Higher Education for Those Who Serve

A-HEC: Do your students receive any type of financial aid assistance? What other kinds of student services are provided them?

FM: About 85 percent of our students come to us with tuition assistance through the military. And there are various other funding sources that are available to them. As far as support services go, we have student advisors assigned to certain majors to make sure students pick the right courses. For example, our homeland security has certain people trained just to counsel students on that degree. We have some online counseling available, and we really work hard with our faculty to make sure they interact with our students. We also have a call center that students can contact to get any information they need. And again, because most of our faculty are either in the same area or they are ex-military and the students are all military, we almost have to stop them from counseling the students too much sometimes.

A-HEC: How does APUS compare with some of the institutions operated by the military such as the National War College?

FM: It’s interesting. Because we’re virtual we have working with us faculty from the National War College. We have a faculty member who is active with us who also teaches at the Naval War College and one of our faculty teaches at the Defense Language Institute. We also have faculty that have been through the War College themselves. Our faculty naturally have these kinds of associations and there is a lot of going back and forth. One of the faculty who has taught intelligence a lot for us, he’s gone from full-time to part-time because he’s become the main trainer for education for Homeland Security. And he’s setting up for DHS their preparedness course for Weapons of Mass Destruction. He teaches that course for us as well, and having him on our faculty, I can’t tell you how great that is for us.

A-HEC: Do you keep in touch with your alumni?

FM: We have an alumni foundation that our alumni belong to, and they’re pretty attached to the university because as they move around the world, we stay with them. They feel warmly toward us because of our flexibility toward them. We have about 3,000 students who have graduated so far. Our graduating class is just starting to get large now. We’ve experienced tremendous growth in the last five years. I think this year we will graduate about 800 students.

A-HEC: Please explain the technology you use to conduct your online programs.

FM: We actually use a learning management tool called Educator, which we adopted about seven or eight years ago. Educator is run by a company called Ucompass in Florida. It works very similar to Blackboard, and it’s pricing structure is a little bit better for us.

Students have to provide their own computers. That has sometimes been an issue for us, how they can sometimes have or lack access to a computer. For those students who are called into emergency situations, or they are operating in remote parts of the world with very bad Internet connections, we have to be flexible.

Our future is certainly in multi-media. About 98 percent of our content right now is text-based, but we’re also aware that in five years that’s going to change. We’re playing with podcasting right now. We’re looking at downloading lectures onto I-pods. We’re also looking at courses that can come across on a PDA. We have a technology group that plays with these things and creatively looks at what’s ahead.