University Teaching as E-Business?
Research and Policy Agendas

Case Study: George Washington University

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CSHE > Research > University Teaching as E-Business > Case Studies > George Washington University

NB: These draft case studies, compiled by Shannon Lawrence, are an internal resource for the University Teaching as E-business? research project. Originally released in October 2001, they were updated in March 2002. They were gathered from numerous sources, including news articles, press releases, scholarly reports, and company websites. In many cases, information presented herein was taken directly from The Chronicle of Higher Education's longitudinal series of articles on Information Technology and Distance Education, which represents the single best source for information about this evolving universe.

The George Washington University (GW), located in Washington D.C., uses a variety of distance learning techniques to reach students outside the traditional classroom. These include classes delivered via technologies such as videotape, compressed digital video via telephone lines, satellite, cable television, CD-ROM, and classes offered on the Internet or at off-campus study centers. Partnerships with other universities and organizations facilitate tailoring degree and certification coursework to suit specialized audiences. Internally, GW has committed to Internet technologies as a way to transform existing campus experiences and communities as well as also move the faculty and staff toward embracing the challenges of online education. To prepare, GW has created the Millennium Project, a $126 million project to build the E-Technology Platform and create an Internet-enabled business. This project is a major strategic push toward a centralized e-campus.

In particular, there are two types of e-learning strategies at GW from an institutional perspective. The first is Prometheus, a learning management system designed as an enterprise-wide solution. The second strategy at GW is more of a niche strategy, with several initiatives, such as the for-profit spin-off beginning in the summer of 2001, called GW Solutions that will target GW’s existing core markets (such as the government, regional corporations in the Washington metropolitan area, and some international markets), and the College of Professional Studies, a new degree-granting unit.

Products/Services

Prometheus
www.prometheus.com

Prometheus is a community-based open architecture software platform. In 1997, administrators at The George Washington University were looking for a quick and easy way to help faculty members get online, either by teaching Web-based distance-education courses or by introducing online components to traditional courses. Technicians at the university decided to create a courseware system 1 in answer to the need for an easy-to-use, flexible and scalable enterprise-wide learning platform designed to allow customization for faculty, administrators, and students. The system was eventually named "Prometheus," for the Greek god who provided fire to man.

Prometheus was developed over an 18-month period, with another 18 months in intensive testing through alpha and beta stages at GW and later at Vanderbilt University. During this time Prometheus was rapidly adopted by faculty at both campuses because of its user-friendly, form-driven, question-and-answer format that walks instructors through course creation and content import quickly and easily. In the first 90 days after the 1998 launch of Prometheus at GW, 100 faculty members had logged on and created courses. Currently, over 1,000 faculty members are teaching 1,800 courses online with little or no formalized training. Some administrators have suggested that Prometheus has helped some professors at GW embrace distance education more quickly than they might have had the courseware been more foreign. Additionally, 17,000 students-or 85 percent of The George Washington University's student population-are using Prometheus.

Like Blackboard and WebCT, Prometheus is a courseware platform, but it supplements courses internally and serves as a platform for doing business externally. Built on a ColdFusion application layer, Prometheus is designed to grow quickly and easily while integrating cleanly with database, browser, and server functions. ColdFusion's modularity makes it easy for partners to build applications in various languages and then plug them directly into the Prometheus architecture. Prometheus also has user-driven features, such a math editor, an integrated e-reserve system that ties in to individual libraries, the ability to accept international characters and symbols, and automatic translation into HTML.

Professors at George Washington and Vanderbilt use Prometheus to let students in traditional courses have discussions, post lecture notes, and make presentations online. GW also uses Prometheus as the platform for its online distance-education courses. Content is developed by the faculty who use the software. With little or no training, instructors can author and edit content directly inside the learning management system as well as import content from outside applications such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Instructors can easily enhance their content by uploading movies, images, and audio from multimedia files. Prometheus also gives instructors the ability to create learning objects outside the course context, group them into "content modules," then insert and rearrange them within courses. Such modules might contain outline items, assignments, tests, projects, lectures, files, and discussion topics. Modules make content independent of any particular course, allowing reuse in multiple courses. Class information and assignments can be downloaded directly to any PDA running the Palm OS.

