On July 25, 2010, I gave the commencement speech at American Sentinel University in Denver.  Here is the approximate text of the address: 

Online education: why you are perfectly positioned to succeed in life

Thank you President Adams,  Chief Executive Oliver, the faculty of American Sentinel University and honored guests for inviting me to speak today.  It is pleasure to be here to provide a few thoughts on the occasion of this commencement.

To the graduates – I bring Greetings!  I am proud to be here today on a day that marks a very significant achievement in your lives.  I congratulate you on your attainment of securing an online degree from American Sentinel University.   You could not be obtaining an online degree at a better time in history.  I firmly believe that Online education is becoming an integral part of American Higher Education and that you are part of the vanguard of graduates from online programs.  Why is this important?  My answer is that all of us must engage in education for the rest of our lives – to learn new skills and apply them in a world that is no longer only brick and mortar.  As we engage this new culture of everyone learning for the rest of their lives, all of us that understand and utilize online learning are well ahead of those that follow more traditional pathways.   You have learned how to learn in this environment – meaning that you are perfectly positioned to continue to learn and to earn a living in this new-age environment where learning takes place anywhere –anytime.

I started with online education 17 years ago when people were certainly disbelievers – I was told repeatedly that if you can’t look them in the eye, they can’t learn.  Well, you showed them, didn’t you…? you came and you learned and rarely saw the whites of any professor’s eyes.  Of course, technology improved over the years – I recall the story about an early online teacher..

It goes something  like this:

Instructor:  Hello  (in answer to a call on the phone)
Student:  Hi, I can’t access the course online
Instructor:  What seems to be the problem?
Student:  My screen is black
Instructor:  oh yeah, is the monitor plugged in?
Student:  Let me look …. (pause).. yes it is plugged into the wall socket
Instructor:   ok, look on the back of the monitor and find the cord that is not plugged into the wall and see if it is plugged firmly into the computer.
Student:  (pausing and looking)….. I can’t see very well…
Instructor:  can you turn on a light?
Student:  no, we have a power outage here ……
___ ____ ___

Well, that rarely happens anymore – we’ve come a long way since those times.  The level of understanding about computers and their use has certainly helped us move forward with online education.

I’ve always been interested in the leading edge of how you teach online.  I’ll share with you a story about how I’ve been teaching an online course for the last 3 years.  This is a course at Babson College, where I’m a Professor Emeritus of Technology Entrepreneurship.  The course has about 30 students in it each semester and those students are located around New England, but due to the fact they are working adults are often at many places around the world.  I decided some years ago to use Second Life for the course; a virtual environment where we could all gather synchronously and discuss the week’s work and invite guest speakers to come.   Second Life was started as a game by Linden Labs.. and I imagine that many of you have used it before in that way (anyone here used Second Life?).  It turns out that higher education has started using Second Life as an educational venue and, indeed, most universities and colleges have an island in Second Life where they hold classes.  The neat thing about Second Life is the ability to replicate the classroom experience – binaural sound is a key feature along with the ability to share media.  What I do is combine the use of Blackboard and a wiki (as well as other tools) with Second Life, so that we can have both synchronous meetings and asynchronous learning activities, such as you have become intimately familiar with in the course of taking your degree from American Sentinel University.   The key thing I found out was that using this type of technology provides a real step-up in social connectivity.  It is a way that people learning together can discuss topics easily just as if they were in the same room, can hear guest speakers from anywhere in the world and get all this at a cost that is quite low.  Each semester I start by having a guest from New Zealand come by for a short while – that is easy to do since we have a Sunday evening class, and it is Monday morning there .  Quite often, members of the class say they are at various places around the world – “I’m dialing in from in an Internet Café in Paris, for example” – it makes education very convenient.  A few weeks ago, one student said “I’m stuck in Iceland with the ash from the volcano”…  But sitting around the table in Second Life discussing a topic in Social Media, no one would have known he was actually in Iceland.

