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Episode 10
How Schools and Colleges are Pivoting for Today and Tomorrow
About This Episode
We look at how Vermont Law School pivoted its marketing strategy during the pandemic and expanded its curriculum online.
Pam McBride | Director of Product Marketing, StackAdapt
John Miller | VP, Enrollment Management, Marketing and Communications, Vermont Law School
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
One of the benefits of my position that oversees the departments that I do is that I make sure that nothing happens in isolation. You hear a lot of talk about silos and higher education. Well, that doesn’t happen, because there is a feedback loop from the admissions counselors directly to the marketing team. And if a strategy is not producing prospective inquiries, if the language doesn’t seem right, that gets right back to marketing, and adjustments are made without a good CRM, customer relationship management system. Without good reporting capabilities, you know, that’s not going to happen as easy. So of course, I had to make sure that all of that was in place before I went down this path, but you know, that feedback loop, and that kind of collaborative effort is so important to make it work and also determine your return on investment.
How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:53)
Curious to know what industry leading marketers are looking to achieve and the ever evolving digital landscape that How Agencies Thrive podcast by StackAdapt is dedicated to helping the new breed of forward thinking savvy, lean and mean marketers win in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Time to thrive.
Vitaly (00:01:21)
Hello, everyone, this is Vitaly Chesky, co-founder of StackAdapt, and the host of this podcast. Today we sit down with John Miller, Vice President for Enrollment Management, Marketing and Communications over the Vermont Law School to hear firsthand how they run their marketing team and how they’ve been adjusting to the new norm. In this episode, I found very interesting how they have built their in-house marketing team to handle all marketing that pivots very quickly and makes truly data driven decisions. What I thought was really cool is how they built a feedback loop with the admissions office where they can in real time adjust the messaging to increase ret
Pam (00:02:03)
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining the StackAdapt podcast How Agencies Thrive. My name is Pam McBride and I lead the marketing team here at stock that I was very excited when we decided to embark on this podcast journey. And I’m equally excited to be talking to John Miller today. John Miller is the Vice President for Enrollment Management, Marketing and Communications for the Vermont Law School. Vermont Law School, a private independent institution is home to the nation’s largest and deepest environmental law program. BLS, as it is known was ranked a top environmental law school by the US News and World Report in 2020. With that said, welcome to the podcast, John, and thanks for joining us.
John (00:02:48)
Oh, thanks so much for having me.
Pam (00:02:50)
I think we’re gonna I think we’re in store for a great conversation. So John, let’s start by talking a little bit about you. You’ve been at Vermont Law School for nearly 12 years. And it seems you do a bit of a dual role. You’re an adjunct professor, as well as the Vice President of Enrollment Management and Marketing Communications. Tell me a bit about your roles and your path to where you are now.
John (00:03:13)
Absolutely. So my role at Vermont Law School is certainly unique in some ways, especially to a lot of different places, other institutions, and it has evolved over these past 12 years. But when I think about that, it has really been parallel to the changes in higher education and certainly legal education. My career, it began in admissions. And when you consider the factors that have affected enrollments, and certainly as institutions have struggled with enrollments, and you think about what impacts that is financial aid, its reputation of an institution, it’s the programs that you offer, and how you offer them, for example, online on campus, or some combination of both. It’s how people find you, which is marketing, advertising and your website. And it’s the experience that a student has with your insist institution from first impression, either with an ad or with an admissions counselor or an ambassador. And then through graduation and beyond this future donors. I’ll never forget attending a conference where a speaker said to me that the future of higher education administration is this like, chief experience officer. And at the time, that was interesting, but I feel like that’s really becoming true, because as demographics change, as the value proposition of higher education changes, the focus on institutional strategy, right, so institutions, why are we existing, the positioning of institutions within the marketplace, what we offer and who do we offer it to? And just this idea of, of general innovation of an institution, how we do it and how we respond to this disruption that has been happening, is really critical for an institution to persist over time. And I find that for me, this is where my efforts continue to evolve and move towards the strategy in this innovation. Now, on top of that, yes, you mentioned that I’m an adjunct professor of law. And I teach two required courses to our masters students and our joint JD masters students, and then also our law students can take my classes for electives. So I have a pretty full plate.