GW works with a number of academic partners and also provides custom solutions through specialized consulting services including product customization, systems integration, course conversion consulting, co-development, technical support, and hosting. The George Washington University leadership did not originally intend to market Prometheus to other universities, but in March 2000, GW began licensing Prometheus to partner institutions and it has since been licensed to over 35 universities (see Table 1).

In keeping with collaborative academic practice, Prometheus is a community source code product. Partners are encouraged to share code and advice in an open environment-facilitating infinite customization opportunities. Prometheus views partners as part of a development community-leveraging the knowledge and expertise of each institution. Community source code flexibility allows IT administrators to create new features, design custom applications, integrate with existing campus systems, share solutions among developers, personalize interface look and feel-at institution, department, or group level. Instructors and administrators are also encouraged to collaborate with other colleges and universities, sharing information such as content modules, courses, learning objects, and online teaching techniques. Prometheus is grounded in firsthand input from instructors. For instance, Prometheus developers hear directly from The George Washington University faculty at regular monthly meetings. Feedback from these sessions fuels product development.

Prometheus also relies on service partners for technological input and support (see Table 2).

GW Solutions and the College of Professional Studies
http://128.164.127.251/bulletin/grad/cps.html

Leaders at The George Washington University believe that they need to be able to offer both non-credit and for-credit types of offerings to the marketplace in order to be successful, so two new internal organizations have been developed to address these needs: GW Solutions (GWS), a for-profit subsidiary of GW and an offshoot of GW’s continuing education starting in summer 2001, and the College of Professional Studies (CPS), a degree-granting college, scheduled for operation beginning in fall 2001.

Under GWS, all of the non-credit professional development programs, formally under the University’s Center for Professional Development, will merge into one unit - including GW Television, the Center for Distance and Mediated Learning, Conference Management Services and off-campus marketing functions. GWS handles the nonacademic functions for CPS such as marketing, business development, customer service, consulting, teaming agreements, professional development, training, executive education and the production of distance education course modules.

The College of Professional Studies (CPS), the University’s ninth degree-granting unit, administers the University's off-campus credit courses and degree programs. The College also offers noncredit certificate programs, courses, and workshops through the Center for Professional Development. CPS will support the University’s other schools and colleges that offer off-campus programs with marketing, enrollment management and a variety of student and administrative services. In addition, CPS may develop its own degrees - Associates, Bachelors, and Masters of Professional Studies - that will be customized to address the learning needs of organizations and will be delivered under contract to partner businesses, government agencies, school systems, and other non-governmental organizations. The staff of instruction for College programs includes members of the full-time faculty of the University and academically qualified adjunct faculty from the professional community selected by the academic departments and schools. Instead of buying down the time, they would use their one day of consulting time.

CPS offers courses and programs at GW's Arlington Graduate Education Center, Alexandria Graduate Education Center, and Hampton Roads Center, all in Virginia, and at other off-campus locations in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. All College off-campus offerings in Maryland are approved by the Maryland State Board for Higher Education; those in Virginia are approved by the Commonwealth of Virginia Council of Higher Education. The following degree and certificate programs are offered through the College of Professional Studies (see Table 3).

CPS also works with the Center for Professional Development, which provides a broad spectrum of services focusing on innovative, nontraditional, career-oriented education. Among its programs are noncredit, graduate-level career certificate programs to prepare college graduates to become legal assistants, publication specialists, desktop publishers, public relations specialists, landscape designers, administrative managers, web developers, information systems specialists, multimedia product designers, and appraisers of fine and decorative art. Workshops, short-term courses, and intensive summer programs provide the opportunity for individuals to be informed of innovation in their fields.

An academic background appropriate for the program of studies contemplated is required. In addition, the applicant who has previously attended this or another college or university must be in good standing at that institution. An applicant who has been suspended from any educational institution for poor scholarship will not be considered for admission for one calendar year after the effective date of the suspension. Applications for admission are necessary for international students, though there is no application fee.

The normal academic workload during the regular academic year is not more than 10 credit hours for a student employed more than 20 hours per week and not more than 18 credit hours for a full-time student. During the summer a student may take a maximum of two courses during any one session. All general University regulations apply to students in the College of Professional Studies. In addition, its students may be subject to special requirements of the school through which they are taking courses.