 I think education is moving in a direction in which all of you can participate in the upcoming years as lifelong learners. I know all of you are expert with computer use… and that is a major part of my message – I want to discuss with you how to use that capability which you have acquired and why that uniquely qualifies you to succeed.
What is going to be important for you in the upcoming years?  You, a newly degreed person, have countless opportunities – where should you expend your energies in these online environments that you are now knowledgeable about?  My core message today is that you should leverage what you have learned to do so well to aid you in moving your career and your life forward in the future.  You now have an advantage – and you should capitalize on it!  Let me speak to three things that you should carefully consider as you venture forth with your new degree:

* Learning new formal skills and securing additional degrees.
* Social networking
* Your personal brand

Let’s talk about lifelong learning for a moment.  Given that you have had this wonderful experience in securing a degree through online education, I am recommending that you stay engaged in higher education by finding learning experiences online that you can begin as soon as possible.  There are many things available, from free webinars to paid courses that count toward advanced degrees.  For those of you getting a bachelors’ degree – there are many master’s degrees available online.  For those of you receiving masters, likewise there are many Ph.D degrees.  And, for those of you receiving Associate’s degrees – the bachelor’s degree is not far away.  For those of you searching for specializations that you can’t get here at American Sentinel, Sloan-c is currently working to provide you with a catalog online where you can find what is right for you. In the spirit of full disclosure, I will mention again that I work for The Sloan Consortium – it is a good source for all things about online learning.  The Consortium was created by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a non-profit professional organization dedicated to helping improve anywhere-anytime learning around the world.

A second very useful area to engage in is social networking; especially for learning.  You do learn from others – we know that discussion groups really help in learning new materials – and what better way than to engage in social networking groups in the area of your work?  As you take a job or continue in one you have now, you would be well-advised to consider the technique of joining  various  online special interest groups on the topic of your work (for example, listservs are an easy way to start – albeit rather ole-timey now).  Your expertise in learning online, of course, makes online interactions easy for you. You should use the tools of Social Networking – for example, blogs and Twitter.  In fact,   Twitter is a great example;  a friend of mine told me that any time he wanted to know something, he just tweeted the question to his followers and he would have an answer instantly  (of course, he had some 1000 people in his network).  -- So imagine you are in a work situation in which you can really stand out because of the knowledge that you have.  While much of your knowledge was acquired here at American Sentinel, you can get more immediate knowledge on a specific topic from your social network – and almost instantly.  Using instantly available knowledge from others can help you solve problems more rapidly than your peers.. It will make a difference!

 You can learn from blogs and from the advice of online friends.  Starting your own blog is a great way to start getting noticed – just be careful what you say.  These tools will help you improve what you know and enable you to use what others know immediately –  this will make you look really smart in your workplace compared to those that don’t use these new technologies. 

The third and perhaps most important area is in improving your own personal brand.  In fact, the ideas about social networking lead immediately to the idea of improving your own personal brand – What’s your personal brand – what does that mean?  Well, your brand is basically your name and what people associate with that name.  To establish a personal brand, you can work both on-ground and on-line.  We mentioned just now how you can become expert at work by relying on your social network.  You can also become an expert on-line by answering questions, by blogging, by tweeting and participating in all sorts of social interaction on –line.  If you work hard at becoming a professional expert online, that reputation will give you great creditability and significantly improve your standing in your on-ground job.   I really believe this method works and have evidence from many students that supports this assertion. 
These three activities:  (1) continuing to learn online by taking courses, workshops and the like, (2) engaging in social networking and (3) working hard to improve your personal brand  will really help to propel your career.  I strongly recommend that you follow up on these recommendations.

Why have I told you these three things? - because you are so spectacularly situated to take advantage of these suggestions.  Through the education that you have received at American Sentinel University you can enter the life-long-learning/social media/personal branding world with very little difficulty and make even fuller use of your online education.
Use the power of online learning to uplift your opportunities --- you are not through learning just because you have now secured an online degree – you have to capitalize on it.  You were a pioneer, getting your degree online.  Now is the time to embrace online to continue to learn throughout your lifetime.  

Good luck to you and Godspeed to you!