The document discusses strategies for scaling online and hybrid education courses. It notes that good course design is vital for student outcomes and may be more important than course content, especially for online courses. Specific strategies proposed for improving scalability include streamlining grading tasks, limiting assessments, cutting long-form content, using checklists and rubrics sparingly, and leveraging tools like Google Forms to automate data collection. Co-curating courses between faculty and adjuncts is also suggested to provide better frameworks for connecting lessons across a program.

1. Executive Education
Scaling Online and
Hybrid Education
Marshall Sponder
Adjunct, Rutgers University
Faculty Lecturer, Zicklin School of Business
January 14th, 2015, Newark, NJ

2. Executive Education
About Me:
Teach:
Baruch College : http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/directory/detail.jsp?oid=204506620
Rutgers University: http://www.masongross.rutgers.edu/content/marshall
Write:
ClickZ:
http://www.clickz.com/author/profile/2854/mars
hall-sponder
Blog: http://webmetricsguru.com/
CMSWire:
http://www.cmswire.com/author/marshall-
sponder/
Book:
http://www.amazon.com/Social-Media-
Analytics-Effective-
Interpreting/dp/0071824499/ref=reader_
auth_dp

3. Executive Education
My title at Rutgers
is “Adjunct” but
“program
founder/director”
is a better
description
Encourage students to
master small steps, combine them
effectively, win the Championship

4. Executive Education
Created a popular course at Rutgers University, offered
since 2012 @ Mason Gross School of the Arts (online)

5. Executive Education
My POV developed from creating and teaching
Hybrid & Remote courses
Web Analytics
(Adobe & Google
Analytics)
Social Media
Analytics
SEO/SEM, Email
Marketing, etc.
Programmatic
(MediaMath)/trading
desk starting Spring
2015
Audience Analytics
(Comscore)
DIGITAL PROGRAM
http://baruchmarketing.org/

6. Executive Education
Teaching an online course approaching 300
students forced me to address scaling challenges
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
Spring 2012 Fall 2012 Spring 2013 Summer 2013 Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Summer 2014 Fall 2014 Spring 2015
Rutgers Students Online

7. Executive Education
While keeping the quality of instruction
up.

8. Executive Education
Good course design is vital to successful
educational outcomes.
• Course Design might be more important than course
content to overall student outcomes.
• Good Course Design (and we can debate what that
means) is more important for an online course than a
hybrid course because you don’t meet your students in
person.
• Good Course Design is similar to good Web Design, or
good Usability Design
Higher failure rate of students taking online courses is probably due to the
uneven course design than it is because the students don’t meet the teacher or
each other.

9. Executive Education
What would make online and hybrid courses
more “scalable” in 2015?
http://www.jma
nx.com/xfiles/
main.php?g2_it
emId=93

10. Executive Education
New “Ins” and “Outs” for 2015
IN
• Google Forms (collect data) for collective learnings.
• Student Checklist
• Rubrics (very general rubrics work best)
• Cutting down repetitive steps in evaluation and grading
• More Ta’s
• ProcterTrack and other authentication /certifications, etc.
OUT
• Excessive long form content (reduce by 75%).
• Learning Objects, etc. (no integration with Gradebook and
poor search capabilities suggest very minimal use).
• Detailed Rubrics (shocking!)

11. Executive Education
The promise of online education….
http://mashable.com/2011/06/10/online-education-infographic/

12. Executive Education
…. is to eliminate Boredom and allow
flexible, retainable and extensible learnings.
http://www.tmz.com/20
09/03/10/james-
franco-sleeping-photo/
Some of my evening
classes looked just
like this.

13. Executive Education
Path to scalable courses …..
• Streamline grading steps frees up a lot of time.
• Limit test taking – set up gradebook automation.
• Limit over using “long form content” like discussions.
• Rubrics are good in theory, but often too tedious to grade
with.
• Platform specific: Pearson eCollege, cut down use of
Learning Objects, with Blackboard, do any test taking in
another module or platform.
• Develop a checklist for students to follow.

14. Executive Education
Pyramid of Scalability
LevelofDifficulty/Profitability
LevelofImpact
This is as
far as I have
been able
to go, so far
The two upper
levels require a
fundamental
disruption of the
education model
before they can
happen at a
University level

15. Executive Education
Examples of how streamlining material
makes a big difference
• Each semester there were as much as 57 ( a few
years back) actions to evaluate over the semester for
each student [such as quizzes, exams, discussions,
Webliographies, journals, assignments, final projects, etc.].
I spent as much as 6 hours per student evaluating their
work.
• In Spring 2015 I cut down to 28 actions I need to
evaluate, and of those and spend about an 60 to 90
minutes max (instead of 6 hours) per student and
increase the quality of the interactions and learning.

16. Executive Education
Cutting down of items to grade

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EXAMPLE: Social Media for the Arts has a lot of “long
form” content, turned out to be good for learning” but
difficult to read and evaluate as the class grew larger.
Action: Cut
down discussions
from 13 to 4.

