It has been said that one of the few institutions that would be recognizable to Galileo are our colleges and their campuses. However, in recent years access to information and rapidity of communication has given rise to truly different models of higher education (Berg, 2005; Bonk, 2009). This paper--by authors with faculty, administrative, and instructional design experience--highlights some of the challenges faced by our campuses in making the changes necessary to address the needs and desires of contemporary students and society, operating on a limited budget. We present the approach taken by one institution. Administration and Faculty We present two frameworks for understanding faculty and administrator efforts at responding to feedback and demands from our external constituencies. Previous work on organizational change (Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch, 1974) suggests that systems' initial attempts at change involve "changing without changing." That is, an organization (or individual, for that matter) will typically initiate change by using strategies that it has typically used in the past, without more fundamental changes to the organization (what these authors call "second order change"). Rather than engaging students in knowledge discovery and creation, we will put PowerPoint slides online, continuing our unidirectional transmission of information. We contend that fundamental change in our thinking about teaching and learning—and our institutions—is essential to successful implementation of online education. An additional framework comes from Kuhn's work on scientific revolutions (Kuhn, 1962). In science when an anomaly is discovered the initial reaction of mainstream scientists is to dismiss the finding, and later criticize and discredit the anomaly finder. In much the same way, traditional higher education has been dismissive of the "for-profit" institutions as being of lower quality—both students and faculty. Assertions which were often made without any supporting evidence. Like Kuhn's scientists, it was a reflexive reaction to a challenge to the prevailing paradigm. A key to making the substantive change involves bridging the gap between where faculty are and where they might be. This involves faculty development which meets those needs. Unfortunately, as Glenn (2009) notes "college leaders too often lack a strong sense of how to use teaching centers...administrators sometimes let the centers drift." The world in which we live focuses on "just in time" delivery of services and dispersed authority in problem solving and training; however, our teaching centers are often built around a "y'all come" presentation. Finally, our institutions too often fail to encourage innovation, favoring standardization. Finally, how to get faculty involved? First, recognize what rewards appeal to faculty, and find those that align with student needs and interests. Summer salary is one key way that faculty supplement their income; student preferences resulted in online courses being the only courses virtually guaranteed to have sufficient enrollment to be offered. Faculty had experiences which showed them the possibilities for online education. We were also fortunate to have an interdisciplinary program built by cobbling together multiple minors. As a result, we didn't need a single department to offer all of their courses online—three or four per department across a few departments would do. Within two years, we were able to offer the interdisciplinary program completely online. Our next step was to enhance faculty development. Our institution had a well-funded traditional faculty development center that averaged 5 attendees at its many workshops. It was clear that this traditional approach was not engaging faculty in their own development—even when, in some cases, faculty were compensated for attending sessions. Our model was a different one; the instructional designer was place in the college and given student workers (in graphic design) as assistants. We sought to provide faculty support through several mechanisms. First, through traditional "make an appointment and come by"; through online or phone trouble shooting. We also offered two different faculty learning communities, in which faculty met weekly for an entire semester—each working on their own project and providing feedback to others. The College provided a small fund; learning community members made the decision about how the money would be used. Assessment data suggest that members were very satisfied with the experience and their learning, and that the experience changed their approach to teaching (Meyers & Lively, 2008). Engaging Students Our model engaged students on two levels. First, as "engaged consumers" of information in online classes and service learning courses. Second, as facilitators of course development. As "digital natives", our students were prepared to benefit from technology-enhanced courses across a number of disciplines. Second Life courses engaged students in a 3D psychology discussion forum which included rooms in the clouds with teleport to fireside discussions. Courses were created in Papervision3D for biology and world history courses which engaged students in a 3D carousel video wheel. 3D "Jeopardy" poetry and "CityScape" games were used to engage students in 3D game play on the web and distributed as open source components for other universities. 3D chat rooms were created for Women's Literature in Papervison3D in which participants met to discuss works of art. In addition, students in a service-learning course partnered with our team to build virtual 3D Google Map sites to facilitate historical tourism in a local city. Central to any online program is an efficient and cost effective pipeline for producing quality eLearning content. Building such a pipeline requires the creation of a new learning environment which streamlines training and uses local student talent. Graphic Design students were taught development skills by immersion facilitated by a skilled developer and collaboratively learn by teaming on projects with other students. A video/code tutorial trail is left behind on YouTube and Google Code by student designers which enables new student designers and faculty to come up to speed rapidly on projects. Students gain international recognition for work by publishing open source projects and collaborating on community and industry projects. This approach allowed us to bring design students up to speed in 6 weeks (as opposed to 2 years) and made them highly employable upon graduation (and even before in a number of cases!).