Pam (00:05:21)
Oh, you definitely do. So how you described the entire experience in the chief experience officer, I assume that role has has sort of surface because post secondary education is also a very competitive industry, so to speak, and that you need to attract students to your own educational institution versus having to go elsewhere. Right. Yep, that’s right. Yeah, so Vermont Law School has been recognized for environmental law amongst other aggradation. So what makes Vermont Law School unique?
John (00:05:59)
Vermont Law School, as you mentioned, is the premier environmental law school in the United States, and we have the largest program and offer the most faculty classes and clinics in that area. What makes BLS unique is that we are this private, independent law in graduate school with a social justice mission. We’re committed to developing the next generation of leaders who will tackle these complex social justice issues that impact the evolution of our civilization. Climate change is certainly a big one. Another one is restorative justice and criminal justice reform. We have master’s and certificate programs and classes in that and that’s actually the area that I teach in access to legal services and public interest law. And the intersectionality of all of those issues, is really what makes Vermont Law School a very unique kind of niche institution. And I also mentioned that we’re a lot and we’re a graduate school that’s also unique for a law school. Right. BLS has been a law school with master’s degrees since the 1980s, which we have only expanded over time. And about approximately 10 years ago, we went online with our graduate degree programs, in which we offer six different entry points each year for those programs, which as you might imagine, has allowed us to significantly grow that population, and provides opportunities for the law students to earn joint degrees, but also to take classes online. So we look. And the programs that we offer are very different than many law schools. And even just being an independent institution without an overarching University, is also very unique. And to me, what that says is that we’re really able to stick to our core mission, build programming off of that core mission, and really become innovators and disruptors, and quickly change to any, any of these challenges in the marketplace, whether it’s for higher education more generally, or for legal education. And it’s one of the reasons why I have stayed at Vermont Law School for so long. Because to be able to, to recognize this as to firmly be rooted in our mission, certainly, personally, to build a team who is passionate about that. And it’s just been such an incredible experience that even for me, I’m just committed to making sure that Vermont Law School continues. You know, the excellence that it has created over these past 40 years at the institution has been in existence.
Pam (00:08:25)
Wow, that’s interesting, because I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed law through the lenses of how you describe VPLS and the programs that you offer. So I definitely see how the uniqueness is part of your value proposition and the quality that stands out. So you also have one of the largest online student populations in the country. And we all know, given the current climate, other institutions definitely did feel a significant impact from COVID-19. Did you?
John (00:08:56)
Yeah, so of course, because everybody did. But you know, I’m very proud of how Vermont Law School pivoted to all online instruction this spring when the pandemic really hit. And I absolutely credit that to the experience that we have had in the delivery of online education. You know, since pivoting in the spring, we also had to tackle this idea of offering a really expansive summer program online, which we offer over 30 different courses. Typically in South Wales in Vermont, well, that wasn’t going to happen with the pandemic. So this was a bit of a feat to pull off. But a lot of law schools canceled their summer programs, because they just were unable to either have them in person or be able to pivot to online. And for us, this ended up being a little bit of an opportunity to open it up because we made that decision to go online with it and then to advertise to other lawn graduate students who could take advantage of our curriculum and not have to move To Vermont at all, so take it from their home or wherever they are. It ended up being a huge success for us. And we recently announced that we would hold the fall semester online. One of the reasons you know why we did this was the reality is that Vermont Law School is a national school. So we draw students from all over the world, but all over the country, in many areas that are being hit pretty hard with the virus, and especially right now. So those important to us when we were thinking about, you know, the spring, the summer, and now the fall that we’re able to offer the best experience, and the most consistent experience for all of our students. And, and going online was really the best way to do that. And we’ve even for the fall, staggered classes to accommodate many of our students in different time zones, we fall climate people from places like Texas and California, and there and there are even some people who will move here will will come to Vermont, and of course, will have to follow the health and safety guidelines, including quarantine requirements. And the school does plan to offer some services like the library and study spaces and maybe some food options, as soon as it is safe to do so. But, but you know, I think we made the right decision to continue with, with online and virtual instruction throughout the fall. And in June, if you’re paying attention to the news, you’re seeing more and more schools do the same. And some school even walk back on where they said they were going to open residentially or on campus. And now they’ve given the conditions around the country, they’re not going to do that. But yeah, I absolutely think our experience in having online programs, and then delivering the online education and the dedication of our faculty, especially in our staff, to make that happen has been highly successful for us. So of course, it impacted us. By drawing on that experience with online education, we were able to do it quickly and efficiently. And the outcome has been, you know, students have been satisfied with that experience, including the my own students that I’ve had in my class, and my class will be virtual online in the fall.
