Online Learning's Journey: 2000-2022

Book Review: Staying Online: How to Navigate Digital Higher Education, Robert Ubell, Routledge, 2022.

 By Gordon Freedman

 As the author weaves the issues of the pandemic into the traditional operations of higher education, which historically bucked legitimizing online learning, “Staying Online” moves from an internal higher ed accounting of online learning’s ascendancy to that of historical reporting on one of the most dramatic episodes in the evolution of higher education which, finally, cemented in online and virtual learning as mainstream.

In 2000, Robert Ubell launched version one of WebCampus, pictured above left, at the Stevens Institute of Technology. As the newly appointed Dean of Online Learning, Ubell joined a handful of pioneer institutions, including the University of Maryland University Campus, Penn State’s Global Campus, Western Governors University and the SUNY system. Much of this experimentation was generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Starting in the late 1990s, the Sloan Foundation eventually invested $75 million through the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C), now the Online Learning Consortium (OLC). This unprecedented philanthropic investment jump-started and nurtured higher ed online learning under the wise and practical guidance of Sloan program officer Frank Mayadas.

In those early days, no one knew whether online learning would catch on. In 2000, I was part of the Dot-Com web portal HungryMinds (circa 2000), meant to market the new online higher ed offerings, including Stevens’ WebCampus and those of the Sloan-C members and others. In order to determine if online learning had a viable future, HungryMinds, along with Pearson, Blackboard, WebCT, and the Financial Times, commissioned a joint study to determine if online would grow from 2000 forward, excerpted here:

Pearson Education [and collaborators] today announced the results of the first statistically valid study of US demand for Internet-based education and training courses. According to this study, about 3% of Americans aged 18 and up (roughly 6.3 million adults) say they plan to take Internet-based education or training courses in the next 12 months.

While these numbers were minuscule compared to today, they represented a solid start for the new industry. Ubell, both at Stevens and later at NYU, was part of igniting online learning and tending to its consistent growth with concentrated and unrelenting effort. Ubell and a small number of dedicated then-futurists became the primary boosters, responsible, in part, for prodding institutions and faculty to legitimize online learning as a recognized part of higher ed, not just a convenient tool or off-campus revenue source.

Through numerous papers over the years, his continuing involvement with Mayadas, the Sloan-C consortium, and his previous book, “Going Online: Perspectives on Digital Learning” (Routledge, 2017), Ubell has come to represent the start, rise, maintenance, justification, lock-in, and ultimate reality of online as a solid and necessary component of higher education worldwide. There are a few others who have similar through lines, but they have not packaged a book as lean and convincing as Ubell’s.

As an EdSurge columnist, Ubell has previously touched on many of the topics in Staying Online. But in book form, thoughtfully laid out, a fuller picture emerges. This is not just recalling important episodes, outlining what works and what doesn’t, and summing up online’s contributions. Instead, Staying Online provides a sense of a cycle of history that we have collectively witnessed over a period of 22 years, that has accompanied the slow and now turbulent changes in higher education. Enrollment declines, females excelling, males not doing so well and the malaise of education’s loss of power and promise while jobs go unfilled, all portends darkening clouds.

Thus, in this light, I see Ubell’s 2022 book as the fitting close to a significant and successful chapter in the evolution of higher education, 2000-to-2022. The chapter would not have closed had Covid not come on like a freight train from hell aimed at the heart of higher ed. The campus, the classroom, the faculty lounge, libraries, breweries, office hours and rapidly expanding administrations were blindsided. Online rapidly turned into virtual education, virtual services and virtual administration. Ubell puts this in perspective and, in my mind, brings the curtain down on the questions of online versus in-person versus blended learning.

Ubell does this by taking the reader on a thoughtful journey through the difficult years of establishing online learning’s legitimacy, to the economic arguments for its viability, to its necessity for working learners to equity issues where in-class, online and blended learning are compared for retention and graduation outcomes. Ubell points out that going online for institutions, instructors and students finally no longer happens in a vacuum chamber or in separate campus projects and, as a corollary, can only prosper through high quality-based design and ample support for online learners, courses and programs. It is now part of the main (to quote John Donne).

While Staying Online provides a superb and compact job of recounting what for many in ed tech, online learning and higher ed see as “inside ball” reporting on the journey from introduction to acceptance to necessity, the book climbed beyond this campus insider talk when Covid put higher ed on trial.

