Digital Learning - From Nothing To Something: my webinar notes

Background

Recorded Webinar snippet

I have been working in distance learning since 1992. 

I like technology in education where it is used to make a real improvement in the learning experience for the students.

We are a traditional distance learning college in the FET market. That means that we print and send books and study notes to our students via courier. It also means our students are working adults who usually did not complete school; meaning they don’t have matric.

And that usually implies that they do not have high income jobs. In fact, it is quite the opposite. That means we cannot assume our students have computers, or new phones, or much internet data.

We are always experimenting with little bits of technology, that usually is cheap, to improve the experience for our distance learning students. Things as simple as WhatsApp groups.

The problems we face as a private college, is not only the issue of how to keep our students studying, it is also the issue of how to deal with our income dropping off a cliff.

The challenge we faced

As a distance learning college we are in the business of teaching people who are not in a classroom, and who are part-time students. So we have an advantage compared to classroom colleges.

Our unique proposition to students is that if they don’t study, they don’t have to pay. And most of our students are on monthly payment plans.

So the challenge we faced is as follows:

1. We have to keep students studying, if we want them to keep on paying us
2. We had to close our offices with only very few days’ notice
3. We would not be able to courier books to students under the lockdown - which brings the risk that students stop studying
4. Our system of providing support to our students is heavily based on telephone systems, email systems, online forms and to some extent WhatsApp groups; all nicely set up in our offices!
5. What changes have we seen in student behavior? Increase in use of WhatsApp. Increase use of Edmodo. Willingness to put in extra effort because of the lockdown. Especially around the use of ebooks.
6. Logic told me our income would drop rapidly - so we need to cut costs immediately and preserve cash

What we did

Figure out how to keep our students studying, while our staff all works from home

• We put our study materials on a shared drive, as well as on a number of hard drives, so that staff can email study material to students
• Our biggest group of students are studying the ICB courses, and our publisher, Edge Education, is giving us a three month voucher for each book we order. This gives our students access to their eBooks + Online Playlists (Pro version). So we can email students the vouchers which gives them access to their books online immediately
• Student’s response to ebooks? We have been surprised to find zero complaints. So from our side it looks like it is working better than we ever expected. Of course this is also influenced by the fact that students understand this is the only way to get their books while we are under lockdown. So I think they are putting in the effort to make it work.
• We ensured internet access for essential staff at home, in some cases this is as basic as buying them airtime
• We have not yet investigated getting free data for our students. We have seen the big cell phone companies make access to educational sites free. So this is something for us to pursue.
• We developed a proactive plan to keep students motivated, this range from social media posts, to phone calls
• How is this working? We believe it is working. We can see how busy interactions are on the Edmodo App. We can also see from the volume of assignments we are getting, that students are studying and doing their academic work.
• What exactly are we doing? Social media posts. Posts in the different forums like WhatsApp groups, TWP groups and Edmodo. We try to be proactive.
• Have we tried to set up peer-to-peer connections? Yes, in WhatsApp. Also on our TWP student chat platform. We use the Edmodo APP that is free, for peer to peer connections.

Keep up new registrations so as to keep on bringing an income

• Our sales team are working from home
• We started with special offers similar to our Black Friday offers immediately
• New sales have dropped off a cliff, leads have dropped off a cliff, web traffic has dropped off a cliff (I do love a good crisis!)
• We launched some short fully online short courses
• The end of April numbers will give us the first real indication of our financial future

Collecting money from students who are at home, not working and worried about their own income

• What makes us different from other distance learning colleges, is that students don’t have to play when they don’t study
• So the responsibility is on us to keep them studying
• Studying students are paying students
• Our student finance and collections teams are working from home - that required computers, airtime
• Income from current students is significantly down already; our numbers at the end of April will give an indication of how much our business needs to shrink its costs, to live in the new lower-income reality
• Our best chance to get students to pay us, is to keep them studying

Cut costs drastically

• We put all non-essential staff on TERS UIF leave.
• We have now cut the running cost of the business by 50%
• Only time will tell if that is enough
• The savings include putting over half our staff on UIF TERS leave

What we plan to do next

Continue fine-tuning how we work from home. We are all discovering the challenges of working from home!

Challenges I foresee

Since we are in distance learning, we are already good at teaching a student that is not on our site, and not in a physical classroom. 

The challenge is to increase student interaction and help and support, that tends to cost us more, with a situation where we can already see a drop in payments by current students, as well as a drop in new sales.

Bringing in less money, while having to spend more to ensure students can keep on studying… is a bit of a perfect storm.

We are heading into the biggest economic disaster of our lifetimes. The best I can say is that Education will be less badly affected compared to restaurants or people selling clothes.