Episode 18: Statewide Virtual Education feat. Jory Hadsell, Executive Director at California Virtual Campus

What options do students have if they cannot complete a traditional four-year degree program? Jory Hadsell, Executive Director of the California Virtual Campus, has personal experience with that challenge. If he tried to earn his degree on the typical university schedule, it would have taken seven years to fit the right classes in with work and other obligations. He opted for an online degree, sparking his interest in helping other students achieve that goal.

Jory is an educator first, having served as a tenured faculty member and associate faculty at the graduate level for over 23 years. His work sits at the nexus of technology and instructional innovation. In this episode of Illuminate Higher Education, Jory joins Kiran to talk about the California Virtual Campus, better ways to leverage technology in the classroom, and the oft-debated ROI of a four-year college degree.

Read the brief Q&A below for highlights from the conversation, then listen to the full podcast for all the details.

What is the California Virtual Campus (CVC)?

The California Virtual Campus is a collaborative effort among California Community Colleges (CCCs) to ensure that significantly more students can complete their educational goals by increasing both access to and success in high-quality online courses. The organization includes 115 colleges offering more than 10,000 courses to choose from.

The CVC was born out of necessity. During the Great Recession, California turned away about 500,000 students from courses at our institutions because we could not afford to fund them. Around the same time, massive open online courses (MOOCs) were growing in popularity. The governor of California at the time, Jerry Brown, read an article about MOOCs in the New York Times and wondered how we could use online education to help solve these problems. Since then, the state has invested heavily in building out online infrastructure.

In 2014, I joined and originally served as Chief Academic Officer. The organization operated much like a startup, but we were also operating within a large bureaucratic structure. We had no authority to force colleges to do anything—it had to be a coalition of the willing. A few initial colleges signed on and folks really started dreaming about what online learning could be.

How can we engage students in using technology in the classroom?

We must tap into some human characteristics and motivators. We have been doing a lot of work around humanizing online education, asking ourselves, “How do we build that human connection as a component?” It is important, but the human connection does not scale in the way that technology can. There is tension between the human element and technology. If we can get it right, students can explore content in a way that makes sense to them and achieve the same learning outcomes. Unfortunately, the lack of funding for simulations and other types of interactive resources is limited.

From your perspective, what changes in higher education could we expect to see in the next decade?

I am optimistic and heartened by recent events in education. The prevailing thinking used to be that these institutions were massive and unable to change quickly. There are certainly examples, but the Covid-19 pandemic forced institutions to adapt and transform almost overnight. Colleges had to change instructional modalities, add more online services for students, and establish a remote workforce. For the most part, they have done it well.

It has been an interesting experiment, and I do not think we will ever fully go back to how things used to be. Thinking about the way institutions have been able to pivot, there is plenty of room for innovation. Sometimes we just need those market forces to drive the change. There will always be four-year traditional colleges, but online education will remain a core piece of the learning experience.

Listen to the full episode for all the details, then connect with Jory Hadsell on LinkedIn or Twitter @JoryHadsell.

Learn more about the California Virtual Campus at CVC.edu. You can also explore WCET, the non-profit organization Jory mentioned, here.

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This episode is brought to you by N2N’s Illuminate App, the iPaaS for Higher Education.

About N2N Services

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