, one of the innovators in taking the US model of university education to a wider more global audience. Hi Rochelle. Hi Cheryl. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. I am really enamored of the Aston American University business model. So if you could, tell us how widely dispersed your students, faculty and staff are and how you manage to get everybody together and kind of coalesce into a university community. Great. Yes. So we have wide wings of students in international locations. We have students from Peru, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, France, all over the world. And we also have instructors all over the world. So our instructors are located in the Czech Republic, Florida, California, all over the world. The way we facilitate our classes is through a learning management system and people can log on to their classroom and they can interact with their teachers there and they can get student support there. We have live chat. We have 24-hour contact where students can come on and ask questions of their advisors and also they can of course always email their instructors. So we have very good communication with students, faculty and all of our all of our participants. Tell us about who kind of the best candidate for online or distance education would be. I mean, I can imagine someone who says, oh gee, I don't have a regular schedule at work or I have children at home or whatever it is. This is great because I get to study whenever I want. But that doesn't necessarily mean that that person is the best candidate for online education. So what kinds of traits going in should students expect to have as they begin to contemplate whether distance education is the right model for them? Majority of our students are non-traditional students. They have full-time jobs. They have to take care of their families and they still have the dream to complete or finish an education that they never got to do. And so your question about what is this perfect student or what kind of traits that a student would need is there is a lot of self-motivation that's needed. A person needs to be organized, be able to block out time. I find that some students think that, okay, I'm going to study tomorrow but they don't actually schedule it into their calendar and then they never do it. And so organization, you know, time management are very important skills that the student needs to have in order to be successful online. And then they have the flexibility. So one of the best things about studying online and distance learning is you are able to study when you want to. So you can study. Some people study really well at 2 a.m. Others, they can't. Yeah, that would be one of the camps. Right. So the one good thing about distance learning is the flexibility. What about people who are, because I've had classmates like this in university, maybe you did too, the ones who for on purpose would wait until the very last minute to try and do something, get an assignment finished, write a paper, whatever it was. And you would be working on it incrementally and trying to keep it relatively smooth but those people just couldn't function if they weren't tied up against a hard deadline. The students like that experience more or fewer challenges say in a distance learning environment. In any learning environment, we already suggest to a student that you study little by little. So take 20 minutes to read, take 20 minutes to draft your paper, take 20 minutes here to, okay, so you are planning out your schedule. But like you mentioned, there are students that will cram at the end and try to read and write and submit at the very last minute. So we highly suggest in our orientation that we have a student and we pace yourself. It's like a race, pace yourself. You know, don't start out very quickly and then sputter out at the end. You want to pace yourself and be able to manage yourself in order to submit your things in time, plus cook your dinner, plus take your kids somewhere, plus you know, attend your job. So there's a lot of different things that you need to plan. So I mean planning is a key but some people just do drive on that adrenaline at the end and trying to submit. How about faculty? Are there, are there, you mentioned you have faculty all over the world. What kinds of qualifications do faculty need to have in order to become part of the Aston University model? Most of our faculty have doctorate degrees, so either a PhD, a DBA, or a JD, which are the doctorates in the specialty fields of the business administration that we offer. If a faculty member has special subject matter expertise in a specific field but does not have a doctorate, then we may also evaluate that candidate as one of our instructors. So some people may have their master degree in economics, but maybe does not have a PhD, but they are the subject matter expert in that field and so we may evaluate that instructor and have them come on board to help as well. I can see where that would make good sense, say in disciplines like accounting or finance, where CPA is very, very important in order to be licensed, to be an accountant, or perhaps in finance where you might be a certified financial professional or a certified stockbroker or tax preparer or whatever. And in those cases, it might be pointless to have a doctorate degree, which really need is that the expertise in that particular discipline. Is it difficult in your opinion to recruit faculty from all over the world? Not all faculty have worked online and so there's some really fantastic faculty who come from brick and mortar universities and that are just fantastic in person with students. We specifically do look for instructors that have more capabilities in being able to connect and engage with the student online. And that's not as easy necessarily in an online environment as it is in a brick and mortar where you can see your teacher and say hi and good morning to them. So we do look for people who have worked in an online capacity when we bring them on to our staff. How about your administrators? Because I know that you have some in Cyprus, some in Turkey, some in the continental US, some here. How do you all manage to get together to collaborate on different projects or get your daily assignments finished? We use a lot of online tools. So there's several online tools that we use to organize ourselves in the administration area and one is called Zoom. It's a go-to meeting type of a connection where you can go online, you can actually see each person and you can talk there, you can record the conversations, you can record the meetings that you have, you can share your screen to show people where you need to go, what do you need to do and things like that. And then we have another really big tool that we use and it's called Asana. And both of those tools help organize our projects and kind of give us a project management layout and then assist us in being able to facilitate amongst remote workers the project that needs to be done. So you could have students telecommute, you can have faculty