18. Executive Education
EXAMS: Cut down from 13 Quizzes and 1 Final to
just the Final Exam (which is now going to use
ProcterTrack).
• Quizzes turned out to be the most problematic part
of the whole teaching experience (technical issues
mostly), creating a lot of frustration for everyone.
Streamlining on quizzes and tests while keeping some in,
makes a lot of sense as the course enrollment rises.
• In eCollege you can have the student’s grade
automatically populate the Gradebook – in most cases,
that is very good idea and I highly recommend it.

19. Executive Education
Turn Long Form Content into Online Surveys
PROBLEM: eCollege and Blackboard assignments are not
designed to be aggregated and are time consuming to
download and read though.
SOLUTION: Keep the uploads of assignments to Dropbox (for
a record trail) and instead, set up Google Forms or
something similar and have the students input their data into
the Cloud, where the data can be funneled back to the class.

20. Executive Education
Example of
a Google
Form

21. Executive Education
Rubrics are a double edged sword
http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/2014/02/12/rubrics-why-use-them-2/

22. Executive Education
Avoid using Learning Objects if you can
• No Integration with the Gradebook.
• Limited Analytics, can only look at time in the Portal, not
what students are doing there.
• No Global Search function within Learning Objects - makes
it very difficult to isolate students work across folders.
• Learning Objects seems more like an “add on” to eCollege
that was never integrated well to the rest of the offering.

23. Executive Education
Make a Student Checklist
• Gradebooks are not a replacement for a task list.
• Dates Due notifications also don’t replace a simple list of
what needs to be done, when, and links to where to find the
work.
• Its amazing that eCollege and Blackboard didn’t build this
already, because it really made a big difference last
semester with my students.
Previous Semesters –
No Task List
By Mid Semester 15% of my
students were up to date with
their work
In Fall 2014, by Mid Semester
(with the Task list) 80% of my
students were up to date with
their work.

24. Executive Education
Make a Student Checklist
Imagine how
many
problems
are solved
just with
good
design!

25. Executive Education
Use round numbers for grading
• Make your grading schema simple.
• Whatever you end up settling with in terms of the
Gradebook, you will repeat several times for EACH
STUDENT.
Any place where you can cut down on manual work you should do it.

26. Executive Education
Use round numbers for grading
• Make your grading schema really simple. When you get into
having hundreds
of students, little
things like an even
number make BIG
DIFFERENCES in
time spent

27. Executive Education
Economizing repetitive interactions freed me to
become more strategic in my teaching approach.
Helping students
access their
online presence
and visualize
the progress
over the
semester is
much more
valuable than
simple certifying
if a student did
an assignment
correctly, which
a TA can do with
proper Rubrics

28. Executive Education
Recasting my role to be “Data
Visualizer” and “Program Builder”
If we don’t
find ways to
“scale” our
courses, we
can not act
strategically
as we’re
bogged down
on the day to
day
operational
details.

29. Executive Education
Laser
focused on
Data
Visualization
- teaching
students to
work with
their own
data, is
leading them
to meaningful
long term
results.
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Blog
Video
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
SEO
Instagram
Pinterest
Geolocation /
reviews
Website
Before
After

30. Executive Education
Rolled out a new “analytics selfie” methodology
this semester (Spring 2015) while cutting down
Long Form content.
• Students do assignments and fill out Google Forms with
much of the information.
• The data is then collected by my TAs and me for analysis
and then fed back with a lesson to the class.
• Students learn to access their own growth by
experiencing “before” and “after” and observing the
differences, they come to define their own position and
point of view, which is the real goal of the course and my
teaching of it.

31. Executive Education
So far we can cut out a lot of wasted
effort by making better course design
choices and being more strategic rather
than operational.
We can still do more – but it would take a re-adjustment
of how we create courses.

32. Executive Education
Co-Curation of courses by Faculty and Adjuncts
could provide better courses that are easier to
maintain.
• Co-Curation would be at the department level, mostly.
• Courses could be sketched out and developed to allow
creativity (which teachers love) while providing enough of
a framework to allow students to connect the dots
between courses.
• The overall quality of the courses would improve.
• The workload on teachers would actually go down, I
believe.
Co-Curation

33. Executive Education
Learning Platforms need to improve more than they have.
• What we really need is something closer to a Newspaper
Publication platform that publishes “editions” of courses
(and of “stories”) that can then be continually updated.
• Blackboard, eCollege, Sakai, Moodle are essentially blogs
with private access and a gradebook. That’s an over
simplification but not far off.
• Such a platform does not seem to exist YET for online
learning – though Online Newspapers have done quite
well with these systems (though Newspapers are dying).
New Publishing Platform – similar to Newspapers

34. Executive Education
Summary
• Our jobs as teachers are too difficult to be bogged
down with needless repetition – any place you can cut
out unnecessary repetition (that does not lead to improved
student learnings) while encouraging automation, is going
to improve learning outcomes for your students and make
you life much easier and more enjoyable.
• Lets figure out what a Well Designed Course needs to look
like and then start build it.
• A Well Designed Course is probably a more Scalable Course.
• It’s a Win-Win for everyone.

35. Executive Education
Ques
tions?
Thank You!
• Marshall Sponder, @webmetricsguru
• Adjunct – Rutgers University
• Lecturer - Zicklin School of Business
• Baruch College
• Marshall.sponder@baruch.cuny.edu
• Now.seo@gmail.com