Adapting to Serve Part-time Students

In the last episode, Ken Steele laid out his case for the rise of "invisible" part-time students on college and university campuses (see it at https://youtu.be/e5GGxa2Z7EY ). Now we review some of the many ways in which higher education institutions are adapting their program delivery models and services to better serve part-time and commuter students.

Business schools offer flexible MBA programs. Colleges seem to cater to night owls more than early birds. Many colleges use technology to allow part-time students to participate in asynchronous online learning as part of a blended or hybrid program. Some universities are using a "boot camp" model of intense, brief residency on campus. Some colleges are allowing students to complete a full-time program by spending just one day a week on-campus.

Beyond flexible delivery, some institutions are rethinking the program model entirely, moving to a modular approach. At Stanford University's d.school, a working group has proposed what they call the "Open Loop University", 6 years of non-linear education instead of 4 straight years on campus. A task force at MIT concluded that the course itself may be an outdated concept, and that courses should be unbundled into discrete learning modules.

If we're moving toward a world of "just-in-time" education, all of these approaches -- time-shifting classroom work, fragmentation of curriculum, online and blended delivery -- all will make it more and more challenging to grow student engagement as measured by NSSE (the National Survey of Student Engagement). We already know that there's a great solution for student engagement: one institution has NSSE scores that exceed all others, and we'll look at its unique approach in a future episode.

Finally, just #ICYMI, we share clips from Simon Fraser University's slick new anthem video, "Engage the World".