Bringing the 22-year journey of online education into the jaws of the campus closure crisis globally was an unexpected transition that was not smooth or elegant or well-designed. Because online education was never designed to be a replacement for all of higher education. In fact, much of the online learning infrastructure, design and delivery was not up to the task of moving teaching, learning, support and administration online, virtually, en masse. Had it not been for the lucky coincidence of the YouTube-like evolution of Zoom and other virtual technologies at just the right moment, the education crisis would likely have turned into an impossible catastrophe with widespread shutdowns.

Ubell takes us through the territory where online learning and virtual classrooms and administration met up and, we readers, are left with the impression that the online world of teaching, learning, counseling, support and administration have come full circle. As 2023 begins, all forms of education and learning are there to be shaped by institutions, investors, content and technology developers and by the outsized demands of a hungry labor market. The legitimation of many varieties of learning and higher education favor giving learners a wide set of options. Options equal opportunity.

Ubell, in my mind, has allowed us in Staying Online to finally bury the mostly endless past debates about online, and understand, as in 2000, that we are entering entirely new territory which will truly change the face of education without a singular outside or outsized event.  The speed and rapidity of artificial intelligence (AI) in research, writing, auto-generation of assessments, self-writing essays and tool building will accelerate in 2023. So will the demand for all types of employees with or without degrees. Some regions will push hard to make education work in lockstep with employment. This includes a billon dollars from the Federal Build Back Better program and many more well-funded state efforts.

The amount of investment heading in these directions is enormous. It will be servicing intense demand for workers in a demographically contracting labor market in the U.S. As this tsunami begins to gather momentum, knowledge and skill seekers are going to piece together their paths in many different ways. The old world will not look the same.

I and others from the late 1990s inception of learning online are grateful to Bob Ubell for packaging and bookending online learning from inception to acceptance to necessity to now, an inflection point, that will provide the groundwork for the next cycle in higher education whose future will be difficult to predict.

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A Brief Interview with Robert Ubell, author of Staying Online: How to Navigate Digital Higher Education, Robert Ubell, Routledge, 2022.

Q. Did you start the Stevens Institute's WebCampus? If so, explain.

Ubell: Yes. I was the head of web-based distance learning at Stevens. In that role, I thought we needed to brand online learning at the school with a distinctive name, so I invited a high-level faculty committee to suggest proposed names. WebCampus was voted as the best choice.

Q. How did Stevens Institute of Technology make the decision and commit funds so early on? Did you have a senior sponsor in the institution?

Ubell: Before I was appointed, a trustee funded the prospective, new online unit with $350,000. That start-up funding was all that was needed since online tuition each semester provided continuing resources from the first day onward.

Q. What were the early reviews like, early faculty, student and administrator reactions.

Ubell: Most faculty resisted. A few adventurous ones agreed to teach the first courses in a handful of degrees. Frank Mayadas [of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation] offered to contribute a Sloan Foundation grant for an online degree in Telecommunications Management. Sloan continued to support WebCampus and other Stevens projects for many years. The big turning point came when a highly respected faculty member agreed to teach a WebCampus course. Faculty resistance melted.

Q. When did revenue come?

Ubell: A trickle of revenue flowed from the start. We enrolled 23 students the first semester.

Q. How did you convince the Steven Institute of Technology to keep funding?

Ubell: Funding was drawn almost exclusively from continuing tuition revenue.

Q. When did you know that the WebCampus would succeed and when did you know online learning itself would succeed?

Ubell: If I remember, it took about 2 or 3 years for enrollment momentum to surge. By year 5, as I recall, enrollment in online courses started to cannibalize on-campus courses. We knew then that student preference was tilting online.

Q. Who were your early competitors?

Ubell: New Jersey Institute of Technology was also an early entry into the online space. Most other competitors were state schools with online programs. Columbia University was among the strongest with its video network.

Q .When did you get to know the Sloan Foundation? What about program officer Frank Mayadas?

Ubell: I was invited to a local event sponsored by Sloan in New York. Frank approached me as we were departing and asked me to join him for lunch the next week. Over an Indian buffet lunch, Frank offered our very first Sloan grant.

Q. How did you and Frank work together? Toward what end?

Ubell: Frank and I had a very special and very long collegial relationship. In addition to funding Stevens programs, Frank asked me to head projects that he was especially interested in launching. Over some 20 years, we met over Indian lunches I’d say about 4 or 5 times a year in Rockefeller Center near the Sloan Foundation. Frank also funded summer workshops on Lake George for a small group of online researchers and faculty to which I was lucky to be invited. It was one of the most important phases in my education in the field. I became friends and colleagues with some of the most influential and talented leaders today. I joined the Sloan-C board somewhere at the far end of my career at Stevens and continued for a time at NYU when Sloan-C transitioned to OLC (Online Learning Consortium).