 Well, thank you very much for having us. Bruce and I have just been honored to be here, and really enjoying the program, the interactions. So my name is Larry Reagan. I'm from Penn State University at a Center for Online Innovation and Learning, which is a research and development hub for new ideas around how online innovations can impact our learning spaces. And Bruce, do you want to introduce now, or do you want to wait until you? So when Bruce comes up. So our topic really grows out of a program that we've been running for five years now, a relationship between Penn State University and Sloan C. Bruce and I have served as co-directors for several years on this program. And as it has grown, as the program has grown and evolved, we've developed a kind of observations of forces that are impacting today's leaders in online learning. And we want to share a little bit of our findings with you and have some dialogue and some exchanges. It's really interesting to us to know if this is the set of forces that we feel in the U.S. in the U.S. context, what do you feel in whatever context you might be sitting in? So we're hoping today that we can have that exchange and dialogue. I think Malcolm may have mentioned that we're not going to have a set time for questions at the end. We'd like to build those into the program as we go. So be prepared to hopefully be engaged. In order to do this, I'm just going to give you a little bit of a background on the Institute. But I'm not going to go into great detail right now, but I think it's important for you to just know sort of the setting. We use this thematically throughout our program, which is to really ask individuals who are taking a step into a leadership role to think about things from a very personal level. What do I think about leadership? Then talk about how that personal explanation or understanding of leadership expresses itself at the local level. So what can you do? How do you operate within the framework of an academy or an organization? And finally then, and this is the one I think for both has been most interesting and stimulating in the last couple of years is about thinking globally. One thing we've learned, and we were just talking about this last evening, we're reminded time and time again that 20 years ago, 40 years ago, we thought about our institutions as landlocked institutions. Our competition was really the competition 50 miles from campus, not someplace in Saudi Arabia or in the UK or wherever. Today's environment is very different, which calls upon a different set of skill sets for leaders needing to think about things in a broader context. So very quickly, we joined, as I said, in 2009, was our first year. It's a shared effort. We share faculty members. That is, we select faculty who represent the leading thought individuals in the industry. We invite them to participate. We typically have six to seven faculty members per offering of the program. We are addressing the next cadre of online learners. Bruce will often say, if you look around the room, we're not getting any younger. Our generation is beginning to look toward retirement, which means thinking about how are we preparing that next cadre, the next level of online leaders. The mainstreaming of online learning has increasingly become a theme of the program. As 10 years ago, 15 years ago, people were still trying to figure out what online learning meant and where it fit into the ecosystem. And today, the numbers of institutions who don't have an online learning strategy are in the minority. We already mentioned the grain of the online leadership. Oh, this career path topic is kind of interesting for us because when we started the program just five short years ago, which I guess in internet time is like what, maybe 50 years ago, let's call it. We had mostly individuals coming to the program who had not studied online. Most had some experience teaching or had some capacity. But they came from other fields. They were perhaps a director of an AV unit first or maybe a faculty member in a particular college. Today, what we're seeing then is are individuals coming to the online learning program who are beginning to represent the people who have had experiences in online learning. So more and more, we're seeing people who have degrees from online institutions. Or in some cases, as we saw this year, have a significant amount of years in the domain itself and now are being asked to step into a leadership role. And lastly is this topic of forces of change. We really try to help the participants understand all of the dynamics, at least from an ability to think about and talk about these forces. And this is what Bruce is really going to talk to you about. Framing this out, we're going to be looking at three things. We're going to be looking at that personal level, the institutional level. But we're going to start with the global level. And Bruce is going to walk us through understanding how these impact us a little bit in terms of preparing to be an effective leader in online learning. So I'm going to turn it over to my colleague and good friend, Bruce Shalu. As Larry said, we're going to flip the framing device here. I'm going to run through over the next couple of minutes some of our findings, if you will. Some of them are based upon the clear interaction we've had with our participants. As Larry said, up to 170 or so now. But also, from research and interaction with a variety of folks from our community. So global