By Josh Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Ed
Many colleges look to online education as the path to growth, but it is often a bumpy road. At the Higher Ed Tech summit in January, a dean from the University of Southern California told me how she avoided the potholes. Karen Gallagher, dean of the university’s Rossier School of Education, took her school’s master’s degree in teaching online with the help of 2tor, a company that builds digital teaching platforms for traditional universities. “It’s our degree,” she says, “and our faculty.” That faculty had to learn a new way to teach for online students, however, and 2tor helped with that, as well as recruiting and placing students in teacher-training positions. The company had to learn that “we are not the Wild West and we have rules,” Ms. Gallagher says. But the partnership is a success: Today the university’s program has 2,000 students in 43 states and over 20 countries, reflecting growth that would not have been possible if it were limited to bricks and mortar.
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