Continuing Education has a long and
proud history in American higher education. The concept dates back to the early days of the land grant
movement, when Agricultural Extension was created with the vision of the
academic researcher working with farmers in their fields to improve
agricultural production in order to sustain the forces of urbanization and
immigration that were key to the Industrial Revolution in the United
States. While Agricultural
Extension grew throughout the 20th century, many institutions also
created centralized “General Extension” or “Continuing Education” units to link
other academic departments across the institution to the broader community that
the institution served.
Over
time, these centralized Continuing Education units became expert at matching university
resources to community needs. In
the process, they supported innovation and delivered a wide range of programs
and services, including:
·
Community needs assessments.
·
Evening and off-campus credit courses,
certificate programs, and degree programs, including related student support
services to adult, part-time students.
·
Noncredit workshops, professional development
programs, and consulting projects.
·
Academic research and technology transfer
conferences that create academic and professional communities around university
research interests.
·
Summer youth camp programs.
·
Liaison between academic units and employers and
other community organizations on responses to community development needs.
The
Continuing Education function grew rapidly in the 20th century. As far back as 1915, institutions came
together to form the National University Extension Association as an umbrella
professional and organizational development for CE units. It is now called the University
Professional and Continuing Education Association and includes 400 institutions
throughout the U.S. and beyond.
A shared sense of purpose matured around this community, as reflected in
institutional mission statements for Continuing Education. Some examples:
Our mission
is to promote lifelong learning through the design and delivery of continuing
professional education and training programs for individuals and organizations.
The Center for Continuing
Education’s mission is to extend the educational resources and expertise of the
University through innovative, non-traditional programs and services.
We connect Penn State’s programs,
research, and services to a vast, diverse community. Our mission is to engage,
empower, and inspire global
learners through the transformative, boundless power of knowledge.
The mission of continuing education
at the University of Washington is to extend knowledge and professional
development, career advancement, and personal growth opportunities through
teaching, research, and public service to the citizens of Washington State and
the nation.
The Division of Continuing Studies
supports the mission of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the spirit of
the Wisconsin Idea by providing access to educational resources to
nontraditional students, lifelong learners, and the community.
The
Wisconsin Idea captures the essence of Continuing Education in the U.S. It is “the principle that the university should improve people’s lives beyond
the classroom. It spans UW–Madison’s teaching, research, outreach and public
service.”
Continuing Education in Transition
Many
of the traditional continuing education roles—and the idea of a centralized CE function
itself—have come under pressure in recent years, for many reasons, not the
least of which is technology. Online
learning has created a much more diverse and convenient access to credit
programs for adult students, giving students greater options and making
traditional evening classes less competitive. At the same time, reduced state funding for higher education
has made academic units more sensitive to the need to generate new funding and
more aggressive about creating direct relationships with external clients. As a result, some longstanding
Continuing Education roles have diminished and pressure has increased to
decentralize the traditional role of Continuing Education as a single interface
between the university and the community.
All
this came into a fresh focus when Inside Higher Education reported this week that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan “was
set to call for a new focus on accountability in American higher education.” Secretary Duncan’s immediate focus is on accountability
for student success, on behalf of the students, parents, and taxpayers who fund
the cost of educating traditional students. However, there is a broader accountability question. Recently, Pope Francis used the term
“social mortgage” to describe the debt that institutions owe to the public that
funds them. The question for
higher education is simple: how
can we best return value for the taxpayer dollars that states provide as general
institutional subsidies? That is,
how is the state taxpayer’s direct investment in colleges and universities
returning value to the community? Part of the answer lies in our tradition
of Extension and Continuing Education: to extend the university beyond the
campus through teaching, research, outreach, and public service.
A
Renewed Vision
Certainly,
when colleges and universities properly educate individual students—turning
successful students into successful professionals—they directly contribute to
the economic and, in some cases, social success of the community. It is especially important that the
commitment to student success extend to adult students, for whom re-entry into
higher education is often a high-risk step. This is a core role for Continuing Education units that
offer credit programs to off-campus and adult, part-time learners. However, we must also consider the
quality issue as it relates to other, less formal ways in which colleges and
universities contribute to the community.
