Best Practices in Online Learning: Full Sail University

At Harvard Business Publishing we’re investigating ways to best enable our customers to use our business content in online environments.  To that end we spend a good deal of time info-sharing with eductators and program designers to hear about their best practices, challenges, and lessons learned.  We recently held an information sharing session with Full Sail University.  Full Sail is one of the premier art, music, game and web design, and film schools in the world – and its online programs have been lauded for their success in engaging and educating learners (they won a “21st Century Best Practices in Distance Learning Award” in 2011 from the United States Distance Learning Association).  Here’s a review of how they achieve such great results with their online program.

I originally met Dr. Holly Ludgate, Program Director for Full Sail’s Education Media Design & Technology (EMDT) master’s degree, at the Future of  Business Education conference at Acton MBA (see blog post on the conference).  Clark Aldrich, a longtime mentor for our thinking on simulations and education in general, had noted to us that Full Sail was a program to look at regarding engaging and effective online education (he’s an advisor to the EMDT program).  So we arranged for Dr. Sharon Wyly, Course Director for the EMDT degree program, to give us an overview of their approach and strategy.

Full Sail has about 14,000 students online and about 9,000 on-ground, so online is an important component of their offering (there is no hybrid program).  They use a proprietary learning management system and use Wimba for synchronous components (which are recorded and available as archives).  The program is project-driven (lots of teamwork) and has an action-research focus that includes a literature review, research proposal, and eventual web write-up.  So right off the bat we see some of the cornerstones of successful online programs – a mix of synchronous and asynchronous and a mix of individual, team, and class assignments.

The first notable interesting aspect of the program is that classes are run monthly – meaning they only last a month.  Students then take a new class each month, but more importantly, the program and faculty get to run 12 cycles of any given class each year.  Faculty are hence constantly evolving their curriculum and syllabi. The ability to then review, react, and refine courses is much greater than with traditional course cycles.  It’s truly an agile, rapid iteration approach that allows the program to mature and cycle in best practices at a rapid rate.  And on the administrative side this forces challenges but also efficiency – they are registering and graduating students on that same continuous, monthly cycle.   Iterating and revising approaches is a best practice in any educational environment, and we do see shorter academic terms becoming more common across many master’s programs.  So for those programs whose content could warrant these short cycles, the ability to learn and revise curriculum is a potential best practice.

Instructors are also co-located and work in an open environment (no closed offices).  The resulting informal and formal info-sharing by faculty then leads to a greater level of integration and cohesion across courses (what they refer to as their ‘connected curriculum’). They serve as consultants to each other, share workload, etc.   Clearly teacher support – both from the institution and among each other – is another best practice.  But in this case it breaks the norm – usually online programs have an ability to collect a geographically-dispersed student body and by default do the same with their teaching body.  And while the ability to attract talented educators from a wide area is in fact an advantage, this approach demonstrates the best practice in ensuring that these educators, and not just students, collaborate and aren’t isolated.

The fundamentals that the program seeks to uphold online are motivation and engagement.  To that end they employ a series of tried-and-true best practices for most any educational environment, including peer reviews, student reflections on learning, the accommodation of multiple learning experiences/styles, coaching, and modeling.  According to Dr. Wyly, “we see ourselves less as instructors and more as coaches”.  They try not to lecture.  Again – textbook best practices.  Motivation and engagement are key to making online experiences sustainable and effective for learners, and the Full Sail pedagogical tactics and approaches are great examples of how to achieve those fundamental goals.

In a school that leverages so much technology as both medium and subject matter, they have a great perspective on technology’s role in the classroom.  Rather than ‘teach technology’, they seek to ‘create learners of technology’, thereby teaching students the craft of exploring new tools and technologies as needed to support their projects and allowing the faculty to focus on the pedagogy.  The goal is the end product, not the tools used to get there – a great approach in fields where the technologies and tools can change dramatically and swiftly over time.   And they leverage free/open software whenever they can, further exposing students to readily-available tools for their work.

Full Sail’s graduates are world-renowned.  There has not been a Grammy nomination in the last sixteen years that has not included Full Sail representation on the team responsible for the nominated work.  Many students are already working and use the master’s degree to advance careers, so in many cases these students are a bit older and are more ‘digital immigrants’ than ‘digital natives’ – which makes their success in an online environment – and in their subsequent careers – all the more impressive. 

Comments

[Michelle]

Thank you so much for this post. I'm really excited about possibly attending Full Sail (if I can find some free money).

I've been wrestling with which master's program to go with for quite some time now: Full Sail's program or a Secondary English Education program at Nova University. After everything I've read (including this post) and listening to my gut, Full Sail is the way to go.

Thanks again!