Office of the President Blog

David Harpool, JD, PhD
President, Northcentral University

I applaud the quick actions of higher education in response to the threat of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). Recent data from Italy, France, and Vietnam suggest younger, seemingly healthy students can be carriers. The health threat to older adults is clear and maybe understated to traditional college-aged students. During the last few weeks, on-ground higher education institutions have made the correct, although painful, decision to move online. 

A challenge with online learning is ensuring you build a community for student-to-student and student-to-faculty engagement. By design, our 1-to-1 “Teaching Through Engagement (TTE)” model promotes faculty-to-student community. To build student-to-student and student-to-alumni community among all constituencies requires additional approaches.

In 1978 I was a page for President Jimmy Carter, at an event associated with the Southern Baptist Convention, in Atlanta, Georgia. Since then, we both left the Southern Baptist Denomination—or more accurately, with a large number of Southern Baptists making an intolerant move to ultra-conservativism and political activism, the denomination left us. I was 17 years old, had just taken my first flight, and was attending this convention in the largest city I had ever visited. I was receiving a National Service Award from the denomination, and President Carter was the Keynote Speaker.

At Northcentral University, we reject the “sage on stage” model of teaching – where a professor stands in the front of the room and lectures. It was never very effective in the traditional classroom, and is disastrous in an online course. Instead, we use a model, unique to NCU, called Teaching Through Engagement (TTE), ^© where the goal is for our students, faculty, and team members to be actively “engaged” in the University community. It is the model of faculty-student interaction that NCU uses to foster learning in our online environment.

Historically, colleges and universities, regardless of their mission, were private or public. Later, for-profit higher education emerged as an alternative model.  Although institutions invested in new formats and modalities – such as extended-campuses, weekend and night formats and mini-courses – colleges and universities were largely private, public or for-profit.

At NCU, we value diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). These words often get collapsed together but we wanted to share briefly that when we talk about diversity in our context, we are talking about the diversity of identities that exist among us in terms or race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion, economic status, education level, and other identities. We all make up our diverse work environment and we are stronger because of the diversity that exists at NCU.

Welcome to the Office of the President’s blog. As President of Northcentral University, I look forward to a robust and stimulating dialogue on the future of higher education, and how best to advance the Mission of NCU.

In 1989, when I first experienced teaching in an online format, I discovered the potential power of online learning, and the extreme limitations of our learning management system (LMS).  As one technology director stated, “It doesn’t do much, but it is reliable.”  Truthfully, the LMS was horrible, nothing more than horrid lecture notes, posted online, and email.

The foundation of NCU’s education model is the one-to-one engagement between doctoral faculty and a graduate student. We believe how faculty-student engagement is structured makes a significant difference. Most theories of adult learning have, as one of their tenets, the concept of adults as independent learners. The Andragogy theory (Knowles) specifically references "self-direction.”  The Transformational Learning Theory (Mezirow) recognizes the independence of the learner, after a faculty member makes them “curious” about the course content.