The Global Campus

The University of Illinois Global Campus is a rather new initiative with the mission to “become a national leader in online education, focused on innovation, quality, superior instruction, service, and accessibility” (University of Illinois Global Campus, 2007, p. 1). As a campus, The Global Campus itself is not accredited and relies on partnerships with other colleges and departments to design and develop its online programs and courses. Therefore, faculty senate buy-in and support at all three land-based campuses is essential.This unique structure has encountered its own challenges to the point of forcing The Global Campus to close its doors as a separate campus and return distance education programming to the individual campuses.In September of 2005, a newly appointed president, Joseph B. White, made it clear in his inaugural speech that the University of Illinois should strive to become a leader in providing quality education in a more accessible and userfriendly fashion (White, 2005). Since that time, efforts ensued on creating a fourth campus: The University of Illinois Global Campus. In 4 short years, The Global Campus formed and developed distant programs, enrolled students, conducted virtual classes, and come full circle to closing its doors for restructuring.The University of Illinois Board of Directors approved the creation of The Global Campus in March 2007. The board’s decision was based on several market analyses and the president’s vision for increasing the university’s presence in the distance education field. The board approved the initiative based upon a proposal brought forth by a core team of professionals, headed by Chet Gardner, who was appointed special assistant to the president in 2006. The proposal included a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats analysis, market analysis of initial programs, and processes and policies for registering students, designing quality courses, hiring faculty, and measuring success. Originally, it was intended that The Global Campus would become a for-profit arm of the university as well, which ultimately was changed due to all three campus faculty senates expressing lack of support for a profit-based business model.Once the board approved the initiative, the core team was provided with a budget and the green light to hire additional staff. The staff had less than nine months to establish its new virtual campus before going live with its first two programs in January 2008. For the next year, The Global Campus was criticized for the lack of enrollment numbers and continued lack of support by many faculty and academic units. It was decided that one possible solution was to become accredited so that the virtual campus could work toward academic independence. In November 2008, the board of trustees approved the request to seek accreditation, which was quickly added to the Global Campus project management schedule to be completed by Fall 2010. To help address faculty concerns, the board of trustees approved The Constitution for the Academic Policy Council of the University of Illinois Global Campus, which established a faculty oversight committee of Global Campus academic programs and educational policies. Despite these efforts, on April 15, 2009, the president and University of Illinois Senates Conference produced a document that outlined a redesign for the Global Campus that would return all academic responsibility over to each of the campuses and stopping all efforts of The Global Campus to become a separate campus.So, what went wrong? Let’s look at the initiative through the eyes of Rogers’ (2003) elements of diffusion and try to identify components of the theory that may have helped The Global Campus initiative be more successful. According to Rogers (2003), diffusion is “the process by which (1) an innovation (2) is communicated through certain channels (3) over time (4) among the members of a social system” (emphasis added, p. 5). Let’s first examine these components one a time in order to get a picture of the entire system.Even though the University of Illinois is already comprised of three land-based campuses, only a few individual departments have implemented distance education courses within their program. For example, the Urbana-Champaign campus’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) offers a fully American Library Association accredited master of science degree program (http://www.lis.illinois.edu/programs/leep/). For the most part, program planning, instructional design, and delivery methods specific to distance education are foreign concepts to university faculty and college/department administration. Therefore, the innovation in our scenario is the construction of a new virtual campus that challenges the social structure of the members associated with the existing culture.In order for faculty to adopt such an innovation, they must understand the five characteristics of innovations. These characteristics also help determine and individual’s rate of adoption as well. They consist of relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. When we examine these one at a time relative to The Global Campus, we can begin to see where considering Rogers’ (2003) theory in the initial planning stages may have encouraged a more successful implementation.Specific to diffusion, communication occurs when some method is used to connect those with