I founded my firm, Palmetto Insights, so that I could help higher education leaders create goals, plans, and organizational structures for their digital learning efforts that will lead to strategic & differentiated digital learning. We want the digital learning of our clients to be both important to deliver and distinctly theirs. This is a remarkably rare achievement.
Let’s break down this phase into its components in order to see why I consider it so important.
Digital learning
This is sometimes called “online learning”—thinking here about any fully digital course—but it could be some hybrid combination (synchronous digital, asynchronous digital, or face-to-face). The ability to offer the appropriate version of these is of vital importance to adult or younger learners, degree or non-degree, school year or summer, exec ed, and continuing ed. Increasingly it’s also even finding its way into traditional undergrad education. It’s going to take many years of attention for schools, leadership, and faculty to achieve competency with digital learning on par with its skills with face-to-face learning.
Strategic learning
This is learning that is worth investing in. Investing in these experiences strengthens a school’s reputation and position in the market. This statement sounds reasonable but, given limited resources, every decision to do something necessitates decisions to not do something else. Presidents, provosts, and deans know nothing if not that demands to do “this important thing” come from all corners of the institution. How these trade-offs are handled do much to define the perception of an academic leader’s success.
Differentiated learning
This is learning that demonstrates what it is that makes a school special and unique. No one else could copy this learning because it would look like your learning. Many successful schools and departments have a special pedagogical approach that they have adopted and made their own. However, it can also be productive to think about learning in a broader sense—what is it that happens in the classroom as well as outside the classroom that contributes to the student’s experience and eventual success. These analog processes, services, structures, and departments are where many colleges have invested much money, time, and resources in making themselves stand out from the crowd. This same level of investment needs to happen now in the digital realm if it hasn’t happened already.
So you can now better understand my deep belief that strategic & differentiated digital learning is the key to surviving and thriving.