Pam (00:12:09)
Wow. So it sounds like you took part of your pivot was around your curriculum and your curriculum offerings and the timing of that. But I assume you had to pivot your marketing strategy as well and maybe adjust your messaging and who you chose to target. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?
John (00:12:26)
Oh, absolutely. The marketing communications was so critical in all of this, and we had to move very quickly. And it really was a campus wide effort. The first thing that was that was really important was just to communicate, right, we had to communicate what was happening to our current students, obviously, but also to our prospective students, the students are in our pipeline, and in the various stages of the application and commitment process. So gathering all that information, determining the different constituencies that we need to reach the message, the tone, and then of course, making sure that it’s distributed in the proper channel, which for us was a variety of, of email and website and social media. And then what we had to do, you know, recruitment doesn’t end, I mentioned the six star terms for online, but you know, our residential or on campus, recruitment was still going. And we were still receiving applications and getting and generating inquiries from our different advertisements. So we had to quickly create assets for the admissions team, and our website to accommodate this. And everything was sort of in flux, because this has been such a wildcard the pandemic for for admissions and enrollment efforts. And we obviously have, you know, a serious goal, you know, objective to mitigate the impact of enrollment, and more importantly, allow our prospective students to have access to all the same information to make an informed decision about where they want to go. And the thought was, you know, we had to create a really robust virtual experience to reflect what someone would see and feel as if they were coming for a campus visit. And if you talk to admissions people, you know how important the campus visit experience is to the yield rates for the people who ultimately accept. So we had some of that already, of course, because we are in some remote area of Vermont. But now it all needs to be accessible online. And we have to continue communicating and updating our current students on and admitted students on what’s going to happen, whether it’s for the summer and the fall, all at the same time. So there was just a lot going on. There were a lot of webinars happening. There were a lot of town hall style virtual meetings, to update and just answered questions. Just being available is so important. And it also showcase one of the best aspects of the Vermont Law School community is that we are a community and that we’re in this together. So that’s a little bit about the communication piece. But there’s this entire kind of marketing piece. Right. So the next, the opportunity here was now that our entire curriculum is online. This is an opportunity for us to really amplify what we’re doing. And I mentioned that some schools maybe were not able to offer summer programs, or did not have the capacity to go on to go online. So again, this is an opportunity. So the marketing communications team, the mark comm team worked with the academics to create a series of advertisements that would be sent out over email on listserv through AdWords display and social. And it was really impressive because what we did was we set up weekly meetings to discuss enrollments in specific courses. And then we drove ads towards the really interesting kind of Hot Topic courses, but then also to the under enrolled classes, and that worked amazingly well and significantly improved our summer enrollments. And we’re even able to enroll a lot of students from other law and graduate schools, which allowed them to continue their education where they might not have that had that opportunity at their home institution. So it can just really showcase the campus coming together. And the expertise of the mark comm team to help mitigate the impact of COVID 19 on our campus operation enrollments.
Pam (00:16:07)
I find it interesting that you mentioned that you met weekly to look at at where I would say where everything was performing. So you took a very data driven approach. It appears to your your marketing strategy with respect to your messaging, and what was working and what wasn’t. Did you adjust the cadence of your campaigns at all I envision most post secondary Institute institutions will heavy up just as you’re going into what used to be the new normal of on campus classes starting in September excetera. Are you always on now?
