Scaling Online Learning: A Case Study In Innovation, Tech & People

The control room of one of the online studios at Gies College of Business

MICRO-CREDENTIALS & A NEW GRADUATE CERTIFICATE

The innovations don’t stop there. For each of the current eight specializations offers in the iMBA program, the school now issues a micro-credential that generates a certificate that a student can place on his or her LinkedIn profile. “It helps them achieve outcomes in the moment and not only at the end of the degree,” says Elliott. “It really ties back to how can we help our students have an impact on their careers now, not only when they are done with the program. With the micro-credential, they can clearly communicate to their employers what they are learning, and the students say their employers love it. That is low hanging fruit but other programs are not thinking that way.”

In August of next year, the school will offer a new credit-bearing credential that will serve as a new pathway into the iMBA program. The first two of what will be four graduate certificates will will a trio of three-credit courses in digital marketing and in strategic leadership and management. Students can complete a certificate in 24 weeks, though the timeframe can be extended. Once completed, all 12 credits would stack into the iMBA if a student decides he or she wants more than a standalone credential, part of Gies’s strategy for life-long learning.

Many of these changes are a direct result of the program’s explosive growth. With live Internet classes that could sometimes exceed 1,000 students, the school wanted to insure more access to faculty and deepen engagement. After a successful co-pilot of a co-teaching model, Gies will now roll this out in a big way. 

A CO-TEACHING MODEL TO BETTER HANDLE OFFICE HOURS & LIVE SESSIONS

Gies College of Business Dean Jeffrey Brown has aggressively expanded the school’s online offerings by making big investments in virtual learning

“The theory behind it is if you bring together two experts in a given field their ability to bounce ideas off each other and to collaborate creates a learning experience that surpasses what any one of them could do alone,” says Elliott.

“It also insures that the students have access to our faculty. Our greatest differentiator is that we have our very best faculty developing and delivering this program. We have classes with in excess of 1000 students in a single course so we want to make sure students don’t feel that size in the office hours they attend, the discussion boards they engage in, or in our live class sessions every week.”

Another solution that Gies will begin next August is the creation of an entering cohort experience called the First Eight for the first eight weeks of the program. While the size of the cohorts has yet to be determined, Elliott is aiming for groups of 200 students each. 

“When you think about an MBA program, individuals identify with a cohort,” she believes. ”Early on we had that because we started with 116 students. We recognize that we started to lose that. How are we going to get back to that? In August, we are going to launch the First Eight. It will be a required eight-week course that every iMBA student has to register in. We will set expectations, give new students the change to meet many of our faculty in the program, and do general on-boarding in the cohort. They are going to have a common experience with a common set of individuals. I think that is a way to bring back some of what is lost when you scale.”

THE SINGLE BIGGEST CHALLENGE: ASSESSMENT AT SCALE

A grand online education challenge is assessment at scale. In an effort to solve that challenge, Gies is partnering with a number of ed-tech companies, including Coursera. "In quantitative courses, we had started to explore different AI-based technologies to help us grade at scale," says Elliott. "We worked with one company—Sensei—and implemented that technology and we hav knocked it out of the park. It is really easy to do anything that is multiple choice but what this AI model can do is to go in and grade a clear cut answer in an Excel-based assignment. It can even go in and check the underlying formulas. The rubric has to be well defined upfront and there has to be a clear cut answer. But that technology has been quite successful in two courses, in finance and in financial accounting."

Using software to grade other subjects and qualitative assignments has proven far more difficult. "On the qualitative side, technology has not advanced to the point where we get the same return from an AI-based grading tool," concedes Elliott. "Even though it is at scale, we don’t use multiple choice, true-false answers in qualitative courses. We still use case studies just like we do in the residential courses. So at this point we are still throwing people at the problem. That is extremely costly. We used to have one course assistant for every 50 students. But we realized that in qualitative courses it needed to drop to one in 25 or 30. So we can now have 60 to 80 course assistants in a single course. They range from professional graders to PhD and graduate students with discipline-specific expertise. Eventually, throwing people at it doesn’t work because now someone has to manage those 60 to 80 assistants. We have talked with every possible vendor we could find for a solution and one doesn’t seem to exist."

That led to early conversations with the school's original partner on the iMBA: Coursera. The partnership with the company, which went public earlier this year, has been highly successful. Of the active learners currently in the iMBA program, 23.6% started as non-degree students in a Coursera MOOC (MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSE) offered by Gies.

GIES BOASTS HIGHEST MOOC-TO-DEGREE CONVERSATION RATE OF ANY COURSERA PARTNER

"We have the highest MOOC-to-degree conversion rate of any partner on the Coursera platform.  It’s very easy to enroll in one of our courses. Students try it out and they like it. Because we offer the largest MBA program and the largest qualitative courses at scale, Coursera asked us what our biggest challenge is and assessment is it."

The upshot: Gies has formed a committee with faculty members from both education and engineering schools at the University of Illinois and is leveraging Coursera resources and talent to develop models to assess students at scale. "It will end up with something that is really cool, and we will develop something that we will share with others," says Elliott. 

The scaling of the program also has allowed Gies to re-negotiate its partnership deal with Coursera and keep more than the original 60% split of revenue from its online initiatives.

How much larger can Gies online MBA become? Elliott isn't saying, though there is no immediate intention to "put the brakes on."

"People ask all the time, 'How big will you grow?' Our mission is democratize education, to expand access to the highest quality education.  We will continue to do that as long as we can continue to deliver the same high quality degree and the same high quality content from our very best faculty. As long as that remains true, we won’t limit access and so far we haven’t had to."

One thing seems certain: Elliott and her team will continue to race toward the sun

DON'T MISS: POETS&QUANTS' ONLINE MBA HUB

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