forces, and I have to admit, these are global forces a bit from a US perspective. Most of the students who participate, colleagues who participate in the Institute, are in fact individuals from US colleges and universities. There's a significant challenge in the US right now about the value proposition of higher education. It plays out, essentially, as is the investment of time and money that our young people are making in higher education for this credential, actually paying the dividends that it should. I have to say that in the US, this is probably the first time in maybe 50 years where we've started to have questions, very deep-rooted questions by policymakers being raised about the value of higher education. I think we have generally floated along as an industry, if I can use that term. And there was no question people needed to move into post-secondary education in the US, not a question about the value proposition. But it is now, in part driven by the enormous costs to attend a college or university in the US. And it used to be just in the private sector, it is now in the public sector as well. So pricing is a huge issue. This historical cultural legacy of the academy, the traditional academy, is under some significant change as well in the US. And it's going to be interesting to see how we define the academy over the next decade, because indeed it is changing quite significantly. I'll comment on that a little bit more momentarily. We're having interesting questions about what learning experiences should be, how long they should be. The traditional 15 or 16 week semester is a little bit under attack. In some measure, back to this point about the value proposition, time in seat is a cost. And the idea that it's going to take you eight semesters of full time study to complete a four year baccalaureate degree, which used to be the standard. The standard now is 150% of time, so over six years. And we have in the US, I'm not proud to say this, we have some 50 million working age adults, 25 to 62, although the age of work has been extended more and more. 50 million of them have some college credit, no degree. And we're working with a number of institutions to try to turn that 50 million not into a deficit, but into a market. And in fact, online strategies are being utilized. The second component of this is who grants the credential. Most of you have probably heard about badging. Badging has become amazingly popular. We introduced it to our IELA Well Group this year. And it's amazing how many of them are saying, well, I'm going to finish this because there's a badge attached to it. And we've kind of laid out a five badge strategy. The badges, in some instances now, are being turned into academic credit. The credit is being applied towards a degree. And who gives the credential is becoming more and more significant. The democratization of learning used to be the case that we would come to a university, such as the University of Nottingham. And our faculty would be generating research and findings. And the students would come to the university and we would deliver our findings sitting in a traditional classroom like this. You can Google just about anything these days. And in fact, you do not need to come to the traditional campus. So there has been kind of a flip, if you will, in terms of how we can acquire, how we can access, where we access knowledge and learning. So there's a democracy at play here. None of you, of course, have any reduction in funding, right? And in fact, if I'm not mistaken, I've read a few headlines about the UK. It's getting a little bit more expensive for your students to attend university in this country. Welcome to our world. We've been in this world for the last 25 or 30 years. As I mentioned, we've got this double issue now, double jeopardy, if you will, of not only having dramatic increases in the price or cost, it's been pushed in some measure by reductions, particularly in the public sector, of support or resources. So the policy makers in the U.S. continue to extol the virtues of higher education at the same time slashing budgets. And they've essentially said to institutions, you folks make up the difference, and so we've seen huge tuition and fee increases, which has become a huge burden for many families and students. The online markets continue to grow. These are, in fact, global in nature. They become much more competitive. Launch a program, reach students, we used to be reaching students, hello John, we used to be reaching students, we used to be reaching students locally, then regionally, then nationally, and now internationally, and particularly at the graduate level, the competition for institutions that are launching online graduate programs is intense, quite intense. Whoops, excuse me, we have this fascinating situation where we were in London earlier in the week and we saw that there was a Pepperdine University office right across the street at Imperial in one of those marvelous flats. We saw that Fordham University from the U.S. has a presence. That's not to say that U.S. institutions are still not reaching out across the globe, but they can reach out in far better ways using the technology, and indeed the students have that same capability. So there's far greater mobility both in terms of institutions and who they serve and where they serve them and the learners. And the last point I want to make on this global force component relates very directly to the comment I made earlier about