____________________The following is an interview with Dr. Fred DiUlus, CEO and Founder of Global Academy Online, Inc. He is an online education pioneer and the father of online college program ratings and rankings. The interview with the Journal of Online Education was over the 2011 Thanksgiving Holiday. He shares with us some of his career choices in online education and the past and future of one of the fastest growing industries today.
____________________J.O.O.E: How did you, a Wall Street veteran of three decades and recognized by US NEWS as one of the nation’s top investment experts ever get involved in online higher education?
Dr. DiUlus: In 1989, the financial publishing firm I had purchased was moved from Houston, Texas to the Jacksonville, Florida area. Wanting to share what I had learned over the years, I solicited a part time teaching position at the University of North, Florida, one of the fastest growing regional universities in the nation at the time. I was invited to teach one semester of Business Ethics and was told by the Dean not to get too comfortable teaching the subject as “ethics” concentrations for business professors was just a flash in the pan. I ended up teaching the course as well as Entrepreneurship ten straight years, the last five as a fulltime lecturer. During those years I developed a systems methodology to teach applied ethics and entrepreneurship online. The result was the first private education Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. I later named it the Center for Ethics in Free Enterprise and offered the very first online Applied Ethics and Entrepreneurship certificate training programs.
J.O.O.E: That was a pretty radical departure from your expertise wasn’t it?
Dr. DiUlus: The online education portion certainly was. However, I had been teaching college classes throughout my investment career and never missed a chance to do so. When I discovered that I could help influence the spread of learning online globally to every nook and cranny in the world, I could not move fast enough.
J.O.O.E.: There is a rumor that you hatched that idea thirty years ago. Can you tell us about it?
Dr. DiUlus: It’s not a rumor. Thirty some odd years ago as I was sitting in front of a $10,000 state of the art PC with two floppy eight inch drives, one to initiate the operating system and the other to draft documents. We then transfered the data via hard-line phone connections to a mainframe where it was spun into meaningful prose and sent back. It was, by today’s standards, slower than molasses. I wondered about the possibility of pushing this technology to potentially make learning available to the world. It took thirty years for the technology to catch up to the idea.
J.O.O.E.: How did you come to create Global Academy Online?
Dr. DiUlus: In the late 90’s, I was serving as an Associate Professor at a southwestern university that had hired me away from UNF to develop a Free Enterprise program at their school. While growing the program, I was fortunate to be given a grant by a major online systems provider to create an advanced Entrepreneurship program. I took the new MBA development to my school’s business dean and the academic dean to offer my work to the school. I detailed how within two years the program would help double the size of the university’s full time enrolled (FTE’s) because such online programs were in great demand. I suggested we could build two other advanced degree programs online that were equally in demand. As the market was global and well beyond the 100 mile radius the school considered their market share, I pointed out it would not infringe on existing faculty jobs or put additional demands on them. They turned the program and me down. Two months later, I resigned and went about creating private label online curriculum and a delivery system for colleges and universities that in 2002 became Global Academy Online, Inc. Its first program was an online, private label, fully staffed MBA program.
J.O.O.E: Weren’t they just a bit shortsighted?
Dr. DiUlus: Not exactly. They actually professed the common beliefs of the academic world of the day. Remember this was 2002. In their eyes online education was not credible. They genuinely believed students could not learn as much unless they were standing in front of them and online learning would never be regarded as good as a traditional education. The icing on the cake was their expressed belief that by adopting the program they would be harming the university’s reputation not, as I suggested, enhancing it. They were right on the money for the day. Fortunately, there were those of us who believed otherwise on all counts. It was a hard sell. As they say, "You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink." All my research showed opposite results of what the dean and provost concluded. They just regurgitated myths with the myths spread by the rumors of the day.
J.O.O.E.: Was this prevalent throughout academia and if so why were they so close minded?