John (00:16:42)
We’re always on. And I mentioned that, you know, we have the online programs. And I think if you talk to anyone with online programs, you’re always on, you never stop. So but I do think it added an additional dimension to everything we’re doing. We were doing. Because absolutely we we wanted to, we saw an opportunity to offer our curriculum to more and more students. And we had to act very quickly to get it out there. Because again, whether it was the spring, the summer and now the fall, you know, everybody around the country is hedging their bets a little bit on what’s going to happen, because we just don’t know. So to be able to say, Okay, we’re making a decision, we’re offering everything online marketing go. So, so yeah, we absolutely had to ramp up very quickly. And then we had to meet you know, we met with the academics, you know, once a week, but then the internal team was meeting at least twice a week to look at how the ads were performing. And do we need to make any, any adjustments? Okay, you know, we, you know, we were trying carousel ads on Facebook for a little while, wasn’t working back, right. So we switched it back to the single display. And so just like really watching that, and seeing what people were interested in, and I didn’t mention this, but there during the summer, there are four four start terms in just in the summer alone, because they’re shorter classes. So we’re constantly switching to the new term and just deploying more ads. So yeah, absolutely. Summer was crazy. But you know, I have a team that that lives for that they love that. And it was also it was, it was a bonding experience. It displayed teamwork. And ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, the enrollments were, were incredible, and it helped the institution.
Pam (00:18:32)
So you talk a lot about your team. So it seems to me, I have insight knowing that you set up a next generation mercom office at WBLS. Tell me more about it. So why did you decide to bring everything in house?
John (00:18:45)
I am extremely proud of of the mark on team that is currently in place. And I’m so grateful that I’ve had the you know, I have had and currently have a president and a board of trustees that believe and support and indulged, you know, my vision over the years and continue to do so we initially started with an agency, and that was incredibly helpful to kick kick it off and kind of move us into to this century with marketing. But you know, law schools are notoriously bad at this stuff. And typically, because they leave it to the main University, and they might get a little budget to place a few ads, but it’s really not something that they have historically, of course, this is all changing and has been for for years now, but really, historically have been very deliberate about. And I mentioned that, you know, we’re private, and so we don’t have a main University, and that we had to adapt, and we had to and it’s up to us to get the message out. And my general strategy. So you know, and the agency was was great, but it wasn’t. What I found was that I wanted to do more. And my strategy has been, you know, content, distribute, amplify We have to generate the content, we have to distribute it through whatever the channels are, whether it’s emails, social, or website or, or what have you. And then we want to amplify it through advertising. So and that’s what I call our machine at Vermont Law School. Like, we just need to keep feeding the machine. And with an agency, I just wanted to do more, I wanted to, you know, I wanted to try new ad placements, I wanted to get us on YouTube, if I if we found that copy wasn’t working, I want to change that quickly, I want to create a campaign when we see an opportunity. And that just wasn’t going to happen. And it wasn’t really happening with an agency who had other clients, you know, we were we were we, you know, just one of the many clients that are being served. So, you know, the Director of Communications at the time, and I were strategizing about this, and, and I made a pitch to the board and to the President that, you know, let us, you know, fund fund this initiative for us. And let us start building this, this this mark, calm office, that was about five or so years ago. So we hired a marketing manager who helped us build our first advertising plan, who happens to still be with me today, and now runs the marketing side of the house. And that that got us kick started. And then over the years, we’ve really built this amazing, dedicated and passionate team. And they’re just so talented. And we have someone who specializes in multimedia production, ad placements, creative design, social strategy, web content, digital communications, and in and as I kind of mentioned in my other responses was that this really is allowed us to pivot on a dime, and come together and create the content, place the ads, share them, share it as appropriately, check on the conversions, make adjustments as necessary, in real time, you know, and that is so incredibly important. And I also think one of the benefits of my position that oversees the departments that I do is that I make sure that nothing happens in isolation, you hear a lot of talk about silos and higher education. Well, that doesn’t happen. Because there is a feedback loop from the admissions counselors directly to the marketing team. And if a strategy is not producing prospective inquiries, if the language doesn’t seem right, that gets right back to marketing, and adjustments are made. And without, you know, without a good CRM, customer relationship management system, without good reporting capabilities, you know, that’s not going to happen as easy. So of course, I had to make sure that all of that was in place before I went down this path. But, but you know, that feedback loop, and that kind of collaborative effort is so important to make it work, and also determine your return on investment. There’s definitely, you know, it’s easy to spend a lot of money without getting any return. And that just can’t happen at Vermont Law School, we need to be very careful about that.
