OPLERNO? Anyone heard of this?

Oplerno

They have a funding campaign going on right now:
Oplerno--A New and Affordable Higher Education | Indiegogo

With an intent at full disclosure, I'm taking the "wait and see if they're accredited first" approach.

If accredited, it would be easier to donate to this cause.

I'm guessing that friends and family will be the main contributors, initially.

 

That could be a long time. It appears from the site that they've applied for approval to operate from the State of Vermont. No indication it's been granted yet. I think it'll be quite a while before they're even able to apply for accreditation of any type. And they'll need a ton of money long before that, just to get going - once they get permission.

I wish them luck. Any effort to provide higher education at lower cost is praiseworthy -- but I'm not holding my breath.

Johann

 

It's an intriguing concept. In the US, we have:

- lots of students who want to be taught, and who can't pay a lot of money.
- lots of adjunct professors who want to teach, and who don't expect a lot of money.

Can we put these two groups together?

The idea (as I understand it) is that OPLERNO will provide accreditation and an online delivery system, but not much else. If you are an adjunct prof and you want to teach an online course, you develop the course (you retain full ownership of the intellectual property) and submit it to OPLERNO for review. If OPLERNO approves it, you can offer it directly to students, using OPLERNO's accreditation and online delivery system. You can charge whatever tuition you think makes sense, and you keep 80% of the revenue. OPLERNO (which is non-profit) keeps the other 20%, to cover the administrative costs associated with accreditation, online delivery, etc.

They are trying to get state approval from Vermont, and then plan to pursue regional accreditation. I wonder if they might be better off with DETC accreditation, at least initially -- DETC might be more flexible about accepting OPLERNO's unusual approaches, and might be faster as well.

 

I agree fully. But it could still be a while. I'm guessing an absolute minimum of three years. Unless I'm mistaken (could happen) I believe the school would have to operate successfully for two years, before applying to DETC and an optimistic expectation (I think) would be accreditation within a further one to two years from date of application.

Yep. I was right - for once. :smile: From the DETC Handbook:

"At the time of the initial application, the institution must have been enrolling students in the current programs for
two consecutive years and under the present ownership (no new programs may be added during the two year
period).

The applicant institution must be able to document—via an audited or reviewed comparative financial statement
that covers its two most recent fiscal years—that it is financially sound and that it can meet its financial
obligations to provide instruction and service to its students."

As I see it, going for Regional Accreditation instead would likely add two or more years to the process - and the financial (and other) requirements the school would have to meet would be considerably more onerous.

Johann

 

And if you asked me if any eventual accreditation of a school with this unusual model (instructors own the courses, not the school) was:

(a) A rubber-stamp
(b) A slam-dunk
(c) A crap-shoot

I'd go with "c." Yeah, "c" is always a good bet on multiple-guess tests :smile: Even so, I do hope OPLERNO beats the odds.

Johann

 

Here's an example of how this might work. Suppose you want to teach a class for Oplerno. You feel that $500 (at the low end of Oplerno's suggested range) is reasonable tuition for your 3-credit, 12-week course. The course is approved by Oplerno, and 16 students sign up. You collect 16 x $500 = $8,000. You split the revenue 80/20 with Oplerno: you keep $6,400 and Oplerno gets $1,600.

Obviously you could make more if you charged more in tuition, or attracted more students. For example, if 20 students signed up for a class with $750 tuition, you would net $12,000 for the course, after giving Oplerno a 20% cut.

Oplerno plans to cap enrollments at 25 students per course. However, they let you teach up to three courses simultaneously. So in theory, you could teach up to 75 students in a 12-week term. If they paid $500 each, you would net a total of $30,000 for the 12-week term.

I'm guessing that many adjunct profs out there would find this model to be appealing. If Oplerno can get it off the ground, I don't think attracting talented and qualified teachers will be a problem.

 

I'm guessing that the former option is entirely possible in this case.

The State of Vermont does permit the operation of unaccredited degree-granting schools. In fact, one of the most interesting unaccredited schools in the country is the Vermont-approved Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction. They run small MFA and certificate programs focusing on "the creation and dissemination of comics, graphic novels and other manifestations of the visual narrative." CCS claims to be the top program of this kind in the US, and I'm inclined to believe them.

 

True enough. But some states expect new unaccredited institutions to make reasonable progress towards accreditation, and ultimately to become accredited. So there are unaccredited schools, but only in the short term.

