IMS Global: Compass Knowledge Group has been in existence since 1993. Describe for us, please, what led to the creation of your offering and the kinds of services you provide your client institutions?
GP: Our first client was the University of Florida. We began as a public-private partnership with UF and the first online program we helped develop was the university's doctorate in pharmacy. The new dean in pharmacy at that time, Dr. Bill Riffe, was responsible for a point-to-point satellite broadcast to other Florida cities directly from UF's College of Pharmacy. He was looking for ways to improve the program, certainly the enrollments, because it was very costly to do. He connected up with our then president and now CEO, Dan Devine, who is also a graduate of the university. Those two gentlemen were given the green light to see what they could do to expand the program, and their efforts were very successful.
In 1999, the company made a decision to not only provide services to the University of Florida, which they had been doing very successfully, but to branch out and make those services available to other institutions across the country as well.
In what we call our partnership model, we help institutions recruit and retain students. The institutions provide a set of services around their core competencies. It's their curriculum, their faculty. They admit the students and they confer the degrees. We wrap our services around that in a true partnership relationship. First, we provide the marketing to generate prospective student inquiries through business reply card, telephoning a toll free number, or completing an online request for information form. The inquiries or leads are entered into a prospect database segmented by university and by program. Then we follow up with our recruitment services. We contact prospective students by phone and email who have expressed an interest in the program to recruit them, advise them about the admission requirements, and what distance learning is like. We answer their questions about the curriculum and the program. We do this with the intention of bringing forward to the university only applications from candidate students who are fully qualified. We have full-time, fully trained enrollment advisors who are assigned to a specific program to do that counseling and advisement of prospective students. The prospects do not know Compass; we work on behalf of our university partners.
Another major service area we provide is around course development. We have a team of instructional designers and technologists who work with individual faculty members and help them re-design their courses from traditional campus-based format to a very effective retention-based distance learning format. We then build their online courses for them using the course management system platform for that university. It doesn't matter to us whether the institution is working in WebCT or Blackboard, whether they are on eCollege or Sakai. Whatever course management system they're using, our designers and technologists work in all of those. We also help faculty create multi-media presentations and graphic interactive elements for those courses for a rich and engaging multi-dimensional learning environment. In short, we take the pain out of getting starting, finding students, and building courses.
A fourth area of services we provide is retention services. We assign a program manager or retention specialist, an individual in our company who works with students and faculty while the courses are being delivered to handle all the logistical issues that faculty find rather annoying about distance learning and that interfere with faculty focusing on teaching and learning. Things like students who forgot their passwords or textbooks that didn't arrive, needed referrals to resolve financial aid issues or students who don't understand how to use certain tools in the course management system. We monitor course sites and help the faculty to follow up on student participation to make sure that students completed online orientations, are making steady progress, and keeping up with their course assignments.