Pam (00:22:58)
Yeah, for sure. I’m glad you brought up the return on investment, because it sounds like just based on the amount of data driven, you know, adjustments that you make that that would probably be core to what you look for and look at, and just based on the breadth and depth of what you cover, I’m not sure you could actually have afforded to get away with functioning in silos, because it just would not have made you as successful as you are today. So we definitely know what those benefits are, Did you face any challenges? I know a lot of a lot of people, when establishing in house teams find that sometimes the challenges tend to overcome the benefits and kind of give up.
John (00:23:40)
Absolutely. It hasn’t been without bumps in the road. I would say the three things for me on challenges are people systems and software. You know, you need the right people with the right expertise. And that takes time, always floored by how long it takes to find the right person for a position. The other with process, you need to have good processes in place to make sure we use our funds wisely. And as I mentioned before, you know to make sure that there are feedback loops in place for making sure that if there’s adjustments that need to be made, or if something’s not working, but just general process about how we go about doing things, how we place ads, how we spend our money, how, you know, and just how we operate as a department, which is always evolving. And then finally, a software. And this is so incredibly important that I do a lot of consulting on this and free consulting, mostly, you know, to other colleagues in the industry, who tend to say, Well, I’m thinking about this, can you talk to me about it, but you know, so whether that’s, you know, the CRM type software’s that are out there, whether it’s Salesforce or slate or others, and then it’s also using platforms like StackAdapt Right, and AdWords and Analytics and marketing on Automation Systems, and all that. So you search for and that actually was the first step was making sure that we had the software, because I was not interested. And I was, quite frankly, scared to build this type of an office and to start spending the type of money that you spend on advertising, without absolutely being able to say, this student entered our pipeline through this advertisement. And this is the net effect on the budget. I absolutely, that was priority number one for me. And that way, also, its credibility, its credibility for me, and it’s credibility for my team, to say that what we do has an impact to the success of the institution. So those would be my challenges. And of course, they still happen every day, you know, this, you can’t really get away from it. But you know, we work through them. And I can say right now that I feel like I have one of the best teams, and I’m so incredibly grateful.
Pam (00:25:59)
That’s amazing. So if you could go back in time to the start of COVID-19. With none of us really want to balance you out. Now. Would you do anything differently about your marketing approach? Or do you think you’d stay the same course?
John (00:26:16)
I think I would stay the course. And the reason because this has been so unpredictable for everyone, we could not predict just how much this pandemic would impact all sectors of our economy. And you can always do something better and more efficiently, right? We’re human, we make mistakes, we’re flawed. But I have just been so proud to work at an institution like Vermont Law School, where we have really all come together as a community to ensure that we’re able to provide this experience for our students and even help other students continue their education. And you know, just that our dedicated faculty and staff, and certainly my staff who believe in the important mission of the school, and really has done what it has taken to amplify that out into the world. And I also think that one thing that we really did well as a community is communicate. And I think when you talk to people, especially in crisis communications, and we didn’t talk a lot about sort of media relations and public relations, which is also in my repertoire. But but you know, when you talk about crisis communicating, it’s about communication, you just have to be honest about it. And you need to communicate often and thoughtfully. And we really did that. And I mentioned having the town halls, and it was it, whether it’s with our current students, whether it’s with our alumni, whether it’s with our admitted and prospective students, and it’s just just being there. And we held, we actually have the senior administration on calls with admitted students and applicants, just answering their questions. And I remember hearing from a student saying, like, I’m just so thankful that the President and the Vice Presidents and the academic deans took time out of their evening to talk with students who some of them haven’t even committed to the school, just to answer their questions about how you’re operating, and what they can expect, given everything that’s going on. So I’ve just been so proud that that we’ve handled this the way we have, again, it’s not perfect, and I don’t think it can be perfect, but I think we did it from from the heart. And we did it in the way that our community shines, which is collaboratively and transparent.