Other Distance Learning Ventures

The George Washington University has much experience in the field of distance education. For instance, GW is one of 16 partner institutions in the Navy’s PACE program, wherein Navy students can earn GW degrees and certificates through computer video. George Washington and other universities are working with the Organization of American States (OAS) to help the Western Hemisphere's developing countries establish distance-education technologies and curricula. GW is working with countries to figure out what equipment they need and how to use it to distribute distance education. GW is also a founding member of the Global University Alliance (GUA).

Governance/Management

Roger Whitaker, formerly GW’s associate vice president for academic development and continuing education, is Dean of the new College of Professional Studies (CPS) and Chief Executive Officer of GW Solutions (GWS). As Dean of the College of Professional Studies, Whitaker will report to the Vice President Lehman and to the Board of Directors of GW Solutions in his role as CEO. Through his dual role, Whitaker will provide the connectivity between the CPS, the GW faculty and GWS, which is the business arm of the new college. This strategy was intended to streamline the both academic and business processes. The 75 employees of GWS were hired directly from the University, but as an internal unit, the 40 staff members of CPS remain University employees. The University’s vice president and treasurer, Lou Katz, will serve as the chair of GWS’s board of directors.

Finance/Strategy

Within the University, GW is making the commitment to Internet technologies as a way to transform existing campus experiences and communities as well as also move the faculty and staff toward embracing the challenges of online education. To prepare, GW has created the Millennium Project, a $126 million project to build the E-Technology Platform and create an Internet-enabled business. The E-Technology Platform provides the foundation upon which new and innovative applications supporting learning, research and service can be deployed. This project is a major strategic push toward an e-campus rather then a traditional let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach often employed by academic institutions.

E-Learning at GW has its focus on strengthening rather then replacing traditional education with online learning. In response to the risks of new online competition, GW has expanded the resident undergraduate population and developed a focused approach to deal with the demands for online learning coming from professional and continuing education clients. The phased introduction of technology into the traditional classroom environment is quickly building savvy and Internet ready faculty that will be ready to take on the challenges of online learning.

GW also perceives new market segments opening or expanding, including large focused corporate markets, which also include government agencies, that they have already begun to address. GW sees the possibility of expansion of their professional enhancement and certification program, and is exploring the pre-college advanced placement market among advanced high school students. New technologies also enable GW to find ways to address these markets, including online education and also partnerships and contract learning. Partnerships can include higher education consortiums that are emerging to address the broad demands of the e-marketplace and also various forms of arrangements where GW can partner with corporations to deliver customized training and educational programs.

To launch these types of e-learning ventures, however, the need for capital is not as extensive because GW is building off of their brand and existing market niches. At this time, e-learning initiatives are viewed as programmatic investment-versus an upper-case investment-which means they are non-endowment investments. GW’s initial investment is, according to Gordon Freedman, "in the millions of dollars, but…not tens of millions of dollars." (University Teaching as E-Business? Planning Meeting, 27 March 2001).

GW chose the dual internal model (GWS as a for-profit subsidiary with CPS as an internal degree-granting unit) to keep their options open. Gordon Freedman says, "Later on, if we do not need the for-profit structure because we do not need to raise capital or we do not need that for-profit structure for providing the appropriate incentives to the management of that company, we may just collapse it into a non-profit structure or collapse it back into the institution. So we just chose that model for now to keep our options open." (University Teaching as E-Business? Planning Meeting, 27 March 2001). While GW desires a return on this investment, that is not their primary motivation. To illustrate that point, early in the development stages of their institutional plan for distance education, GW turned down several profit-making opportunities through brand licensing. (Whitaker, 2001) From the GW perspective, partners are strategic partners versus venture capital investors.

