Higher Education for Those Who Serve

A-HEC: Your students are scattered in different time zones all over the world, which means that you have classes in session at all hours of the day and night. How do you juggle these challenges in an online environment?

FM: The faculty and students are all online at once and in various ways, broken down by various kinds of sub-groups. We call them faculty practitioners, because although they have regular degrees in business and technology management, a lot of our degrees are specialized: emergency and disaster management, fire science management, homeland security. A lot of our faculty are practicing in those areas. They may work in homeland security in Canada. For example, we have someone who works in intelligence and teaches out of Vienna, Austria.

We have a Web site and something we call the Student Portal. When they log onto it, there are several different things to help them. There’s a virtual classroom where they can do a lot of things. They can chat with other students. They can use a discussion board and read teaching assignments. But because our students don’t come to physical campus, we’ve tried to make it more of a social experience. One of the things that we’ve done is provide what we call the Student Lounge, which is a discussion board area. Of our 13,000 students, about 6,000 use the Student Lounge a lot, which means they can talk about their experiences, movies they’ve seen, ideas they have. There was an ongoing discussion last year called, ‘Going to Baghdad?’ Young soldiers could ask, ‘I’m going to Baghdad for the first time. What can I expect?’ They got lots of responses about what to look for, what to avoid, things to be careful of when they got there, things to bring. It was very helpful for those deploying for the first time.

There are lots of discussion boards in online learning, and for us, the fact that our students can really contribute adds to the learning process. I gave the example of the intelligence class. Imagine talking about an intelligence problem and trying to answer how you analyze certain intelligence. One person is trained with the CIA, another is an FBI analyst, three military analysts with different branches of the service, all talking about how they might analyze the same piece of evidence. Our teachers say they sometimes learn more in the classes than the students.

A-HEC: Given the nature of the content you teach, do you have problems around security clearance?

FM: We have a lot of complicated conversations around that. What can and can’t be said. For example, who can sign up for our degree in intelligence? And what might they learn from the other students in the class? It’s a problem, but it’s also an asset. Let me tell you why. If you worked at an agency for a long time, you would know that agency’s code and culture. When they come to the classroom, that agency gets empowered because all of that intelligence across agencies offers the opportunity for learning best practices.

A-HEC: Where are your physical campuses located?

FM: We have two campuses. One is located in Manassas, Virginia, not too far from the Pentagon, and our main campus is in Charles Town, West Virginia. We have a lot of close contacts in the Defense Department and Pentagon, folks who used to work there, have come into our business. The former head of the Air Force Voluntary Education works in our marketing department. He still has a lot of friends in the military and travels back and forth to Washington to see what they need and how we can help them. Because such a large percentage of the folks in our organization have served, they feel a special obligation to make sure that our students get the best deal they can and work with them. And when you’ve ‘walked in someone else’s boots’ as they say, you’re more prone to be sympathetic.