A colleague sent me this IHE article about Arizona State University shutting down its Global Freshman Academy. He suggested here was another example of an educational innovation that turned out to be a dud. But was it?
Whether it is really a dud depends on what you are looking for them to accomplish.
I would agree that as a way to pull in a segment of the population that traditionally would not have gone to college, yes, it was a dud. I think that at the core it was a problem of misalignment. They wanted to be an open access institution for the Global Freshman Academy (GFA) but a selective institution when these students wanted to transfer to ASU. That failed.
But several things did not fail.
They developed twenty general college courses that were initially for GFA but were migrated to their traditional college campus. The allure of the GFA brought many funders – Starbucks, McGraw Hill, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to name a few. By in large, these funders paid for the (very expensive) costs of the courses used in the GFA. Many of these courses pushed the envelope in regards to quality online education. So, while as the article states, only a few of them are still being used in the GFA, they are being used on the traditional ASU campus (saving millions of development costs to ASU).
They recently launched ASU local where they are creating placed-based online education. They have opened campuses in downtown LA and Washington, D.C. They are leveraging the GFA courses.
Like most successful innovators, they are willing to go out on a limb and try many risky initiatives. Most fail but if one or two hit… This gives them significate earned media in the press resulting in such things as being called the most innovative university by U.S. News and World Report. It also brings in additional funding as well as students for their traditional campus.
So yes, for its stated purpose it was a dud. However, with ASU President Michael Crow you always have to look at second and third-tier effects. On that standard, he has created twenty courses (with other peoples’ money), significant buzz in the academic press and learned some things that can be used to be even more successful in the future.
If only we failed as well as ASU?