About Online Adult Learners

I’ve been re-reading Edith Hamilton's classic work Mythology. Yesterday, I came across the story of Procrustes, and it got me thinking about online adult learners. Go figure.

Procrustes was an innkeeper who preyed on travelers along the road to Athens. He offered them a bed for the night, but with a significant catch. He had one iron bed, and the condition of staying at his inn was that every guest fit the bed perfectly. Short guests got stretched on the rack. Tall guests were trimmed to fit. Of course, no one who checked into Procrustes' inn ever made it to Athens.

It's a story of misguided hospitality that echoes the approach too many private universities are taking in their support of online adult learners.

We've spent generations in higher education perfecting a model built for 18-to-22-year-old full-time residential students who structure their academic life around a 400-year old agrarian calendar. That model is our iron bed. Then adult learners show up (increasingly more so over the past 10 years) to our online programs. These are the students logging in at 11 p.m., squeezing coursework into lunch breaks, and enrolling part-time because that is the only way they can manage it at all. The typical approach at many private universities to supporting and serving these (non-traditional) students is to call for the rack and saw. 

It always goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: Adult online learners are not a deficient version of  traditional residential students who need a bit of adjusting. They are a different student who brings more professional experience, more genuine motivation, and more at stake their 19-year-old counterparts on campus. And they’re the students who almost never fit the bed.

The interesting part of the Procrustes story for me is that he wasn't evil. He genuinely believed he was offering his patrons a customized service. He had a standard, he applied it fairly, and he was certain that his bed was the right bed. I've survived enough institutional online "strategy" meetings to recognize that type of misguided and dangerous certainty.

If you take time to read the story of Procrustes, you'll find that Theseus eventually comes along and turns Procrustes' method against him. Nothing so dramatic is going to happen at the private universities struggling to figure out how to properly serve their online adult learners. But there is a version of this reckoning already underway, visible in flat enrollment trends and abysmal persistence data, and in the growing number of adult learners quietly choosing the mega-universities that have designed their programs, systems and support specifically for them.