Delivering and marketing online non-credit corporate training and professional development courses and certificate programs has always been a challenging, and often unsuccessful, endeavor for many colleges and universities. eCornell, however, looks like a dynamic, knowledgeable, on-the-road-to-success enterprise that has figured this space out.

“To be a substantial deliverer of corporate training you have to get out of the academic mindset and think more like a corporate person,” says eCornell Chief Executive Officer Chris Proulx. “You have to try to understand how to take your academic products and put them into a format and delivery mechanism that will work in the corporate setting. We do that really well.”

One reason for its, so to speak, “wellness” is that eCornell is a corporation itself, wholly owned and separate from Cornell University. Even its offices are located off campus. “I think it would be a much bigger challenge for us if we were more closely tied to and aligned with the academic part of the university,” Proulx adds

eCornell’s working business model and strategies, along with its ability to create very cool, engaging, and compressed online teaching and learning environments has put this company on a unique pathway that most other colleges and universities seeking entry into the corporate training and professional development arenas have not yet entertained.

A Working Model
Take, for example, a typical eCornell course: For one, these courses are tailor made for the busy corporate professional, only 6-hours long and folded into a flexible self-paced span of two weeks. Second, these courses are based on content and the intellectual property of talented Cornell faculty who have vetted a real live subject matter expert to lead these courses. In addition, the content is based on pedagogical strategies that replicate real-world, decision-making processes. Third, eCornell courses are not provided in the old corporate-training-oriented web-based, self-guided format. Instead, each course has a cohort of 25 to 30 students who interact and network with each other and the instructor though online discussions. Finally, these course are loaded with audio, video, slick animated illustrations and presentations, and interactive assessment-oriented elements that help keep students engaged.

Structured Flexibility and Learning Molecules
The model used for creating eCornell courses is called “Structured Flexibility,” and these courses are built through a patent-pending “Learning Molecules” approach, says eCornell’s Vice President of Learning Solutions David Shoemaker.*

“It is a cohort-centric model where students work at their own pace, but there are certain requirements for successful completion of the course that are a combination of assessment activities and meaningful contributions to online discussions. We also make extensive use of Flash to create interactive learning media. The courses are rich in various media and are built according to a problem-based pedagogy, which means we immerse students in problems, situations, scenarios and case studies that are likely to reflect what they encounter in the workplace. We ask them to solve problems associated with those scenarios or case studies, and, generally, they discuss the solutions to the problems in the context of the online discussions.”

The production team for creating any eCornell course is comprised of about six people, including a project manager, an instructional designer who serves as a content architect in partnership with the authoring faculty member, and a team of programmers and graphic artists from Cornell’s Academic Technologies and Media Services (ATMS), a division of Cornell Information Technologies (http://atms.cit.cornell.edu/) who create and illustrate the Flash media components.

The cost to produce an eCornell course, which takes anywhere from three to six months to complete, is, on average, about $30,000-$50,000. The Cornell faculty who author the courses typically spend about four weeks for their part of the development and are compensated either up front, with a share of revenues, or both.

Growth Patterns
Currently there are about 60 courses in the eCornell catalog that combine into 17 certificate programs. The first certificate programs were in human resources management and were launched in late 2001 and early 2002 (still available today).

In addition to marketing to individuals seeking career advancement, the eCornell staff started to position its programs toward the corporate training office, says Proulx. “We went after the Fortune 1000, talking with training managers about what we could bring to them in an online format to benefit their training needs and objectives. That, in many ways, guided our growth from 2002 to today.”

Currently, some 60 to 70 percent of eCornell enrollments come from corporate accounts, which is up from about 20 percent three years ago. “Right now we are running about 900 to 1,000 enrollments (450 to 500 students) per month,” says Ross Pearo, vice president of marketing and business development. The number of individual students enrolling in eCornell courses has stabilized over the past 18 to 24 months, and the number of corporate arrangements continues to rise. Overall, eCornell has averaged a 30 to 40 percent growth rate for each of the last three years.

“We are designed to be both self-sustaining and ultimately profitable, and we believe that we are currently in the year when that will happen,” says Proulx.

More Evolved Delivery Model Helps
“We have completion rates in excess of 90 percent,” says Shoemaker, adding that there is an increasing emphasis on the need for professional development within both large and small corporations. He further explains how the self-guided, web-based learning models of the past (i.e., the how-to-learn Microsoft Office and/or product-training variety) have migrated to “something that looks and feels more like a classroom. I think we have seen the market come around to our model. A couple of years ago we had a lot of explaining to do to potential corporate clients who asked us why we chose to deliver online learning using our Structured Flexibility model. They would ask what were the advantages and how was it more effective than the self-guided models. We have found today that we don’t have nearly as much explaining to do because those corporations that have experimented with the self-guided models by and large have come away feeling less than thrilled about it.”

Pricing
Retail prices for individuals are $572.50 or $1,145 for one course and $1,145 for a topic comprised of two courses. Full certificate programs can have anywhere from four to 12 courses and range in price from $1,999 to $6,864. “If you purchase courses as part of a larger corporate training initiative, that number can go down significantly,” says Proulx.

Popular Courses
Currently, eCornell courses and programs are drawn from the expertise and knowledge generated by Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and the School of Hotel Administration.

Many of eCornell’s largest corporate clients come from the hospitality industry, where they have entered into online training and professional development agreements with large multi-national companies such as Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, InterContinental Hotels, and Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts. eCornell is also “very strong in the human resources area,” says Proulx. “The nice thing about human resources is that every company, regardless of what industry they are in, has human resource professionals, and we have material that is very relevant to them.”

eCornell has also seen growth in its leadership-oriented courses in topic areas such as strategic management, financial management and proactive leadership. “The majority of our Fortune 1000 clients, other than our hospitality clients, have selected us for our leadership content first,” says Pearo.

What eCornell has Learned
“It has been a real learning experience for us over the last four years,” says Proulx. “We have talked to folks at conferences who are also in higher education and want to access the corporate training audience. Our real learning has been around trying to understand how the corporate client needs their courses delivered. There are issues related to schedules, issues related to pricing, and a variety of other services that have to be provided around the course content to really make it work in that corporate environment. . . It is more than knocking on doors saying that you have a great course. You have to think about all of the packaging around that.”

* For a detailed explanation of this approach, visit http://www.ecornell.com/about/approach/, where you can download a PDF-formatted white paper titled “Learning Molecules: eCornell’s Approach to Designing Learning Systems.”

http://www.ecornell.com