These include professional development for a wide spectrum of
professionals and technical workers in both public and private organizations;
supporting organizational development for community institutions, from schools
to museums to volunteer organizations; transferring the results of research from
faculty members to individuals and organizations in the community; and
providing informal learning opportunities for youth, seniors, and others. Continuing
Education can serve as a broker for these programs, identifying community need,
matching that need with academic expertise, supporting student success at all
levels, and funding the development of programs that respond to the need.
Here
are some specific elements of a renewed vision that will allow Continuing
Education to help academic units across the institution engage with the
communities they serve:
·
Risk-Free
Innovation. Faculty should be able
to serve the community without financial risk to the academic unit. When the central CE unit is set up as a
cost center, with total budgetary responsibility for its programs, it assumes
that risk. The assumption here is
that the CE unit has total financial responsibility for any program that it
offers. The CE unit can absorb the risk, balancing the risk of innovation
against net revenue from other programs. The CE unit needs two things: (1) a clear costing and revenue sharing
policy that operates as institution-wide policy so that all units are treated
equally and (2) a governing body with representation from across the major
academic colleges so that risk is balanced.
·
A Community
Interface. A centralized CE unit
can provide a single institutional point of contact with key client
organizations, serving as the institution’s ambassador to the community. This does a couple of things. First, it allows the institution to
address multiple needs in client organizations. For instance, a company may have an immediate need for
professional development of its engineering staff, but it may also need some
help with marketing staff or with back office issues or with customer relations. A central CE unit can survey needs
across the organization and bring multiple academic units to the response. It can also manage the overall
relationship with a client organization, as needs change.
·
Adult Learner
Support. A key benefit of a
centralized unit is its ability to work with adult, part-time students, whose
needs are unlike traditional undergraduates. A CE student services group can help students deal with the
many non-academic issues that they face in trying to integrate learning into
already busy professional and personal lives. The CE unit can be a key player in ensuring student success
for the adult, part-time learner.
These
roles require a strong governance system in which academic units have a voice
in policy, funding, and new initiatives, understanding that funding of new
initiatives is based on net revenue generated by previous programs. All academic units thus should have a
voice in CE governance. The
Continuing Education governance should be on a par with the institution’s other
major missions, such as undergraduate and graduate education and research.
CE and
Online Learning
Some
institutions built strong boundaries between Continuing Education and Online
Learning. That may have been
necessary to get online learning started.
However, two decades into the online revolution, it is clear that online
technology cannot not be isolated, but should be widely available to help
institutions better serve individuals and communities of all sorts. The online environment is part of the
daily life of today’s citizens. It
affects how we work, how we socialize, how we find information and solve
problems. It is part of the fabric
of today’s world. The question,
then, is not whether Continuing
Education should use online technology, but how
best to integrate technology into its mission and services.
Already,
some continuing education units have integrated online learning into their
credit offerings, turning evening classes into blended learning courses that
reduce the need for adult students to travel to campus. This makes the courses more competitive
and, at the same time, can improve instruction by better engaging adult students
in the learning process.
Beyond
that, however, online technology can be used in noncredit continuing education
environments. Open educational
resources, webinars, social media, MOOCs, and other variations all have
potential to improve the connection between the university and the many
communities it serves. MOOCs, in
particular, can be used to bring together geographically dispersed
clients—professionals, public servants, etc.—into sustained learning
communities that can have an extended consulting and research transfer
relationship with faculty in multiple academic units.
Continuing
Education can effectively embrace online technology to better articulate the
goal of serving the community with noncredit programs, research and technology
transfer programs, support for K-12 education and community development, and
related services.
Looking Forward
The
original idea of Extension was a response to the need for innovation to support
the Industrial Revolution. For the
next century, universities used Continuing Education to help their state’s employers,
professionals, government agencies, and schools, hospitals, and other community
organizations adapt to changing needs.
Today, a generation into the Information Revolution, these communities
are facing even more dramatic changes as they try to remain vital in the face
of a global economy driven by information technology. Centralized Continuing Education support services,
empowered by the new technology and by internal policies that create a culture
of innovative engagement, offer a way that universities can help faculty engage
the communities we serve and whose taxes support many aspects of our public
higher education system.
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