When Paul LeBlanc took over as president of Southern New Hampshire University more than 20 years ago, the university taught about 2,500 students on its residential campus, but its future was uncertain. But LeBlanc, who was passionate about technology and worked in the field of educational technology, made an unusual bet at the time. We decided to expand our university’s online services.
This growth exploded as acceptance of online learning expanded, but then received an unexpected boost from the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the university has the largest student population in the country, with more than 200,000 students, thanks to its online programs.
This month, LeBlanc announced that he would step down as president after this academic year. But the work to bring about major changes in higher education is far from over. He will focus on a new initiative in southern New Hampshire that explores how new generative AI tools like ChatGPT can be used to reimagine college education.
EdSurge connected with LeBlanc to discuss how the university made an unusually large-scale transition to online education. How to respond to critics who worry that the university is borrowing too much money from for-profit universities. He also talked about how big an impact he thinks AI will have on higher education.
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EdSurge: When you arrived in Southern New Hampshire in 2003, there were some online courses, but only a few. What made it grow at a time when there were so few nonprofit universities?
Paul LeBlanc: In a sense, we have been dragged online against our will. SNHU had these satellite sites within naval bases. We were a preferred provider for the U.S. Navy, and we had part-time faculty who would drive to the base, get a pass, come on base and teach classes.
And the Navy, of course, said that every time you put a ship out to sea, all of those sailors suddenly become college dropouts. They don’t go to class the next day. However, there is a new thing called distance learning and you need to start offering it if you want to maintain your preferred provider status. Thankfully, in 1995 they brought us online.
I came here in 2003 and there were about 18 people in attendance. [teaching] and hundreds of students [online]. I could see the writing on the wall. We’re seeing for-profits growing like wildfire online. And when they were able to offer fully virtual degrees, most nonprofit higher education institutions turned their noses up and said, “This isn’t that good.” However, nature hates a vacuum. University of Phoenix and Corinthian University were all accepted. And at their peak, these for-profit organizations educated 12 percent of all college students in America.
But I thought [online learning] This is a playable card. And what were my other cards? We were relatively unknown and very local. I don’t know the correct way to rank schools, but many people say our school is 3rd tier out of a 4th tier.
There were two things that were really lucky for me. The first is that I had something to work on. There was still a program. People worked hard and there were some really talented people in the early online operations. That early team. The second is that this place has always been built around serving non-traditional students. At the time of its founding, Actual DNA was aimed at non-traditional students.
We started in 1932 with non-traditional students on the second floor of a store on Hanover Street in Manchester, New Hampshire. And it wasn’t until 1968 that he got a campus. It wasn’t until the ’70s that he began recruiting traditional-age students to campus. So it’s always been in our DNA.
And fortunately, we didn’t have much money or status.
Are you glad you didn’t have money?
Because the two biggest obstacles to innovation are a lot of money and a lot of status. Larry Bacow was a good friend and president of Harvard University. And I thought, “Larry, it’s so hard for you guys to innovate.” How do we change Harvard University? There’s not much urgency. And if you have this much wealth, why change?
The first thing we did was take over and relocate our online department. We put it two miles away in a factory yard in Manchester.
And I said, “Look, I’m giving you permission to play by different rules.” There was a lot to do, but it wasn’t sexy. It was under the hood. It was going to change the rules of our business. It was changing our technology. The way the course is taught has changed. There was much to do. We had to negotiate with the traditional faculty, who actually control what we can and can’t do, to give us a little bit of space to do what we want to do. But at one point, the challenge I gave the team was, “How do we compete with Phoenix?” We don’t want to be like them. We want to learn about the good things they are doing. And people forget that the early University of Phoenix did some things very well that incumbent higher education institutions couldn’t do.
like what? What are some examples of commercial organizations doing well at the time?
They said, “Hey, you know what?” There’s no need to put adult learners through millions of paperwork to get into college… transcripts from the registrar’s office that closes at 5 p.m. It’s like getting . ” They were thinking about customer service. There is no need to treat students poorly just because they are students. You could make things better for them.
I remember the early days. So I just said, “Go to the website and click this box.” You are simply giving us permission to retrieve your records. We will track your records and pay a $10 fee. And we had a guy who’s still with us, who used to go to the post office and get a bunch of $10 money orders. And these involved a very manual process of printing out applications and mailing them to schools. Everything is now digital. But certainly, those are the things that made the real difference.
You are planning to step down as president in June, and your next project will be related to AI. Could you tell me more about that?
The plan involves a small but mighty small team, including George Siemens, perhaps one of the world’s top five experts on AI and education. So I convinced him to leave his position and join this small team we had put together as lead scientist. Our group is a health and wellbeing group led by clinical psychologist Tanya Gunby. So we got together and I think there are six of us now.
And it’s this question that we’re looking at. What would happen if we redesigned education from top to bottom, if we weren’t trying to fit it into existing models? And what we’re actually doing is enhanced and supported by AI? What would a person-centered, relationship-centered version of education look like?
So our thinking is, what does human-centered AI look like when we talk about learning, and what kind of relationships do we want to maintain in a world where humans are no longer the most powerful entity when it comes to declarative knowledge? ,about it. AI illusions aside, we are losing that race pretty quickly.
We were greatly influenced by the book Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence. This book is written by three economists from the University of Toronto.
What kind of output do you expect to get? Will you release a white paper or tool?
I think there is research and tools. We hope to be able to announce what we are building by his ASU+GSV summit in April.
We are working on developing a learning platform. Apart from this, we have a very interesting and important project. That wasn’t what we were asked to do. However, George and I recognize that higher education institutions are not good at owning their own data. Even within organizations, we are not good with data. And if we, as an industry, as a sector, don’t manage our data better, we’re going to react to other people’s AI apps and how they approach us. So we are preparing to build a global data consortium, and we also have support from foundations.
The American Council on Education agreed to host that neutral referee. And there are a lot of major players. So we’re working on architecture and governance, and we have to have a lot of safeguards in place when it comes to student privacy data, and we don’t want to minimize them. But our hope is that by building large data consortia, higher education, its researchers, policy makers, and those who want to build learning applications can actually combat algorithmic bias and better understand learning. The goal is to be able to hold more data. We need to own this as an industry. So we look forward to launching and announcing this data consortium in April.
listen full interview On the EdSurge Podcast.
