Did you see this article “Supreme Court declines case on making online retailers collect sales taxes” in the Washington Post?

For most of us in higher education, we’re struggling with not only how to comply with the state authorization mandate but dealing with the simple fact that this situation even exists. Those private liberal arts institutions without an online presence, you should wake up and pay attention to this because it will impact you more than you can imagine. Also, you might want to pay attention to the Gainful Employment movement currently impending on the for-profits because you are next!

This Washington Post article reported that the Supreme Court of the United States decided not to hear an appeal regarding the collection of sales tax for online retailers. Simply put, states can continue to establish policies regarding the collection of online sales from out of state companies to the citizens of their state regardless if the company has a physical presence in their state. Currently, Amazon collects sales taxes from sixteen states.

Sounds a lot like if you have an online student in our state you need to be authorized to operate as an educational institution in our state…just like you were going to build a brick and mortar building in our fair state! But the good news, the high court felt it was Congress’ responsibility to legislate interstate commerce.

What could possibly go wrong with Congress involved? Oh wait, didn’t this entire state authorization debacle get started because one Senator wanted to stop the spread of for-profit education. Hey, thanks for the help!

Most for-profits already are compliant in most states because they actually have a physical presence there and have a stable of attorneys ensuring their compliance because everyone is shooting for the for-profits to make a mistake. But really, could we have expected a Senator to know this before he submitted the legislation (wait, you mean Senators actually have other people draft the legislation… like 22 year olds and then don’t actually read what it says before submitting it…and passing it!).

Well maybe Amazon will have more influence than a few colleges struggling to keep tuition low and an education attainable for all that desire.

Share your thoughts

What are your thoughts on state authorization? Are you frustrated or have you just given up? Share your thoughts below with me.

Inspiration

Protecting the Brand: The Hells Angels have grown increasingly litigious, learning to employ the legal system to protect the recognizable symbols of their club.

I was reading the NYTimes article on protecting your brand, this one happened to be about the Hell’s Angels and how they sue over their brand name usage. (see the article here)

Let’s face it; most colleges really don’t understand branding. Heck, most don’t understand results driven marketing. Please, don’t even mention social media marketing… But we have a Facebook page.

Most colleges will tell you they get branding… you know… our website looks like our brochures. Dig a little deeper and you find many institutions with no real idea which logo is being used by which department and how many Facebook pages actually exist that use their name. How many small colleges turn their brand into revenue generation like the big D-1 schools? Granted most Saturdays there are a couple of thousand fans in the stand for a football game…if they are lucky. Find me a small liberal arts college and I will find you a local screen-printing company using their logo and selling it to their students, alumni and fans.

At eduKan we fight the branding fight

Bring in the Hell’s Angels… and their litigious presence. I love this article and in a previous life worked with some motorcycle clubs and can tell you first hand they are serious about protecting their name, image and logo. The three-part patch they wear on their back, called their colors, is trademarked and defended in both style and format. In the old days it was mostly threats and broken knees, few lawyers were involved.

At eduKan we fight the branding fight. Small e (by the way Word hates when we do that) and capital K with an ampersand-like symbol for the “U”. It all has meaning; capital K for Kansas, the circle around the “U” because you are the most important part of eduKan. The e is small, well, because it just looks stupid with a capital E. Innovating Education is what we do, the circle U carries over from the logo and show that the education if for U.

Brand Champion

As the brand champion for eduKan I have not physically fought anyone or taken the shirt off of their back but I have required all eduKan faculty and staff get the logo tattooed on some visible part of their body… Wait… they don’t know about that yet…

For those of you offended by the use of the word tattooed in an educational blog… get over it… As for the faculty and staff getting tattoos, just joking… for now! 

What do you think?

Share your thoughts about how your brand is being (mis)used below. We’d like to get your take on this subject too.

The United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) has declared November 11-15, 2013 National Distance Learning Week.

As we all prepare our campuses for a week of ceremonies and festive activities…does anyone else see the irony in celebrating distance learning week in a physical location…or is it just me?

For those of us that have been actively engaged in online education for the better part of our careers, this weeklong promotion designed to bring awareness and recognition to quality distance education conjures up some mixed feelings.

