From its earliest foundations in 1886, National Louis University has been guided by visionary ideas about teaching and learning. It’s not difficult to see the same passion NL’s founder Elizabeth Harrison had for education reflected in the work of the school’s present day Dean of Online Education, Dr. Bettyjo Bouchey.
Dr. Bouchey is responsible for setting and upholding all standards of quality and service for all online programming at the University. For those who work in the field of online education, her focus is not surprising. Dr. Bouchey’s work may be supported by technologies, but it is ultimately all about relationships.
“From a philosophical perspective, we view all of our programs through an access and equity lens,” Bouchey explained. “From the very beginning of our relationship, we work with students to determine what they need and then, depending on what the student is facing in their lives at any given time, they can have the flexibility to move between being on-campus and online only as they need to. We facilitate that back and forth to make it as frictionless as possible.”
For students whose programs are only online, Dr. Bouchey and her team continue to advocate for tools, events and routines that promote community-building.
“One of things we keep hearing from students is that they want more opportunities for community-building, for collaboration, for social and professional networking,” she said. “And often, when we create those opportunities, we are surprised that the participation often isn’t at the same level as the demand that was expressed. What we’ve found is that whether the opportunity is formal, or informal, it’s the fact that it exists and they can see that it exists that is important to students. So, we might ask faculty to make sure there is at least one synchronous lecture or event per course, even if turn out is not very high, the offering itself is just as important as the participation. We try other types of strategies to create community and humanize our online courses as well.”
National Louis is making sure the virtual welcome mat is showing outside educational programming as well.
“We are creating affinity groups for different cohorts to ensure they have a sense of belonging in the university, whether they are in a degree program, or doing a post-graduate or non-credentialed certificate,” Dr. Bouchey said. “We are, historically, a female-dominated campus because of our roots in teacher training, so some of this is new for us in creating affinity groups for African American men, for example, but because it is new we can make sure that there is always an online component to ensure everyone has equal access to that opportunity and a chance to belong to a community here at National Louis.”
With such a huge educational and social mandate, Dr. Bouchey finds she often has to expand her team with help from the instructional designers at The Babb Group.
“There is so much demand for our Learning Experience Design work that it’s impossible to hire enough people to keep up,” she said. “Working with The Babb Group has helped us to deal with the fluidity of demand and given us huge flexibility in terms of the number of projects we can work on at a given time. A lot of that I attribute to Sheila. She’s always available, always positive. She’s just a can-do person who wants to help. She takes the stress away somewhere else and brings back solutions. That’s what The Babb Group has become. A trusted resource we can throw problems at and they come back with solutions.”
TBG Staff
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