Pam (00:28:26)
So having those two additional things in your repertoire, repertoire, the crisis communication and the PR, I assume that you put that to good practice with your messaging for your your campaigns. I know that several industries weren’t sure what to do at this point in time, and a lot of them went dark or went off the radar because they just really weren’t sure how to adjust their messaging. But I’m sure those two elements played really well into the communication aspect, not only across your institution, but also with the messaging that you put forward with your campaigns.
John (00:29:05)
Absolutely. And I have to give a shout out because on this on the media relations, specifically, we work with a wonderful PR firm that has helped us immensely and has taken the kind of media relations working with reporters off my plate, mostly. And they’ve been incredibly helpful in this as well. So and that’s the one area that we do get some help in. But yeah, you’re right. I mean, it’s been absolutely has, you know, helped everything that that we do in terms of communicating how we’re handling this.
Pam (00:29:40)
For sure. I know that other industries are are actually closely observing changes in consumer behavior. Just based on the current situation where we are sheltering in place or sheltering at home consumer behavior has changed quite drastically. Not many people are sure if it’s going to To be what that consumer behavior will be like in the future. But can you talk about the trends you’re seeing with students enrollments and with higher education in general?
John (00:30:11)
Absolutely. I think, you know, especially regarding right now, during the pandemic, you know, people are hesitant to commit and make a decision. And I, and that’s just reflective of the uncertainty that we’re seeing everywhere right now. I mean, people are hesitating, going on vacation. So I think that in terms of the responding to the current times, I think that that has been difficult. And we responded a little bit to that by offering a spring start for students who just want to come to the school and just weren’t sure. And they didn’t necessarily want to take start with online classes. We’ve had a small handful of students do that. So I think this sort of uncertainty and an inability to want to commit is certainly out there. I think, you know, it’s going to be interesting for us to see what post COVID looks like, you hear a lot of people saying, you know, pretty COVID, Kurt COVID, post COVID, and how consumer behavior changes after that. And one of the things that I anticipate that we’re going to see is that more and more people actually adopt online learning, because we’re sort of forced into right now having to consider that. And we have seen, our online enrollments are online and only enrollments. So not not the pivoting to online, but the actual people who are enrolling in our online only degree programs, seeing that rise, not just the interest, but also the enrollments rise fairly considerably. This summer, and now we’re seeing a similar trend for the fall. So So I think there may be, you know, a more of a rapid adoption of online learning. And I think, especially as the technology has changed, and become more efficient, and much more user friendly, over time, and I think more and more schools are going to be interested in making sure that they offer online programs. So I think that that’s that you’re going to see that. I also think that cost is a continuing struggle. And a lot of this comes back to the value proposition of higher education, what can that degree do for me? Right, what is the outcome? And I think that again, with people whose jobs have been impacted with whether they were fully laid off or, or businesses that went out of business, I mean, think of all your, your restaurant workers struggling. So I think that costs will continue to be a sensitive topic, and maybe even more. So after, you know, post COVID. It’s gonna take time for the economy to adjust. And we really just don’t know, the length of this, how much longer is it till we get a vaccine? And what does that mean? Does that mean more people might want to continue with online education while they’re home. It’s just sort of unclear This is such a wild card, but but I would say those two things, the, you know, online education, cost sensitivities. The other thing that I would also mentioned is this, this additional need for skills based learning and thinking about credentialing a little bit differently. And whether that means more certificates, microcredentials badges. And again, with the prolific proliferation of online learning, are there opportunities there for schools, and for people to, you know, to adopt new skills that will help them whether that’s their current job, because you think about all the people who may already have degrees, but may need some training to advance either in their career or to get a different type of job, and they don’t want to go back to school again, money. They don’t want to move, you know, given the virus and all these things, but is there some way to reach those people to provide them with the opportunity to get a different type of career that may have been impacted?