particularly graduate programming. We have had this historical, at least in the U.S., challenge, this pendulum kind of swings back and forth on the liberal arts versus vocational education or education that would lead directly to vocation. That pendulum has swung well away from the liberal arts now in part driven by increasing demands on institutions to make sure that the students who graduate from colleges, universities, and the U.S. are in fact employable, have marketable skills. And so many of these programs have become much more applied in nature. And again, at the graduate level, the expansion of particularly MBA programs, engineering programs, online or in blended formats has increased pretty significantly. So those are eight kind of global forces at play. And if I click this button, Larry can explain to you what this means, because I can't. So we were interested in looking at this issue of the global forces and learning a little bit about how your institutions are dealing with what are the forces that are enacting on your institutions as well. And that's where we wanna get a little feedback, because we're kind of checking basis here. Are you dealing with the same kinds of pressures at the global level as we are, or are there different unique issues that you're dealing with? So if I can, now we're gonna need to get a mic to you. And I understand we have mic runners, is that correct? Do we have people who are gonna use mics? Yes, would you come up please? We've got two. So as we're getting the mics there, I have to tell you at our institution, this issue of globalization at Penn State has a very real presence as well. So we feel it in how we have to make decisions. Stephen Freeland's Open University in the Netherlands. I think it depends on the language in which you're teaching. As a small language area, we don't feel the same, well, we feel pressure as well from outside, but most of our students are still touch speaking. So that somehow limits competition. Interesting, I hadn't thought about that. Okay, so the language itself creates kind of a smaller geography, if you will. All right, interesting. Other thoughts, questions? Our force is different. I think what we're trying to drill down to a little bit are these forces that we outline, and there are others, but certainly stopping at eight is a pretty reasonable number. Are you engaged in dealing with troubled by? I was just gonna say, we have... If you tell us who you are, please. Sandra Partington from City University. So right in the center of London, and we have a lot of postgraduate courses, and they really are students from all over the world. So they do, you know, as soon as terms finished, they go back all over the world again. So they more and more want the whole thing to be online, even though they are coming physically, they still buzz around all over the place as soon as the lessons are over. So you're filling a force from your constituent base, your students, demand for continued access. Things like assessment and feedback, results online, feedback online, quickly and globally accessible. And how is City in responding? Are you putting together programs that serve their needs? Because if not, we have some that we'd like to offer. Yeah, trying to extend, you know, something like encouraging people to mark online and do their feedback digitally, which can be quite, you know, doesn't suit all lecturers, but it really does suit a lot of the students. So it's tipping that way now to make that, make more of an effort to hand things back and communicate, especially as I say, marking and feedback. Sandra, if I can just extend that a little bit, because I'm curious about this particular force. Is it happening now, or do you foresee it happening where this desire for the online component will begin to change what you do in the face-to-face component? Do you know what I mean by that? I do, I just don't know how it's, you know, big, I don't know if I could comment. Yeah, okay, I was just curious. Yeah, yeah. Interesting, okay, thank you. Malcolm, and then we have... We have two more hands. Hi, Malcolm Ryan, formerly of the University of Greenwich. Just to follow up with the question that you just asked about, does going online change what happens face-to-face? I'm not sure if you're aware in the UK over maybe the last three or four years, there has been a growth in the idea of blended learning. What I think's very interesting about that is the flexibility of the definition of blended learning. Some people at the base level think that just means, well, you carry on doing what you did very much face-to-face and you put things online that people can access or not. But I think more sophisticated use of blended learning where people have thought very carefully about the affordances of the technology as Diana Lorelar speaks about, and have actually used the online elements to do things that you might not be able to do or do as well face-to-face. And I think the more complex decisions made around that, I think the better the actual learning experience would be. But I don't think many people are doing it. It's a force to be reckoned with. We'll have one more here and then we're gonna ask Bruce to move to the next level. Go ahead and get you in, go ahead. Sorry. Charlotte Cork from the Liverpool John Mores University. I just wanted to say that your final point about the vocational importance of vocational courses, that's absolutely been the case at our university. Yeah, that's good. I'm