expert knowledge and experience regarding the innovation with those without knowledge and experience surrounding the same innovation (Rogers, 2003). In 2006, White appointed Gardner to lead The Global Campus initiative. Gardner, at the time, was serving as the assistant vice president for academic affairs. His first task was to develop a core team of experts to develop a proposal to submit for review by the faculty senate at all three campuses before presenting it to the board of trustees for approval. Faculty and staff were invited to campus presentations and provided the opportunity to give feedback and discuss concerns. Though this strategy provided opportunities for faculty involvement, no faculty participated on the core team.Time with respect to diffusion reflects three measurable components of the discussion process which include (a) the time it takes for an individual to be introduced to the innovation to the time it takes the same individual to determine whether to adopt or reject the innovation, (b) the timeframe in which the innovation is adopted relative to that of other adopters, and (c) the rate of adoption by those within the system (Rogers, 2003). With regard to The Global Campus, time was of the essence. However, in its lifespan of 4 short years, too many adopters determined to reject the innovation to the point of pressuring the initiative’s administration to close the doors.Rogers (2003) defines a social system as “a set of interrelated units that are engaged in joint problem solving to accomplish a common goal” (p. 23). Innovation decisions can be made based upon one of three types of choices: (a) optional innovation-decisions where “choices to adopt or reject an innovation that are made by an individual independent of the decisions of the other members of the system” (p. 28), (b) collective innovation-decisions, which are those “choices to adopt or reject an innovation that are made by consensus among the members of a system” (p. 28), and (c) authority innovation-decisions, which are “choices to adopt or reject an innovation that are made by a relatively few individuals in a system who possess power, status, or technical expertise” (p. 28).It was the decision of President White to move forward with developing The Global Campus, therefore, causing the initial choice to be one of authority. However, due to the political nature of a system as large as the University of Illinois, no one person has sole authority to implement such large initiatives in a manner that rejects the input, concerns, and voices of its members. Such authoritarian introduction of The Global Campus may have been the single greatest factor in its downfall.In order for an authoritarian approach to be successful in terms of diffusion, the authoritarian figure must require implementation and have full authority to do so. The University of Illinois, like many institutions of higher education, shares operational power among tenure-track faculty, governing boards, and advising committees. Therefore, the successful creation of a separate virtual campus would have required full autonomy and administrative control or the overall support of the faulty senates and chancellors at all three campuses.Without an authoritarian figure dictating adoption, change must happen through the use of opinion leaders who serve as respectable members of the society and are early adopters of the innovation (Rogers, 2003). With no opinion leader sitting on the initial core team The Global Campus initiative could have been perceived as an us against them (faculty against administration) scenario, causing resentment and negative attitudes toward change from the onset. Michael Lindeman (personal communication, October 21, 2009), director of program and course development for The Global Campus, feels that appointing a faculty member (or other opinion leader within the system) to lead the initiative rather than an existing administrator would have earned more initial respect by the adopting community. By doing so, faculty may have felt that the existing academic oversight and rigor would have been less questionable. However, one must still wonder if things had been different, how different would they actually be? Would the mission to reach more students be successful if the university’s current model had simply transferred to an online delivery modality? Would tenure-track faculty rely on adjunct faculty to help ensure multiple sections of a course could be offered? No one knows. What we do know is that due to the administration’s inability to get the faculty senates’ and chancellors’ support, The Global Campus closed its virtual doors on December 31, 2009. Individual campus units became responsible for the creation and implementation of any distance education adventures. May The Global Campus torch not burn out, but be passed, carrying reminders of past mistakes and successes, and may each campus stay true to the original mission of The Global Campus: “become a national leader in online education, focused on innovation, quality, superior instruction, service, and accessibility” (University of Illinois Global Campus, 2007, p. 1).A portrait of a man above text identifying Kevin E. Johnson, C E O of The Cutting Ed, Inc., with his Urbana, I L address, telephone number, and email inside a bordered rectangle.CEO, The Cutting Ed, Inc., 506 W. Florida Ave., Urbana, IL 61801. Telephone: (217) 253-8670.