Dr. Ronald Wagner
Long before educators were trying to crack the code to effective online learning in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Ronald Wagner was aiming to transform higher education online. Wagner is the founder and CEO of Relearnit, which helps universities identify and implement online programs, and works with educators on translating face-to-face lessons into online learning. And it’s not working just in St. Louis. Recently, Relearnit partnered with Brooklyn’s St. Francis College to launch its first fully online degree program: a bachelor's degree in exercise and movement science designed with nontraditional students in mind.
One intriguing aspect of your company is that you work with universities to introduce programs based on the demands of the job market. How do you do that?
There are platforms that allow you to evaluate the density of job openings by title, by region, by credentials. So let's say that in greater St. Louis, there's an influx of job openings for cybersecurity analyst. And for those jobs, a bachelor's degree is required with a CSSP certification, and zero to one years of experience. What we argue is that a university should be paying attention to workforce demand and aligning academic programs based on what that demand is. Universities need to be agile enough to set up programs in a fairly quick time to address the needs of the communities where they're located. So we’re going to approach one of our universities or partners and say, “Here's the demand, and we also have the program design and we can make recommendations for faculty if you don't have faculty who can teach these programs.”
Educators who have never taught online are being thrown into it during COVID-19. How has online learning evolved most recently?
Online education is not simply taking your face-to-face class and delivering it through Zoom. There are a multitude of attributes of online education that extend well beyond a synchronous meeting. I can go over a lesson right now, but it doesn’t mean it will be effective. You have to take into consideration a student's learning style, the type of content that you're offering or trying to teach, and you have to modify it based on the platform that you're teaching, as well as who the learners may be. In terms of keeping students retained online and keeping them engaged, most faculty are not trained to do that. We have retention teams to check in with students. I don't think that we can have an expectation, particularly given what we're dealing with now with the influx of students in an online environment, that a faculty member can take on all of those responsibilities.
How do you take a lesson and modify it for online?
In athletic training, we teach these psychomotor skills or hands-on skills in a laboratory environment. [Students are] either able to touch their peers or manipulate a mannequin. If I have to go on Zoom, in a video, I can show you those things, but unless you have someone there next to you, it’s going to be difficult to teach you to feel in that manner. So if I’m teaching this in an online environment, then perhaps I have to create 3-D models for you to manipulate online and then translate that to actually having a peer there. You learn the basics with the 3-D model. Are there implications for just video on demand? Absolutely. But it can't be 100 percent video on demand. Talking is not effective for everyone. If a student is a hands-on student, then you have to figure out ways, and you have to create learning objects, that allow the students to be hands-on. I think what makes instruction effective is that you design it in a way that everyone gets an opportunity to learn the way they like to learn.
The pandemic has forced a lot of us to adopt technology in a way we hadn’t before. How do you think that will change online learning? What’s next?
I think that there's so much information at our fingertips that you can just lose yourself in all of it, and really sort of forget what it is you were searching for in the first place because there's so much good information available. I think we're going to have to figure out ways to evaluate the information that we’re consuming. One way I think that evaluation will happen will be peer reviews. Some people on Google are validated reviewers—that’s going to be important. Not everything carries the same weight. There is so much content at our fingertips, consumers need a tool to discern what is credible and what is not.
