Seeking a date to the prom is completely different than finding someone to marry. In the same way, said Asbury University Registrar Bill Hall, choosing a vendor is not the same as starting a relationship with a solution provider. One can be a quick fix, but the other can offer “the whole package.”
Asbury, located in Wilmore, KY., decided a couple of years ago to venture into online distance education, but it wasn’t sure exactly how. The school’s mission involved impacting the world and serving students wherever they were, but that was “increasingly difficult” when students had to be on campus.
So they called on Knowledge Elements to discuss what they could do. Providing technology was on the list, but so were best practices in instructional design, course development, and delivery. Since then, the school has moved ahead to launch its first complete online degree program using the Knowledge Elements platform.
“It took time,” Hall said, as well as “lots of meetings, demonstrations, and conversations.” And there was plenty of discussion to make sure Knowledge Elements lined up missionally with the school.
But when it came time to kick off the new online program, an interesting thing happened. For the first time Hall could remember, representatives from all of the related support services were in one place. Each department—from the business office to student development—does its work in its own offices, and rarely meets as a group. But working on the new program has torn down walls, and as a result, “we’re moving toward the model of having more and more people cross-trained, so that when you answer the phone, you don’t have to send that person three separate places,” he said.
Working with Knowledge Elements, he said, has opened up numerous opportunities, and “this is a group we want to be in partnership with for the next five, ten, fifteen years.”
“The financial arrangement is 25 percent of the relationship,” he said. “The rest of that, the 75 percent, is the goodwill kind of stuff. It is the partnering aspect. It is iron sharpening iron. I push on them for certain things, they push back on me. We challenge each other to create this great program. Those are the pieces that you can’t buy, the really good people or partnerships. It doesn’t work that way. You have to discover them.”
Hall said he has received reference checks for Knowledge Elements from others in the registrar network, and the top thing they want to know is whether Knowledge Elements is “real.”
“And my answer always is yes,” he said. “What they say is exactly what you’ll get…. You’ve got to have this conversation. It’s not picking up the phone and calling a vendor for a solution. It’s picking it up and saying, ‘These people know what’s going on in Christian higher education in the online space.’ They live it, they breathe it, they know. It’s like having a journal on distance higher education with all of this information and choosing not to subscribe to it. It doesn’t make any sense.”