GW Solutions (GWS) was established as a for-profit unit for three reasons: 1) to free itself from the University’s bureaucracy, especially in terms of employment, 2) to enable it to purchase or partner with other companies, and 3) to attract outside investment in the event of future scaling. To compete effectively in the marketplace, GW leadership believes, ultimately, that products needs to be scaleable. So GWS is a business-to-business enterprise in the Washington region. This enables GW to develop strategies, both on an enterprise-wide level and on the niche level. In all aspects of GW’s enterprises, the focus is on the flexibility of the operating entities. Roger Whitaker suggests that GW’s "trump card" is their ability to issue valuable credentials and "a facile, nimble, disciplined business that will be responsible for…developing customized responses to the learning needs of organizations." (Whitaker, 2001)

The niche that GW has formed is educational expertise combined with flexible structure and functions, especially with the Prometheus platform. Though Prometheus began as a measure to institutionalize e-learning within GW, its ease and flexibility made it appealing as a product to other educational entities. Also, because Prometheus is essentially an in-house product, licensees receive all the source codes for it, which means there’s a certain amount of academic freedom in terms of what you do with this product. Flexible branding has also been a big draw. Gordon Freedman reports "tremendous receptivity, yet we’re finding sales occurring, state levels, where the competitors are just confounded about why this 30-person operation has just scooped a piece of the market." GW is a niche player up against extremely well-funded companies that made a market presence in the last couple of years. But what’s been interesting is that a lot of GW’s credibility comes from the fact that GW’s ventures are internal units, and not outside entities. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in June 2000 that George Washington University charged universities $15,000 to license the courseware for a year. (Carr, 9 June 2000) The cost enables Prometheus customers to use the courseware for up to 250 concurrent courses, and includes the cost of service and installation. In comparison, Susan J. Kavanaugh, the director of marketing and communications for WebCT.com, says her company charges colleges $3,000 for an unlimited license for one year, which includes some basic support services.

Prometheus’s close relationship with GW and other partner institutions is a carefully cultivated strategy for the future of Prometheus in higher education. Their goal is to remain closely aligned to partner schools for future product development and possibly for investment. The strategy of working with their academic institution customers as partners, rather than a commercial company selling the institution an off-the-shelf product, has resulted in close, lasting relationships with the academic community that few others enjoy.

Update (February 2002)

In January 2002, George Washington University's Prometheus course management system was purchased by its competitor, Blackboard. Prometheus chose Blackboard over two other interested parties, though their names were not available, because Blackboard historically has maintained multiple operating systems for differing services. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Though Blackboard's long term plan is to incorporate Prometheus into its existing system, short-term support and development of Prometheus as a separate product is in place.

References

• Carnevale, Dan. "Partnership Plans to Offer Satellite Courses Across Latin America." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 February 2000. http://chronicle.com/daily/2000/02/2000022501u.htm
  
• Carr, Sarah. "Challenging Commercial Vendors, George Washington U. Enters Courseware Market." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 April 2000. http://chronicle.com/daily/2000/04/2000042001u.htm
  
• Carr, Sarah. "George Washington U. Tries to Sell Software It Created to Put Courses Online." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 June 2000. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v46/i40/40a04702.htm
  
• Carr, Sarah. "Navy Picks Institutions for Online-Learning Effort." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 November 2000. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i12/12a06002.htm
  
• Carr, Sarah. "Navy Selects 16 Institutions for a Pilot Distance-Learning Program." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 November 2000. http://chronicle.com/daily/2000/11/2000110601u.htm
  
• College of Professional Studies [website]. http://128.164.127.251/bulletin/grad/cps.html
  
• The Distance Education Working Group. Report on Distance Education at the George Washington University, 20 February 1998. The George Washington University [online]. http://www.gwu.edu/%7Edistance/rep.html
  
• "GW Appoints Roger Whitaker Dean Of The New College Of Professional Studies," 20 July 2001. The George Washington University Press Release [online]. http://128.164.127.251/~media/pressreleases/07-20-01-CPS.htm
  
• Olsen, Florence, and Arnone, Michael. "Blackboard Will Acquire a Competitor, Prometheus, From George Washington U." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 January 2001. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i20/20a03101.htm
  
• Swartz, George. The e-Higher Education Summit: Implications of the Internet to GW. http://128.164.127.251/~cio/presentations/HigherEd3/sld013.htm
  
• Whitaker, Roger. Repositioning and Restructuring Continuing Education within the University. 2001. The George Washington University.

Notes

1. Prometheus is a product of Intuitive Networks, a subsidiary of The George Washington University, located in Washington, D.C. [ back ]