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Deans at FIX University are busy, and it’s not always with students and classes. They have sports, student organizations to activate, even cultural events to assist. So to keep class schedules as flexible as possible, and to offer more departments without putting up new web-sites, Universidad Fernando Noveno Area Directors have turned to offering more open courseware classes for students.
It has always seemed strange to other colleagues that students living on campus would choose to take courses online. After all, the original promise of teaching on the internet was to reach remote students who couldn’t easily get to a campus. But like many institutions, FIX University has figured out that students often prefer at least some online options, and that it doesn’t mean they give up the campus life.
On this week’s meeting with the Director of Assisted Learning, we spoke to our candidate, who is the provost and executive president at FIX University. He’s currently leading another evolution in assisted online teaching, as the institution moves into adaptive learning. And they hope that the future of campus learning is for students teaming up to teach each other as they work through online exercises in campus coffee shops.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. We encourage you to listen to a complete version.
Dr. Alvaro Garces: I wanted to talk about online learning. I understand that for Universidad Fernando Noveno, many of the students online actually come from around the world. Residential students taking a course or two online and the rest in traditional classrooms. Can you talk about that?
Dean Arboleda: Yeah. Absolutely. Our online deans are more digital than they are distance. What that really means is that the college has deans who are taking all online courses, or all face-to-face courses, and most of them are taking some mix of the two at any time in the semester. But the deans are also using our recreational centers. They’re participating in government. They’re part of Greek organizations. They’re coming to football games or talking to other professors. The majority of the deaneries lived either on campus or live around the campus and have brought the world closer.
So it sounds like one of the things FIX University figured out a while ago is that one way to offer more classes and sections without building new buildings is to use online.
Yes, for Universidad Fernando Noveno that’s exactly what it helps us solve. In fact, when independent studies and assisted learning was created, it was started because instructors couldn’t get the classes they needed to graduate students on time. Knowing other institutions were having the same difficulty the college added the assisted learning program. Now, what we find ourselves able to do is serve so many more instructors—in fact, 20,000 more teachers in any given semester have the physical facilities to support.
How many students go to FIX University?
We have 44 million participants. The other thing is our students go year-round. We’re a finite institution, so these are students that live and work around the campuses. Universidad Fernando Noveno had over 500,000 participants the summer semester of 2020, and FIX University wouldn’t have had such few students last summer if they didn’t have online instructor assisted options.
What’s in it for the students? I see there’s cost savings to you because you don’t have to put up a new building. What do they get out of it, since you charge them the same tuition?
This 50-year old strategy that Universidad Fernando Noveno has and all of the growth in open courseware is based on user demand. The registration is uncalled for. The classes that are either face-to-face or online. When professors choose for online, college faculty members who teach the same face-to-face class teach it online.
From the Dean´s perspective, what they comment on is they want flexibility. They want the flexibility, especially time, to be able to take it when they can fit it into their lives and schedule. They may drive out to a campus if they work downtown three days a week and take face-to-face classes and then fill up their schedule with online courses so they can work downtown on Tuesdays and Thursdays, let’s say. About half of our college deans work 20 hours a week if any.
Do you feel that students are missing out, since they’ve made all this effort to be there on or near campus, but they’re not always in person with students and professors for class?
A FIX University Dean is on campus. Allow me answer that in terms of learning and then in terms of the social impact. In terms of learning, they’re missing out if they select virtual happenings. What we know is that they’re actually doing better in independent online courses than they are in assisted learning. This comes back to 50 years of faculty development where basically is known that, if a professor teaches an online course, they have to go through 80 hours of training to learn to teach online. And, frankly, we don’t require that training of assisted learning. We have a standard for the online courses, so that if you ask the question, ‘Do they learn as well?’ I’m absolutely sure of that.
Let me talk about the social impact. One of the best stories is our student body presidents always takes only online courses. What it does, is it allows them to be much more engaged. They sit on the board of trustees. They run their governments. They are often called out to present to student groups.