While it is nice to see this segment of higher education get the accolades it certainly deserves, it is also a little sad that after almost two decades of success in the higher education market place, we needed to designate a specific week in its honor?  I feel the same way about National Grandparent’s Day.

Do we really need a special day, or week in this case, to recognize something so good? I started thinking about some other things happening in higher ed that could benefit from having their own specially designated weeks for recognition.  How about these:

• National Private College Disappearance Week – for those colleges that have been resisting distance education for years and are now starting to disappear.

• “You Can’t Deliver that Class Online” Week – for those faculty members that continue to assert their classes could not possibly be delivered online.

• National “Save Our Institution” Week – for college administrators who think putting a syllabus online or contracting with a third-party vendor to deliver their courses will save their failing institutions.

• Faculty Against Technology Week – you can figure this out by the name, but unfortunately, it was cancelled this year due to poor response.  Evidently, none of the faculty read their email or saw the post on social media. Paper surveys will be mailed to them next week to solicit consensus on a unified position statement about why technology is bad in education.

• Department of Education is Here for You Week – unfortunately the development of the portal to engage with the DOE was awarded to the same Canadian firm developing the ObamaCare website…enough said.

So party on people, virtually of course. Let’s raise of glass of symbolism over substance and give three big cheers to tradition.

Be sure to share and comment…  Mark

The United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) has declared November 11-15, 2013 National Distance Learning Week. As we all prepare our campuses for a week of ceremonies and festive activities…does anyone else see the irony in celebrating distance learning week in a physical location…or is it just me?

For those of us that have been actively engaged in online education for the better part of our careers, this weeklong promotion designed to bring awareness and recognition to quality distance education conjures up some mixed feelings. While it is nice to see this segment of higher education get the accolades it certainly deserves, it is also a little sad that after almost two decades of success in the higher education market place, we needed to designate a specific week in its honor?  I feel the same way about National Grandparent’s Day.  Do we really need a special day, or week in this case, to recognize something so good?

I started thinking about some other things happening in higher ed that could benefit from having their own specially designated weeks for recognition.  How about these:

• National Private College Disappearance Week – for those colleges that have been resisting distance education for years and are now starting to disappear.

• “You Can’t Deliver that Class Online” Week – for those faculty members that continue to assert their classes could not possibly be delivered online.

• National “Save Our Institution” Week – for college administrators who think putting a syllabus online or contracting with a third-party vendor to deliver their courses will save their failing institutions.

• Faculty Against Technology Week – you can figure this out by the name, but unfortunately, it was cancelled this year due to poor response.  Evidently, none of the faculty read their email or saw the post on social media. Paper surveys will be mailed to them next week to solicit consensus on a unified position statement about why technology is bad in education.

• Department of Education is Here for You Week – unfortunately the development of the portal to engage with the DOE was awarded to the same Canadian firm developing the ObamaCare website…enough said.

So party on people, virtually of course. Let’s raise of glass of symbolism over substance and give three big cheers to tradition.

Be sure to share and comment… 

Mark

Last week I received a phone call from Maranda, a stay-at-home mom who has been working on her PhD and is ready to re-enter the higher education admissions game after taking ten years off to care for her children. Maranda was my Director of Admissions for the now defunct Mountain State University, and what a story we could write about the rise and fall of a wildly innovative organization. Recruiting and enrollment management were two things MSU did with precision and Maranda was the best Director of Admissions I have ever had the pleasure of working beside.

Maranda explained that the timing is right and she is ready to get back in the enrollment management game; she is nearing end of her PhD program and her husband is considering relocating his practice. She wanted to know if I could find her an unpaid internship in an admissions office so she could get back up to speed with the new practices and policies for higher ed recruiting that emerged while she was home being a Mom.

I thought for a while about what has changed in higher education recruiting. Sure, the way schools use social media has certainly changed, and there have been some changes in student information system vendors, but other than those, I really don’t think we have made wholesale systematic changes in how we market, recruit and enroll students. So I started thinking, what could the new enrollment management function look like if we did things differently?