Dr. DiUlus: Traditionalists don’t think beyond their internal strategic plans and most, even today, do not offer or even suggest moving their schools to online degree programs, let alone mention them. Small inroads were made by firms like eCollege, WEBct and Blackboard. MOODLE had not even been invented nor the dozens of other course management systems providers that exist today. The big three as they were called provided online supplemental online teaching protocols to schools but the thought of having an entire online school program within a traditional environment free of the classroom was tantamount to heresy.
J.O.O.E.: You participated in several strategic planning sessions and led many sessions for organizations other than schools. What is the mindset when it comes to online education?
Dr. DiUlus: Unfortunately, most strategic planning specialists follow a set formula to sustain the status quo for a target school. They offer to improve it, and make sure that it survives. Instead of wiping the slate clean and starting over as though the school were brand new, planners follow the SWOT method religiously. Accentuate the strengths, cut the weaknesses, embrace the opportunities and challenge the threats and overcome them. In their eyes, online education is the threat. Rarely and only within the last two to three years has it been broadly considered the opportunity. For most schools, the desire to overcome the perceived threat instead of embracing the concept and growing it, assured the opportunity that existed was not considered.
J.O.O.E.: Do college presidents not see this?
Dr. DiUlus: Probably, they do, but I suspect from my conversations with many over the years that they perceive the risk as too costly to their own careers and fear unnecessarily for the school’s reputation as well as theirs among the board of trustees. They are unwilling to change. There are exceptions, plenty of them. Most administrators, college presidents and those that may want to achieve such a high position someday are cut from a mold we call transactional as opposed to transformational. These are two terms experts use to describe leadership style.
J.O.O.E.: How do they differ since the idea of being one type of leader or another may be a blur to outsiders?
Dr. DiUlus: Transformational leaders are change agents, pure and simple. The term speaks for itself. Most college presidents in the world today are transactional. In other words, the view is, “If it isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it.” That mindset however is changing as the economics of sitting on one’s institutional hands and not moving to adopt online education protocols rapidly is pushing schools to become tomorrow’s failures. Their ability to support infrastructure and the declining financial health brought about by tight fisted legislators and benefactors are seriously impacting them. They are being drawn to online education not because they consider it worthy or they changed their minds about it, but because of necessity to survive economically. Many are suffering now because of the lack of vision ten years ago and are desperately trying to catch up. For many that vision is still skewed in the wrong direction.
J.O.O.E.: What do you hold for the future of higher education?
Dr. DiUlus: I believe what I warned a decade ago. Colleges and universities as we know them will cease to exist in a generation transformed by technology and 24/7 continuous education online. I did not make this up just to be contrary. Peter Drucker, the father of modern management warned us of this just before he passed away. Virtually every prediction he ever made about education has come true. My feeling is that before this decade is out, I will be able to pull out my school device (a combination of a phone, ipad, ipod, laptop, kindle, nook, or whatever) and access any field of interest, study it, have a lecture on it by the finest professors in the world, and view it all on my desk in a 3D or holographic image, interacting with the image at will. This technology already exists today.
J.O.O.E.: Why do you believe an online education is superior to a traditional education?
Dr. DiUlus: It is not because of what I think. It is what students and learners around the world already think. For those who have experienced both traditional and online education ninety plus percent (90%) believe that this education is superior or as good as the traditional classroom.
J.O.O.E: Then where does all the negativity come from regarding online higher education?
Dr. DiUlus: Mostly from classroom hugging professors. They have no compunction about expressing dissatisfaction with the whole development of online learning. My experience in faculty meetings from coast to coast bears this out. I would say the average among faculty who are against a school’s partial or wholesale adoption of online education is hovering around 60% or higher. The new breed of professor, those coming out of colleges who can and do seek to teach online have a much different attitude. The future that lies with youth who have been brought up on technology and probably know far better than most of us, see first hand the revolutionizing of higher education. Perhaps we should consider online education as the blackboard of the middle ages. Professors then thought the board’s introduction into the classroom would destroy education.
J.O.O.E Thank you Dr. DiUlus for being so candid.
Dr. DiUlus: My pleasure.