Pam (00:34:11)
Based on the way you’ve described, the experience that you and your team has put forward to the market in general, I’m assuming that you’ve probably influenced several people to potentially even change career paths. So someone that might have been looking to pursue a degree in something other than LA may have been positively influenced just by the experience that you and your team had brought to market? Absolutely, absolutely. So no one no one has a crystal ball, honestly. But given a given experience, some have been able to predict what the future can hold for their industry. It sounds like your team has got a good strong, solid blueprint of how to respond and how to message and how to communicate. And I know we touched on post COVID But just in In general, what do you think the education in 2021 and beyond will look like? And I’m saying beyond and do you think the shift to online learning learning might just be the new normal?
John (00:35:12)
I do. And I absolutely do. And I think that it’s a good time to be a company that delivers online education right now in terms of the software. Right. So So, I mean, whether your resume, you know, whether you’re Microsoft Teams, whether you’re some of these learning management systems, because the adoption is so incredibly fast right now. And so I absolutely do, I think we were heading that direction anyway. And I think what I think is likely to materialize, and especially with how widely use the video conferencing has been, is more of what you’ve probably heard before, it’s called a blended classroom where you can you could do it, you know, where you get a little bit of both? Because I absolutely do think there is criticism from students who don’t learn well online. That’s me, as someone who’s involved in in enrollment, you hear this? Well, I don’t want to start online, I don’t learn well, in an online format. But again, when you think about everything that’s happening, and people, you know, everybody’s comfort level around traveling is, you know, especially unless we have a vaccine, but maybe even with one is going to be very different. So this idea that schools have to adopt to accommodate because all schools right now are suffering from most schools, right, from enrollment challenges and demographic changes around this country. So how do you continue to reach new audiences to deliver your educational experience. So I think that schools are going to have to adapt to that. And they’re going to have to be open to accommodating a variety of different learning styles. And one way to do that is with this kind of blended learning where you have some of it is online and asynchronous or kind of at your own pace. And then there might be one or two sessions that are alive, or at Vermont Law School, we call it live virtual, where you’re using kind of a video conferencing software, but you meet at a certain time. And I actually do this in my class, it’s not mandatory for my fully online class, where I have one session a week, where I’m happy to deliver a short lecture or answer questions in a live format at a certain time, and people can come in. And we can do that. And the students have responded very well to that, because it accommodates that need of being in the classroom. And there are so many students that want that. So, you know, I mentioned that I also mentioned this idea of skills based learning. And to me that’s online, or, again, in some sort of a hybrid format. But this idea that, you know, if anyone that’s been studying demographic changes in higher education knows that there are less students, right, there are less students graduating from high school, and therefore there will be less students, for undergrads. And then there’ll be less students in graduate and professional schools because the birth rates have been in decline for a long time. So that Tibbets then just say, if you plan to exist, how do you then reach the different populations and one of those populations is adult learners, who either need a career or want to change a career. So I would say that, when I think about education, 2021 and beyond? Absolutely, I think the online learning is the new normal, and then I OT, but I also think that thinking about credentialing differently and reaching these different audiences are going to be incredibly important for institutions to to really survive, but you know, to continue on the mission and, and mission, you know, an educational mission is an important mission to carry on, we’re educating our civilization, we become a better society for it. And I’d like to think that schools like Vermont Law School where we exist to literally make the world a better place, and our graduates embody that in the work that they do. You know, I want that I want to hand I want this school to keep handing the torch over to the next president and the next board of trustees to continue this really important mission, you know, throughout time.
Pam (00:39:36)
Yeah. So that’s interesting. It’s interesting you call it a, what did you call it a classroom, you call today?
John (00:39:42)
The blended classroom, a blended, blended or flipped classroom and there’s a lot of like different terms that people throw out for describing this sort of mix of synchronous, which is live and then the asynchronous which is on kind of at your own pace?
Pam (00:39:56)
Yeah. When since we started working from home we’ve now I called it the hybrid office. Yes, that’s right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So like the blended class. John, this has been an interesting and enlightening conversation. There was so much ground that we covered in it felt like we were just getting started. I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. I am sure our listeners are really going to enjoy this episode.
Vitaly (00:40:22)
Oh, well, thank you so much for having me. It’s really been a pleasure. Thanks, John. Take care. Thank you.
Episode Outro (00:40:29)
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