Other states allow unaccredited institutions to exist indefinitely, even if they have no plans to seek accreditation. Vermont is apparently in this group, since the unaccredited, degree-granting Center for Cartoon Studies has been around since 2004 (or even longer, if you accept their possibly questionable "Origins" story).

So Oplerno may be able to survive indefinitely in Vermont, even if they struggle with accreditation issues. But obviously their marketability would be much higher if they had RA, or even NA.

True enough.

 

Not my idea of lower cost; Quote:
"Most courses will cost between $500 and $1,500 per 12-week, 3-credit class."
For that amount, or a little more, I can earn credits from good RA colleges/universities.

 

I agree that Oplerno will need to become RA to be truly competitive (and they claim that RA is their goal).
But from the same source, how about this quote:

Are these points true at the average RA online school ?

Certainly there are inexpensive RA online schools. But they are often accused of simply supplying "canned" content, delivered by poorly paid adjunct instructors, who have little incentive to offer anything more than the required minimum interaction to the students. (In fairness, some B&M schools are like this too).

With most online classes, the bulk of the tuition revenue doesn't go to the instructor -- it goes to administrative overhead (which is high in the case of a traditional B&M school) or to the shareholders (in the case of a for-profit school). So the average online adjunct gets lousy pay.

Oplerno promises to give online adjuncts the freedom to teach classes their own way, and to provide them with a significantly higher level of compensation relative to most online adjunct positions. If they can deliver, it seems like these changes could potentially improve online teaching quality. After all, if more money and more academic freedom aren't incentives for better teaching, then what other incentives are there ?

And if the quality of online instruction is unusually high, then maybe Oplerno is still a good deal, even if the tuition is comparable.

 

I heard about OPLERNO because I'm connected to one of the operations team members via LinkedIn.

If you go to this page:
Team

His name is Crompton. (The technical person.)

The President, Skiff, has apparently founded a school before, Vermont Commons School (a college prepatory school).
Vermont Commons School - College Preparatory School for Grades 6 to 12 - A Private School in South Burlington, Vermont.

He's currently working on an Ed.D in Vermont, in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies.
Robert Skiff | LinkedIn

This guy *might* know what he's getting himself into, at the least.

 

Likely he does know what he's getting into -- at least, with his background, as Instant000 described it, he should. And maybe, with his high level of knowledge, he should not be allowing "spin" -- e.g. use of the "Vermont Accreditation" phrase. My apologies for not reading details of the cost of OPLERNO courses. I agree this is hardly "low cost." This seems more and more like a good moneymaker for instructors and not such a good deal for students. I'm liking it less and less by the minute -- so it'll probably be insanely popular within weeks! :smile:

For a genuine lower-cost approach, I like University Of The People. They've got money - they don't need crowd-sourcing etc. Owner Shai Reshef made a bundle on the sale of his former, highly successful education company to the Kaplan people -- and he's invested a lot of money in UOTP. UOTP is already on the DETC Applicants list. Their model means a Bachelor's degree will cost about $4,000. Now that IS low cost!

University of the People

Johann

 

As I understand it, Oplerno's strategy will be to offer courses from different instructors at different price points.

If you just want an English comp course to check a box, then maybe you sign up for the minimally priced $500 class offered by the recent American Lit graduate from Podunk State.

On the other hand, if your passion is cinema, then maybe you sign up for the high-end $1500 class offered by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter. Yes, Oplerno claims that they can give students that choice:

Let's say that the screenwriter can get 25 students (the maximum for an Oplerno class) to pay $1500 tuition each. He would net $30,000 for his course, after giving Oplerno a 20% cut. And if the course was successful, it wouldn't be a one-shot effort -- he could offer his course repeatedly, and collect tens of thousands of dollars each time. Realistically, that seems like enough compensation to motivate even an Academy Award nominee to take up adjunct teaching.

Do other online schools -- like, for example, University of the People, Charter Oak State College, or University of Phoenix -- offer sufficient adjunct compensation to attract this kind of faculty talent?

Everyone else in this thread is defining educational "value" in terms of price -- is Oplerno's price low ? But there's another way to deliver educational value -- through higher quality instruction. This is not something that online education has historically been known for. But maybe it's worth trying.

 

Oplerno just received approval from the State of Vermont to offer courses for credit. Not clear if they can offer degrees.

Sounds like they are having no trouble attracting adjunct faculty -- quite possibly because Oplerno offers them decent compensation. Their list of forthcoming courses seems ambitious.