telecommute, you've got administrators telecommuting. Tell me about the kinds of programs that you offer. Are there some programs that are perhaps easier to deliver in an online or distance format than maybe some other topics? The programs that we deliver are business administration programs. So our Bachelor of Business Administration and our Masters of Business Administration and then we also do a English as a second language course. And so that has been actually very successful. We do it in a hybrid online and tutoring type of a session. So each student gets the opportunity to study with our materials on an online platform. So 80% of their work is done online speaking, reading, writing, and then they schedule a one-to-one personal appointment each week with their instructor and they get to actually converse with them online through Zoom. And so they really love that part of it because that's really where they also can make a connection, especially when you're trying to teach English. Yes, I can imagine that. It's tough if you can't see and pronounce and see the articulation. Yeah, that's true. The guys in the booth speaking of speaking English are telling me in English that we need to get ready for a break. So let's do that, hang around, don't move. We will be back in about 60 seconds. This is Working Together on Think Tech Hawaiʻi. We'll be right back. Aloha, I'm Kili Ikeena and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock PM on Think Tech Hawaiʻi's Hawaiʻi Together. In Hawaiʻi Together we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government, and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaiʻi Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaiʻi Together. I'm Kili Ikeena. Aloha. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. Welcome back to Working Together on Think Tech Hawaiʻi. I'm Cheryl Crozier-Garcia and we are talking today with Rochelle Kim, the Managing Director at Aston American University about the changes to university education that are possible using various kinds of online media. Now, Rochelle, you and I had talked before and this was something I had never thought about. Now, I've been a university instructor for 22 years. I started teaching when I was eight. But I never had to ever worry about issues of censorship. I could pretty much, within reason, pick the textbooks I wanted, the supplemental readings that I wanted. If I wanted to address a specific topic in a specific way, academic freedom has always allowed me to do that. But that isn't true necessarily for all of the students that Aston reaches out to. So, can you tell us a little bit about some of those kinds of censorship issues that may come up and what do you do to get around them? Some of our students cannot even get Skype or cannot get some of the internet channels that there are, you know, apps that we're trying to use. So, we have to find other ways to contact them. So, some of my tutors that normally we use Zoom or we use Skype to do a one-to-one. But in certain countries, I think it's like Qatar, Oman, they're not allowed to have Skype. So, then we have to find what they're using like WhatsApp or there's others we chat or whatever it is that they're using in order to do our one-to-ones with them. So, we go out of our way to find the technological means to be able to contact our students. And then, some of our students are not allowed to get textbooks. So, I think that was the one we were talking about. Right. Where, you know, a lot of universities might require you to purchase a specific textbook in order to shake this class. Well, they can't receive the textbook because they're in China or in another country that doesn't allow specific books or things to come in. So, all of our resources are done online. So, everything that we have is on our learning management platform. And sometimes we connect to links. I think we talked about this as well. And the link might get broken. So, we'll have to find other links that will work with that. Our teachers are good at finding those links and filling in the things that they need to when missing piece of information is gone. How challenging is it for a student, say, who lives in a country that has relatively strict censorship laws? And I'm thinking specifically of perhaps those in the Middle East where not only are there issues about what you can and cannot bring into the country, but also rules about who gets to socialize amongst each other. Do any of those issues become problems? Like, do you have to go and look, say specifically for male or female faculty to meet the needs of male or female students in countries that are gender segregated? Those issues haven't come up for us in terms of online because most of our interactions are through, like I said, our learning management system. So, they're able to log in and they can work with different instructors. So, if we do once in a while have requests from students that want to have a different instructor and we try to accommodate requests if it's something that they really want. But for the most part, our instructors are fantastic. And so, anyone can work with them if need be. That's good to know. I did have a situation, gosh, several years ago now where there were a bunch of students from a particular country. And I was not aware that they were actually doing this, but they would purposefully segregate themselves. So, all of the male students would ask for, say, office hour time right around the same time. And the female students were nowhere to be found. And then the female students would say, well, we'd like to come, can we come see you on Friday at two o'clock? Sure, you can do that. And the male students at that point were nowhere to be found. And I discovered that later, like, why is it that they're always like that? And it's because in their home country, there's no such thing as coeducation, that is to say, genders together. It's either the males are all in one school with male teachers and male staff and administrators or all females with an all female faculty, all female administrators. And it was incredible. The women loved it. The men found it a little bit challenging because they had never actually had a woman, say, in a position to evaluate their work or to assess performance in any way. And they didn't know how to handle when it was no, it's really not an A. It really is a C. And let me show you why. And they had some real difficulties in dealing with that. Are there cultural issues that come up, say, in distance education that make it more challenging? For us in distance education, we have to deal with a lot of different cultures. It's not just one area that we're working with. We're working with people from so many parts of the world. And each part of the world, like you said, deals with education differently. But when they come to us, we are set up as an American university. And so when they come to us and want to attend our university, then we do let them know that you're going to be following American standards and the American ways of education. So there will be