actually from the careers department and we run a World of Work Skills certificate, which it was originally an optional extra thing that students could do on top of their degree. We got reasonable good take up, but the university took the decision two years ago to make it the first stage of that program compulsory for every level four, every first year student coming in. So we've just come, we're just starting now the second year of running that, but that's 5,000 students doing an employability focused program. So it's very high on the agenda at our university. Set in your session yesterday and it was really very informative, very educational to learn more. So I appreciate your comment. We're gonna slip this question in as well and then I'll catch up. Roy Williams, you hear me? Yes. Roy Williams University of Portsmouth. I've seen some interesting research recently in relation to free future learn. And that says that there's a divide, I don't know what the figures are on the divide, but there's a divide between students who want to engage with UK universities for the whole English experience, whatever that is, but it's an inculturation process. They would like to become incultured, whatever they think that is. So they want to be here wherever here is. And they want to get those goods, whatever those goods are. And then there's another whole group who don't actually care about the inculturation. They might get the inculturation where they are or it might not be relevant to them. And they just want, as in where the technical skills. So there seems to be a split in the demands of those people. The interesting question is, and I think it goes back to what Malcolm was saying, can online learning give them some of the inculturation goods that they're after? I think it can some, but I think it can't others. Yeah, I actually have six grandchildren. The oldest is 12. He will go off to university. We live in Atlanta, so maybe he'll go off to Georgia Tech, very fine institution. I want him, and I'm not anti-campus at all. I mean, I love our campuses. Our campuses must continue to exist for a lot of the reasons you just mentioned. But the instructional activity and how the teaching and learning environment has created a place like Georgia Tech or any other institution, I think is going to be the change. My hope is that he does not get put into a 500 seat theater as he stands in front of a 500 seat theater here, and someone lectures to him 50 minutes, three times a week. And I know that's not what is happening at a place like Georgia Tech where students are heavily engaged in technology. So I do see that the need to create a cultural environment. I think that is clearly part of, if you will, a traditional university experience, but the instructional activities within it, I think, are changing and in fact need to change. So don't give me too far off on that. Let's talk about institutional forces. A few of these things that you mentioned are gonna come up. We're into, we have a lot of attorneys, too many attorneys in the US. In fact, I mentioned this notion of trying to reduce time in seat. President Obama came out a week or 10 days ago and said, law school, which has historically been a three-year experience, needs to be pushed to two years. And there was a hue and cry from law schools. And why was there a hue and cry? Because our entire model, our entire institutional model, and take it out of law school, put it in almost any institution, is tied to how many individuals, how many seats we put in seats, whether those are real seats or virtual seats. And if you start playing with that formulation, then you've got a challenge on the revenue side, on the resource side. And despite that, the movement clearly in the US is clearly kind of going back to the 60s. We've gone retro with competency-based activities. So this notion of the contract for learning or with a learner is changing. Obviously, the financial impact of online learning, I'm gonna catch up here, make one quick comment. With the internet revolution, if you go back into the mid-90s and through the early 2000s, online learning, e-learning in the US was promoted with policy makers as a way to save money. We can give you a quality educational experience, but we're not gonna charge you to mow the grass, to keep the lights on, to do all those other things. Yes, there were fees, technology fees, so it was the term that was used. But students typically were paying maybe a little bit less than what they would be paying if they were attending university in a more traditional face-to-face manner. That model is, it's 20 years old and it's just not applicable anymore. And what is happening in the US market, particularly at the graduate level, come on in, is what we call market pricing. What will the market bear? What can I put my Duke University Executive MBA Online International or Global Program on the market for over 100,000 US? And then seven miles away from Durham in lovely Chapel Hill, North Carolina is the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a marvelous public university. If you go to the campus, the MBA program's probably $15,000. If you take it online, it's $50,000 and it's approaching $100,000 for their global online program, which is about the cost of what is happening with the Duke Executive MBA program. So the market strategy or market pricing strategy has changed. You had to mention MOOCs. I'm not sure what else I wanna say about MOOCs other than this fascinating