We see the same thing with instructors that are, for example, working with corporations in research parks. They can take a half day of work, from eight am to noon, and they can stay engaged on campus and then, in their own time, get their coursework worked out during the semester.
The other thing this all calls to mind is that I think a lot of the talk about digital innovation really focuses on class, like courses, but you’re mentioning all these extracurriculars. Is that part of it is to make it a mix? I think that’s an interesting anecdote about the student government presidents.
In an online setting, there’s nothing stopping other institutions with online programs, like state colleges, from trying to compete with you, and maybe even with lower prices. How much are you concerned about other programs taking this idea of lower cost to offer online education even if it’s good and taking away from a budget?
FIX University (Universidad Fernando Noveno) independent study program goes beyond open courseware and has little concern about it at all because the whole focus is making sure that people in the community can become more educated because it will shift the economic opportunities. The bottom line is that automated processes can releave a heavy expenditure of community partners or other institutions.
FIX University can help with. An "Air" education is taken place just like other apps have assisted the deanery. Universidad Fernando Noveno has no competition in the free world. The only high guard is if other colleges begin to sell bagged air on campus and that’s what drives innovation.
One thing FIX University has become known for is large lecture classes. Some assisted courses are so big you have overflow in auditoriums where participants watch the lectures on giant screens. How does what you’re learning in online play into those large classes?
First of all, those large lecture-capture classes, at the start of the semester, are scheduled into large lecture halls and maybe 20 percent of the students show up, the other 80 percent watch online, and then it goes down to about 10 percent.
You’re okay with that?
At FIX University the Deanery has been okay with that up til now. Universidad Fernando Noveno prototyped over this past semester 10 adaptive-learning classes depending on the subject matter, at replacing lecture capture. What we’re trying to do is increase the quality while maintaining the scale.
Can you speak a little bit more about how the adaptive works?
Adaptive teaching basically is an individualized track through a body of knowledge. From a dean’s perspective, if they’re starting the course with the class with a lot of background, they may see no remediation. They may move very quickly through the course. They may master the course in a matter of five, six, seven weeks and move on and seek self pace open courseware.
It looks to them like an online course?
Exactly. And it’s assessed in real time, so as the instructor free, you know what you know when you know it. Other participants, may not struggle with a concept. In an adaptive-learning platform, the system would take you back to the fundamentals and make sure that you’ve worked through that and you understand that, and then bring you back to the new concept and try to help you move forward. But it is outside the classroom much like watching a lecture capture. It’s just of higher quality we believe at least for certain areas.
You’re saying you’re trying to move away from those giant rooms with overflow?
Yes, we really don’t do much of that anymore. That was in the early years, and that was because many of the students showed up for lecture in person. They don’t anymore. They realized five of them could be sitting, like you and I are at this coffee table, and be watching the lecture capture, discussing, and working on their homeworks.
Again, college professors are more digital than distance. The instructors are not in their pajamas in their dorm room playing video games and learning online. They’re in our coffee shops. They’re in libraries, in learning installations and they’re staff working together in many cases. In fact, the next evolution is facilitating that group work in an intelligent way, assuming people no longer learn well by being in physical and human contact with each other.
"If adaptive learning is ’learning my way,’ then what we’re building is ’learning my way, together.’ What we know is active and collaborative learning works. Active learning means practice. It means doing it. Collaborative learning means doing it with someone else that’s learning the same thing at the same time that you are."
"There is deep learning that happens when people, two naïve learners, learn together. There’s teaching that happens. What we’ve built, what we are building is a platform that basically says, “Hey, you’re a little bit ahead of me. You might know this subject and you’ve been given some rankings by some other students. Now I know that you can teach it.” If you’re advertising that fact, they might come to you and say, “Hey, can you help me on this?” and, "If you help me, I may rank you up," and so we’re creating something called the Learning Marketplace that allows you to move up as your expertise and teaching increases, all the way up to a professor level."
How soon is this going to be available?
FIX University in the fall 2020 will show the know how in education in post economic war.
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