differences necessarily than maybe their own culture. So it is really set up for American education to be shared with international students. And so the students love that part of it. They want to know about the culture of America. They want to know about what do you eat? What is hamburgers? What is French fries and pizza? And so we also do fun things like that where we will talk about have discussion boards about just American pastimes or American life. And that's a dream. For a lot of the international students, the dream is to come and immigrate to the US. And what is it like? What is it really like in the US? Do you have a way of tracking where your graduates end up? Most of our students right now, we're still very new, are still living and working in their own countries. But like I said, a lot of them want to come to the US and immigrate. And so they take classes with us. And we also offer a prep class in IELTS, which is the International English Standards. And so we help them with those type of English proficiency so that when they go to their immigration office, they can speak about the things that they're going to be asked about and in immigration. Wow, that's great. And do you do sort of interview coaching? Right now we're not doing interview coaching, but in that prep class, we help them with several different parts of the tests that they're going to need to know. And part of it is the interview that they're going to face with the immigration officers. That's got to be scary. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't even like going through customs in different countries. Right. No, just a little bit creepy for me. But so I can only imagine what a student would have to really emotionally prepare almost the way an actor would prepare to put on a play or to do some kind of performance. Because you really are trying to impress upon someone that you are a person that is worthy of trust and really should be part of the fabric of our society. We really try to prepare our students for what they will face if they do get to come to the U.S. And so career planning, you know, preparing yourself in terms of your, what kind of job are you going to want to apply for once you get your education, you know, those kind of things that we discuss with our students as well. Yeah. Do you have a career placement office? We have a career planning program and we're expanding that program. It's very exciting for us. We're expanding two programs right now, which is our career planning program and then also our entrepreneurship program. Wow, that's great. Let me ask you a little bit about the doctoral program because you said that you had, you were focusing on the DBA, Doctor of Business Administration, rather than on the PhD. I don't know that our audience knows the difference between the two degrees. So could you tell us what those differences are? Sure. Both are research degrees. The Doctor of Business Administration will be taking more coursework in order to complete their requirements for the doctorate. And then the PhD is mainly a research study, either quantitative or qualitative. So it would depend what they select in terms of that. On the DBA, it is more quantitative versus the qualitative. And do students say who would have been accepted into the DBA program, are they allowed to choose, say, their own research topic that they would write on? We have not accepted any DBAs yet. Yeah, our program will be beginning shortly. We'll have a launch date on our DBA within the next three months. Wow, that's great. That is so exciting. I realize that at the moment you're not really accepting students from the U.S., but I think that the moves in education that we've been seeing from other universities who have a similar type of distance education model, and moving towards terminal degrees like the doctorates, really are opening up education to groups of people who would not have been able to otherwise contribute to society in that way. Yeah, I mean, part of our mission is to deliver an attainable higher education. And so for us, attainable means two things. One is for people, like you said, that never thought that they could do this. It is an attainable goal and reachable goal. And the other part of attainable is the cost. A lot of it is, you know, some of the DBA degrees are very, very expensive. And for us, attainable means that we're going to be offering at reasonable prices. Do you operate only in U.S. currency or are you able to accept currency? We can accept other currencies through our Western Union pay. So Western Union pay will do the conversion for us. Wow. So you really are just approaching it from a perspective of let's try to get rid of all the roadblocks. Let's kick all of the bumps and smooth out the surface. That's so great. I mean, because you don't want an education to be easy. But on the other hand, you don't want to put up unnecessary challenges or stupid challenges and issues around the administrative trivia, if you will, of higher ed. It sounds like you're doing a really good job of just like smoothing out that environment so that the student can focus on what's really important, which is that mastery of new knowledge. Yeah. For us, the practical real-world skills is what we would like to give our students. And so students can come to us and learn about the different theories and the different concepts. But what we want to give them is a practical real world skill that they can actually take out into the workforce and say, I'm using the things that I learned here in the workforce, like how to write a resume or how to network online with other people or how to complete a LinkedIn profile. Things that actually make them look better to their employers and that they can apply in their actual work environment. Wow. I wish I had had that model in high school. I had the joy once of telling my high school math teacher that algebra had not helped me at all in my future life. And we're running out of time. We're almost done. You know, learning is a lifelong process. From the moment we're born until we take our last breath, our experiences color and shape the way we see the world around us. Broader perspectives mean that we are better able to cope with that which is different. Education, especially university education, is one of those broadening experiences that has both personal and societal advantages. As an individual, a university graduate has the ability to think broadly and innovatively about the issues he or she faces. Society benefits from an educated populace that is able to make decisions for the good of the entire community and understands the risks of both taking action and failing to take action to address concerns. Without education, humankind could not have progressed to where we are today. And if we want to continue to grow and improve, we've got to commit to educating the future generations. That's all for today on Working Together. On behalf of all of the volunteer citizen journalists here at Think Tech Hawaii, thank you for watching. I'll be back in two weeks. Till then, take care.