When trying to answer these types questions, I have a tendency to suggest an innovative solution that is EXACTLY the opposite of what is currently being done. What would happen, for example, if instead of admissions officers and selection committees choosing the incoming freshman class, we let the applicants themselves determine who will be in their class? Let them decide whom they ultimately want to be associated with as alumni. This would give those applicants who really want to attend one particular institution an opportunity to use crowdsourcing and Facebook-style tactics to improve their chances of getting accepted, an especially useful tactic for those students who, on paper, may not appear to be a perfect candidates, but whose uniqueness could ultimately enrich the campus. Now this cannot be the sole criterion, but it definitely could be a significant factor in the selection equation.  Of course, there are many details to work out, but it certainly is a conversation starter.

As for Maranda, I have found her an internship with one of the colleges in our consortium. The skills, tactics and approaches she used ten years ago are still relevant because we were so efficient and good at recruiting back then, now she is well ahead of the game today. Don’t tell her though, because they need her help… and for free to boot.

What are your thoughts about how to truly change the way we recruit and enroll students?  Post and share!

Stats of Immigrants

Last night I had the privilege and honor of meeting Hector and Dianna from Honduras. This husband and wife came to an info session for our Spanish General Education Program that allows students with limited English proficiency to enroll directly into college-level courses that are delivered in Spanish to facilitate English language learning.

Hector asked most of his questions in Spanish, worried that his English was not strong enough to convey the complex and sophisticated questions he had about the program. He needed to be sure he understood the details.

I discovered Hector was about to turn 55 and wanted his Associate’s degree so that he could become a para-educator in the local public school.  After the meeting was over, I asked Hector and Dianna to tell me why they came to the United States. Being the grandson of an immigrant from Spain, I am always curious about the reasons a person leaves their home country to come to the U.S.A. Hector told me his story. At 5:39 am on June 28, 2009, Honduras experienced a coup d’état in the form of a constitutional crisis, resulting in public protests and military intervention. At the time, Hector, who had served as a teacher and a principal in the local school system, was a professor of Sociology at a local university.  Dianna taught Geology at the same university. Feeling a sense of duty and obligation, they recorded some of the public protests and sent the footage to media outlets in the United States and other countries.  As a result, they were threatened by local authorities and forced to flee from their home and to seek asylum in the U.S., a place they had only visited earlier in their lives.

Meat Packing Plant

Today, this former university professor works in a meat processing plant, literally slaughtering cattle with a knife, every day. Dianna, recently promoted to a union representative, had also worked in the ground beef packing division of the same meat processing plant.

As a former Director of Admissions, I have personally conveyed to incoming students the value of an education, describing it as an investment that will have a lifetime return.  What I learned from Hector and Dianna is that I was wrong.  I learned that the same system of higher education that makes those bold promises of irrefutable value is the same system that diminishes it.

This week I have met Spanish-speaking students who hold Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from institutions in their home countries that are not recognized by the American education system.  Forcing these students to start over, only after being subjected to months, if not years, of ESL programs, is an outrage.  As I listened to Hector and Dianna, the full gamut of emotions swept over me – from sorrow, to frustration then to anger – at how something like this could possibly happen in a system purportedly run by highly educated individuals.  Then my thoughts turned to the hypothetical – how quickly could this could happen to us if something equally as catastrophic happened in our hometown?  How many of us in HigherEd would be willing to seek asylum in another country, kill cows with a large knife and package their parts while possessing the intellect and education to be a professor or an administrator at a college?

eduKan’s ELL Program

Hector and Dianna’s passion for education and their patience with their new American life has inspired me to so something about the situation.  Frankly, I am not sure what that is, but I made a promise to my new friends to help them in any way I can. They truly feel blessed to have the opportunity to be in the U.S. and to raise their three children in a country as free as ours. Although they make more money as meat packing employees in the U.S. than they did as university professors in Honduras, Hector is relentlessly pursuing his Associate’s degree, not to earn a promotion at the plant, but to earn certification to be a Para-educator at his children’s school – a job that fills his soul more than his wallet.

Stockport bus station, Stockport, Greater Manchester, England and in the mid-distance is St Mary’s church and to the right is the Hat Museum

I spent last week in Istanbul, Turkey and Stockport, England helping institutions in Europe expand their online class offerings. While in Stockport, our host arranged for a tour of the Hat Museum. Stockport was the center of hat making for several hundred years and almost all hats made and sold from England had their origins in Stockport. Even the American classic Stetson was invented in Stockport.