bandwagon, whether it is evolutionary, revolutionary. It's going to change our thinking. What the next iteration of MOOCs will be is very unclear, that it's going to impact how we do our business early in the States is without question, without question going to happen. I'll give you one quick example. Larry and I are one of the things we were talking about last night. Historically, the number of students that you teach in a class, the full-time equivalent student credit hours that you generate are tied to 20 or 25, depending upon the level of the course. Occasionally, we'll get a large lecture kind of activity, but generally, faculty wanna teach classes with 18, 20, 22, 24, and most institutional policy is wrapped around that number. And so now how do we react to Sebastian Thrun teaching 150,000 students in his artificial intelligence MOOC some time ago, or the tens of thousands of students who are engaged in MOOC classes, and the policy makers in the US are now saying, no, so wait a minute. Faculty are saying we can't teach more than 25, how can this faculty member be teaching 150, and it's free. So you have to think about the policy notions here and what our policy makers are saying. Lifelong learning, I think one of the true attributes, one of the beauties of online learning is its potential to serve learners throughout a lifetime. In fact, I think that's really the great spot for MOOCs. It's this notion of continuing the learning experience for individuals who have a particular interest or a particular need. This relates to one of the global aspects. This notion of return on investment is driving a lot of the data collection and driving a lot of the discussion around policy in the US. What is it costing you to send your children to Opti University? And what is the return on investment, both from the learner, from the investment that governments are making in the public sector? It is not something that we actually have done quite, let's go to job as we need to on. We have a huge issue with retention in the US. I mentioned that earlier, a number of 50 million working age adults who have some college no degree. We're bringing them back to degrees in part because they are not working, they have families, and we are engaged with them in programs that meet their needs. We still need to do a better job of having those complete when they in fact can complete. And that number, as I've said to some colleagues of 50 million, we need to reduce but it's going to take decades for us to in fact get to that point. One other quick comment on that. I think it used to be the case where institutions and maybe even those in the policy environment would say it's the students problem. The fact that the student didn't finish is that he or she didn't have the wherewithal, didn't have the resources, had an issue at home, it's them, and I think we have probably put to feel the notion that this is all about students. There are not 50 million US students who couldn't cut it. In fact, many of them are coming back and are doing quite well. And then Larry, I'm gonna stop on, I'll just make one quick comment about disruptive forces. I think we probably, one of the centerpieces of the discussion at this conference, and at most of our conferences, has been about disruptive forces of technology and the changes in pedagogy, which we could go into our own session on that. So let me stop there on institutional forces and Larry's gonna take another temperature. I think maybe what we'll do is have you go through the next batch and then we'll do a set of questions. So what he's telling me is I need to speed up. Individual forces, I'll take these off fairly quickly. Part of what we are looking to do with the institute is to get our emerging leaders to think differently about more broadly learning, higher education, but also e-learning or online learning, and they should be much more progressive in their thinking. They typically want to deal, not with strategic, broader framed issues, but more operational kinds of questions. And we work very hard through the setup. Larry's gonna take you through quickly the program frame. Work very hard to try to get the participants to think much more strategically. That means more progressive and that means much more collaborative leadership. To be aware of the emerging global markets, to have a much greater business orientation for a lot of the reasons that I mentioned under both global and local or institutional, that the demand certainly on institutions in the US for financial management, for maintaining a reasoned balance between resources and expenditures is significant. To be quite agile, nimble, if you wanna use that term in the changing waters, sometimes tsunami-like of higher education. This drinking from the fire hose, it's probably a US term. It really relates more to we collect so much data. We probably collect more data than we know what to do with the data and we need to do a much better job of framing the case for what we're doing. And then we want our future leaders to be thinking about opportunities and our greater orientation to opportunity. So let me stop there. Now this looks like it's really taking a temperature in both C and F, so there you go, Larry. So thank you, Bruce. So we're gonna combine just a quick, get some feedback from you on those two. We talked about institutional forces and then also forces affecting the personal level. So can I ask, are we on the mark? Are these the same things that you're