Higher Education for Those Who Serve

A-HEC: You have approximately 350 faculty scattered around the world, 50 of whom are committed to your universities as full-time professors. Can you provide a profile of your average faculty member? How do you build continuity among your faculty? Describe for us briefly your governance system. And what procedures are in place to ensure consistency in the classroom?

FM: The vast majority of our faculty come from government service. About 35 percent of them have Ph.D’s and the rest have advanced degrees in their disciplines. We try to make sure that they’re teaching in their fields.

When faculty are remote, it’s really hard to ensure quality. One of the things we’ve done, we have a class we call ‘Faculty 101.’ In this course, we show them what ‘our’ way is. For example, we want to make sure that they’re available to their students a certain number of times per week. What’s a good way to respond to a message? How to build an online community. If a student is lagging in their assignments, how we can sort of get our advisors in there to help? We really try to socialize all of our faculty doing that and we have quarterly conference calls where we talk about things of interest. You want to have a quality experience and part of that is consistency from class to class. We also spend a lot of time in faculty development and learning outcomes assessment.

Before I came to APUS, I was a professor at Mercy College in New York for 30 years and so I tend to look at things from a faculty point of view. Here, we try to give our faculty the freedom to have a lot of input into things and we listen to them a lot. In addition to the student forum, there’s also a faculty forum where they can share with us their point of view on what they think is going on. Because so many of our faculty have served where the students are, they feel a commitment to the university. I’ve often joked that if we didn’t pay our faculty, they would keep on teaching. I wouldn’t say that too loudly, but they love what they do and for the limited salaries we sometimes pay them, they really give their heart and soul to teaching our students.

We’re busy trying to keep up with the changes. I’m a philosopher by training. The philosophy degree hasn’t changed much since the 19^th Century. In homeland security, however, almost every month there are new things coming out with which we need to keep up. We spend a lot of time in curriculum development and making sure our courses are consistent with industry standards.

A-HEC: Throughout your career, you have been active in, and written about, online pedagogy and distance learning, and you’ve served on various online accreditation teams in New York. You also served as dean of online learning at Mercy College. How does accrediting an online university differ from the process for a land-based institution? Are the standards as stringent? What benchmarks are used?

FM: There are many similar things. For instance, how do you ensure that learning outcomes are happening in the classroom? How do you use student feedback to make sure the teachers are being responsive? Is there grade inflation? Are the objectives of the course consistent with the objectives of the school? Many of the standards are similar.

In many ways, I think accreditation of online learning programs is more stringent than more traditional models. For example, it’s hard to gauge what’s going on in the regular classroom. The teacher can have a very thin syllabus. When I was a professor, it could be a page or two. And when the classroom door closes, what they teach you don’t really know. But in an online classroom, there is a digital record of every little thing. While that raises other issues like privacy and freedom of speech, it can give you a very exacting example of what is being taught. For example, let’s say there are two courses for Introduction to Military History taught in three sections. You could ideally run statistics to find one professor who had been online so many times, the second professor not so many times. The students had more interaction going on in one class over the other. In the future, the potential to do more assessment and understanding of the quantitative and qualitative nature of these things is just phenomenal.