|
Some institutions have seeded long-term institutional performance initiatives with successful service redesign projects. Benedictine University, for example, is a nonprofit, independent university facing a range of competitive pressures. It competes in the Chicago area with other institutions (including the for-profit University of Phoenix) to attract students interested in earning an MBA. Benedictine accordingly set a goal to increase its MBA enrollments and their "profitability.” Using technology to redesign courses and services, the university developed a more flexible version of the traditional MBA program; the resulting WebFlex MBA features significantly reduced requirements for real-time student/instructor interaction as well as a host of 24x7x365 support services for students. A second redesign of the program targets students who cannot or will not participate in real-time interactions; this version is fully online and has no synchronous requirements to preclude enrollments from outside the Chicago market. To fill gaps in its internal resources and to improve time-to-market, Benedictine outsources some support services, including help for faculty and staff members in redesigning courses, programs, and other services for flex markets. Employing the program and service flex redesign strategy (described in detail in a later section), Benedictine is meeting evolving enrollment and profitability goals, and it now competes more effectively and efficiently for students in terms of quality, flexibility, and price.
Successful flex program and service examples at public universities and state systems include UMassOnline, UBOnline (at the University of Baltimore), and the Tennessee Board of Regents' Online Degree Programs.
Taking a different path than Benedictine, a Fairfield University faculty team in biology has redesigned the two-semester General Biology course, one of the University’s largest courses with an annual enrollment of 260 students. The course formerly was taught in a multiple-section model requiring seven faculty FTEs with 35-40 students per section. The redesigned course “consumes” only four faculty FTEs and condenses all sections into a single large-classroom format. Students work in teams of 2-3 around individual laptop computers, utilizing software modules that focus on inquiry-based instruction and independent investigations. Significant cost savings of 31 percent (from $506 per enrollment to $350) are being realized by reducing faculty time in three major areas: 1) materials development for lectures; 2) out-of-class course meetings; and 3) in-class lectures and labs.[11] Consolidation of seven lecture sections to two in the redesigned course and the introduction of computer-based modules in the lecture and laboratory have contributed to the reduction in costs made possible by the common-course redesign strategy, which will be described in more detail in a later section.
|
|