feeling in your organizations or maybe feeling personal? Do we miss any things or something from your context that might be a little bit different than what we're experiencing? And Bruce, if you wouldn't mind, maybe we'll go back and leave it on the screen just to freshen the memory there. Any thoughts or comments? Do you use the term drinking from the fire hose here? So think of the metaphor, right? You've got this amount of information flowing out. I mean, we were talking about this last night. How do you do that as a leader? How do you simply manage the volume of information, of new ideas, of new technologies? And have you ever felt out of it when someone says, oh, don't you use X, pick your technology, and you sit there and think, why didn't you even know that existed? And it's that feeling of, how do I just manage the pace of these changes in this amount of technologies coming in? It's not easy. I asked Stephen Downs, who will be your speaker tomorrow, that question, how do we help leaders, emerging leaders do that? And he talked about building the network and understanding who your thought leaders are and tapping into those as guides and so forth, which I thought was really sage advice. How are you feeling about that? What other kinds of institutional dynamics are going on? We had a lot around the global. You don't see any around this one. Okay, so. All right, I'm gonna hand this back to you and just keep in mind that Malcolm has a pink card, which is like a red card in football, so let's be sure we don't get that, all right? Okay, so thank you, Bruce. So what we, in the institute this, we call it IELOL, we kind of joke that before you graduate from the program, that has to roll off your tongue like a new word. IELOL is really our experience of helping to prepare this next generation. I'm just gonna give you a little bit about the format of the project or the program. Frankly, our hope is that people may be interested in participating and collaborating with us on this project. One statistics that's kind of interesting to throw out is over the five years we've had over eight countries represented in the program, including the UK, thank you Malcolm, Ireland, Singapore, and Australians as well, so it's been a nice group. So very quickly, it's really about a four or five month program. It's a blended program. It begins with a two week online primer, which this year we're gonna turn to actually, I should say for 2014 will become a three week primer because of the level of engagement going on. We do an immersive experience where our participants travel to Penn State, which is in the center of Pennsylvania. For four days, that's, we call that the immersion or the intensive experience. We then send them back and after a few weeks of getting their semesters up and running, we start a three week online. This is where they take the lessons of the Institute, pick a particular project and begin working on it. And the goal of that is multi-fold. One is that you pick a project and hopefully move the project along in your institution, but the other is a little bit more subtle. It's a way of getting that emerging leader some visibility within the institution. So we encourage them to work with their senior leadership and say, hey, what problem would you like me to work on for the institution? And by the way, when I'm done my project, I'll bring the results back to you. So you immediately get this sort of lifting of their awareness and of their visibility within the institution. Finally, we meet at the Sloan Sea Conference in Orlando. That is generally in October, November timeframe. And we have a pre-conference workshop. That workshop, as much as individuals would like the opportunity to share all of their project ideas, we try to reserve for more conversation about that transition of moving from sort of the operational nose to the grindstone type perspective to one where you lift your chin up and you're looking at some of these broader, more global issues. Our audience is typically professionals in the middle or upper middle management level. So typically these are people who are sort of poised for next level leadership. Those individuals who wish to be leaders or who may have been identified as potential leaders by someone in their organization. We have a broad mix of institutions. We get profits and non-profits. It's really interesting. And we also get community colleges, two year type schools as well as research institutions. And that mix makes it very interesting. And as I've mentioned, geographically we've been getting more of an international draw which I think if I've heard any one comment more than others is about the opportunity to learn and to meet people from different cultures and different contexts which really raises your awareness of what global online learning is all about. These are the dates for next year. I'm gonna leave you with a website if you're interested or if you wanna chat with one of us we'll be happy to do that. There is a fee of course and that information is all contained on this website. So if you go to i-e-l-o-l.psu.edu it'll give you all the information about how to register, how to participate. And then these are the emails for Bruce and I and I think we're probably about at our time. Thank you so much for participating as you did and providing us feedback. We're more than interested in engaging with you on these kind of issues and topics and I wish you an enjoyable rest of the conference. So thank you.