International Ed A Vermont academic visionary wants to update the old college try — online B Y Eth A N D E SE i f E
SEVENDAYSVt.com 09.25.13-10.02.13 SEVEN DAYS 36 FEATURE
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he student loan crisis has caught the f ederal government’s atten tion, but it’s not the only sys temic problem plaguing higher education. The list of troubles is long and complex: grossly inflated administrative salaries carried on the backs of inflated tuition, decreased educational budgets for both public and private schools, student dissatisf action with course offerings, the exploitation of adjunct and limited-term faculty. The refrain is constant: The system is broken. South Burlington resident Robert Skiff believes not only that the system is broken but that it’s getting worse. And he proposes to do something about it. Skiff has a new online academic ven ture called Oplerno. It doesn’t aim to be an all-purpose solution to the crisis in higher education, but he believes that the moment has arrived to use technology to address problems in a way that will benefit both students and faculty. Skiff estimates that by 2020, nearly 230 million people worldwide will seek higher education — up from about 135 million today. “We can’t expect to double the physical inf rastructure of higher educa tion to meet that demand,” he says. “Nor can we expect them to get in airplanes and come to the States. But we can create — if we redesign higher education f rom the ground up — institutions and organiza tions that can offer classes to students.” Oplerno is not yet up and running — accrediting agencies’ approval must come first — but its infrastructure is partially in place. At root, Oplerno is an online learn ing platform that enables faculty members to teach courses asynchronously with up to 25 students. The interf ace will ac commodate everything we have come to expect from the online experience — text, live chat, audio, video, filesharing — and will be accessible via web browser and smartphone app. Oplerno’s name is a condensation of its stated mission — open learning or ganization — and was chosen precisely f or its meaninglessness acrosss mul tiple languages. Though Skiff resides in Vermont, he always intended Oplerno to be an international operation. (With his wife and father, Skiff founded the Vermont Commons School, a college pre paratory school for grades 7 to 12, in South Burlington in 1995.) Not only is Oplerno built atop the world wide web, but its of ficers are spread out all over the globe. The
EDUCATION director of operations is in Bend, Ore., and the director of technology resides in the Netherlands. Skiff, who has nearly completed his EdD at the University of Vermont, first recognized the educational potential of the internet about 20 years ago, he says, when he was working as an educator in Quito, Ecuador. Taking advantage of library sites such as Project Gutenberg and trans f er protocols such as Gopher, he vastly increased the size of the school’s small library. “There’s an amazing equalization that can occur with technology if it’s de ployed properly and equitably,” he says. Skiff returned home to Vermont with
the goal of establishing an online high school, but technology was not yet up to the task. Determined to offer more than a correspondence school, Skiff waited it out. The smartphone revolution provided the necessary technological opportunity at precisely the moment when even pres tigious institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology acknowledged that “conventional” models of higher edu cation are insufficient. MIT is a pioneer in offering “MOOCs,” the Massive Open Online Courses that represent one attempt to use the internet to democratize higher education. Oplerno’s model is different, though
Skiff finds nothing wrong with the way MOOCs operate. “I pref er to learn f rom other humans in small groups,” he says. “It’s how we’ve learned f or thousands of years.” While Oplerno’s courses will be capped at 25 students, minimum enrollment numbers as well as tuition costs will, unusually, be determined by professors. (The website states, “Oplerno believes that between $500 and $1000 is a reasonable f ee to charge a student.”) Prof essors will receive 80 to 90 per cent of the course f ees paid by students; Oplerno will collect the remainder. With that 10 to 20 percent, Skiff intends to