As we were taking the tour, our guide explained the process of using mercury in a boiling vat to shrink the felt as the first part of the production process. Workers who were exposed to the noxious vapors emitted from this process often exhibited odd and aggressive behaviors and were described as being mad as a hatter. The toxic effects of mercury poisoning were discovered in 1829 and 35 years later, Lewis Carroll injected the Mad Hatter character in his classic tale, Alice in Wonderland. It wasn’t until 1941 that the demands for mercury in the war efforts forced the manufactures to agree to replace mercury with hydrogen peroxide in the production of hats.

Hat Works Museum

Why would the hat industry continue to subject the employees to such a toxic environment when they knew the devastating effects? Maybe it was easier just to continue to do it the way they always did it.

“Yeah, it may not be good but this is how I learned to make hats and this is the way we are going to make hats.”

Maybe the companies didn’t want to invest in new manufacturing equipment and retrain their employees. Maybe the employees would lose their jobs if they were replaced with technology and the companies.

Regardless of the reason, I am sure you are trying to figure out what this has to do with education or innovation, two things about which I am passionate. Well, we know some of the things we do now in higher education are not as effective as they once were; yet we continue to do them.

Classic Mad Hatter Style Hat

We claim to be scholars but yet ignore research on what learning styles are the most effective. We still allow faculty to be the sage on stage, lecturing to classes of students despite the compelling research indicating the brain activity of students during a lecture is similar to brain activity while watching TV.

Research shows students learn as well online as in they do in the classroom and that the most effective style is a hybrid class that blends online with an in-seat component. Just like hatters were hired for their skill at making hats, faculty members are hired for their subject matter expertise. Unlike the hat factory owners, who knew better but continued to poison their workforce, as administrators, we must be embrace what we know about learning and change our practices so that our graduates don’t end up mad as a hatter!

What practices are still in use at your institution that are making you, mad as a hatter? Share with me.

Non-native English speaking students trying to enter the higher education system in the United States face daunting challenges. Consider first the requirement at most institutions that a student have four years of high school English. The premise of the American Dream is that more education leads to increased socioeconomic status, guaranteeing a better life for the next generation. This premise, however, is complicated for non-English speaking students.

Don’t get me wrong – I firmly believe that if you are going to live and work in a country, you need to be proficient with the language. It is deeply engrained in my family history. My grandfather spoke no English when he arrived in the United States from Spain in 1918. He did not petition for the United States to adapt to his language nor did he expect signs to be written in Spanish. He learned the language on his own while working 50+ hours per week.

This may sound harsh, and I assure you that I am not criticizing immigrants seeking a better life. I am criticizing the people in the educational system who remain content with mediocre methodology for teaching language. There have been fabulous advances in the technology of learning driven by credible research. To me, it is simply unacceptable to use old tools to teach and assess language acquisition simply because it is how it has always been done in the past.

Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti

There are new ideas we should try that will not only speed the acquisition of languages, but also increase retention. Tim Ferriss tells the story of Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti who mastered 29 languages and was reported to be conversational in an additional eight by using translations of the Lord’s Prayer. Tim’s approach uses 13 basic sentences that he asserts contain all the components necessary for proficiency in any language.

It is time to step up our game. Cardinal Mezzofanti died in 1849, yet we have been reticent to embrace his style of language learning. The reason my grandfather came to America was to have a better life; that dream still drives millions a year to come to the United States. It is time to help them realize their their American Dream.

What are your thoughts regarding this topic? Have you found a viable solution? Are you as frustrated as I am? Share below or online and let’s start a dialog.

Ellen Clapsaddle “The Army and Navy Forever!”

As Memorial Day approaches, many of us will make plans to cookout with friends and family, go to the beach, or just enjoy the time off. I whole heartily encourage you, however, to take a few moments to reflect on those individuals who have willingly and selflessly protected the freedom we enjoy today yet often take for granted.

On February 22, 2013, I had the honor of attending a ceremony in Norfolk, VA celebrating the retirement of Colonel Jeff Waechter from the United States Air Force. Col. Waechter is a soldier, pilot and educator whose passion for finding new and innovative ways to educate military students has produced awesome results at the Joint Forces Staff College.

