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A university can have a strategy, as can a school, a department, and a program. A school can set a strategy for its online programs. All of this is true, but the question remains: At what organizational level does creating a strategy have the most impact?

Higher Education Strategy Series: This is the second entry of this series. This page describes the whole series and provides links to all of the articles.

For some, a strategy is something that has been written — sometimes through a process that involves countless meetings and untold memos — and then put on a shelf to be forever ignored. Others have operated in an organization that, as far as is known, does not have a strategy. A lucky few of us have worked in an organization that has a clearly stated strategy. In this article I make the case for having a strategy and at what level of the organization it should be defined and be operational.

Higher Education Strategy Series: This is the first entry of this series. This page describes the whole series and provides links to all of the articles.

At the Association of American Colleges & Universities Annual Meeting, Dr. Cynthia Kosso (the provost at Moravian College) and I gave a presentation titled “Building Online Capacity at a Liberal Arts College.” In this post I will share some quotes from the 60-minute presentation — giving  you the real-world perspective of a liberal arts college that has successfully embarked on the journey to online learning. 

Introduction to this Series

This is the first of a series of blog posts related to the multi-program financial model I have built. This financial model, housed in a Google Sheet, predicts the cash flows for your institution if it were to launch up to five new online programs in the next six years. This is a complicated model; it requires that you be able to answer a series of questions about your institution and those programs...so this won’t be a short exercise. But I’ve made it easier  for you by already building the model—you just have to fill in the values. And you can always change your answers later as you learn more! 

What happens when you tell an investor you can sell $2 bills to unsuspecting buyers for ten $1 bills and further that you can convince the buyers to sign a 10-year deal agreeing to these terms? That investor would be suitably impressed, of course, and would happily invest in your company at a high valuation. But then what would happen if you later went back to that investor and explained how these buyers you’d been selling to are gaining experience, talking to each other, and now are demanding to pay two dollars for that snazzy $2 bill?