If you have never attended a full military ceremony, you truly are missing something special. The Joint Forces Staff College serves all branches of the military so the ceremony included representatives and traditions from all the branches, not just the Air Force where Col. Waechter served dutifully. Col. Waechter was presented with his retirement flag as the poem by SMSgt Don S. Miller USAF (Ret.) entitled My Name is Old Glory was read aloud.

As the flag was passed from one person to the next, each proudly representing their individual branch, I was flooded with emotion. Watching their purposeful and precise movements and the honor and respect with which they handled the flag was overwhelming. Even now as I am writing this, those overwhelming emotions that I first experienced that day in February have come flooding back, as moving and vivid today as they were then.

Listening to Col. Waechter give his farewell speech, I couldn’t help but see how passionate he is about the business of educating and how I think many individuals in the business of education have lost their passion.

Here’s the link for Col Waechter’s Retirement Program.

When I think about the young men and women who fearlessly and freely fight for the freedoms we enjoy, some of whom were told to consider military service because they were not “college material,” I am reminded that with freedom comes choice. These young men and women are defending our right to choose to accept an educational system that was once the envy of the world, but is now lagging behind in rank and quality. I am troubled that we squander the stalwart protection of the heroic men and women in the armed forces because we have chosen to be mediocre.

Photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Derek Poole

I challenge you to take time this Memorial Day to reflect on those men and women who willingly make unimaginable sacrifices, devoting their lives to the protection of our country, and find your passion for education. At different times in our lives, we have all been a son or a daughter, a child or an adult, a student or a teacher. Today is the day to be a teacher. Let your passion teach our students that we will no longer choose mediocre.

They deserve it.

Way to be wildly innovative, IBM.

In your whitepaper, Taking the Guesswork out of Student Retention, you highlight the benefits of using IBM SPSS to predict and improve student retention. SPSS, first introduced as Statistical Package for Social Science and later changed to Statistical Product and Service Solutions, was first released in 1968. Granted, IBM paid 1.2 billion to purchase the company in 2009, so maybe it is just new to them. Anyone close to my age who attended graduate school will remember the pain and suffering of using SPSS and will probably agree with my assertion that IBM is going to have a tough time convincing us that their product is now user friendly and can help us with retention.

Take a close look at the whitepaper. Start with the title, Taking the Guesswork out of Student Retention. You might infer from this bold title that SPSS has found a solution for retention issues. If true, this could help every institution in the world; who doesn’t want better retention? Yet the document doesn’t contain any evidence to support the claim that SPSS has improved retention. The first example from an implementation at Baruch College quotes the following:

Using IBM SPSS software, the college was able to better integrate data across all units. This led to a 7.1 increase in applications to its business school – when other schools were seeing sharp decreases – and a 21 percent annual increase in transfer students. Baruch also used IBM SPSS technologies to improve the placement of freshman in introductory courses, which significantly reduced drop outs.

Call me silly, but for a company that sells statistical software to use the words  “significantly reduced” is like the Pope saying sin is “kind of bad.” If they had claimed that “retention rose 22% over last year” or that the “college realized a net increase in total revenue by $200,000,” I may have been able to buy it.  But an increase in applications? What does that have to do with retention?

The next example is of SPSS being used at American Public University. I know APU’s Vice President of Research and Development, Dr. Phil Ice, personally. He has done amazing work using predictive analytics. I also know that APU has done more than just “predict with 80 percent certainty at what point a given student is likely to drop out.”  For IBM to simply stop the story there without further discussing the amazing outcomes at APU is a slap in the face to Phil and his team, simply for the benefit of a marketing promo piece. If I were Phil, or the president of APU, I would be perturbed with IBM for publishing this assertion that their product was the primary reason for retention success, a fact the whitepaper fails to mention.

IBM, your public relations firm missed the mark with this obvious MARKETING ploy. My advice to you is to reconsider your entry into a market as an effort to repay that 1.2 billion dollar purchase of SPSS until you are 100% sure that you know how that market operates. I am left wondering if your software could have predicted just how far off the mark you are on this endeavor, from a statistically relevant perspective, of course.

Another interesting IBM factoid: In 1943, IBM chairman Thomas Watson said “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Now it’s your turn to tell me what you think about this? Share below, or tweet me @eduKanCEO.