Jay Halfond: You’ve devoted a lot of your career to thinking about how to best serve adult learners. As a dean in the University of Wisconsin–Extension, you led an important initiative in competency-based learning. How did this initiative come about and what were its goals?

David Schejbal: There had been conversation at the federal level about the challenges of traditional higher education, especially in ensuring learning outcomes. I wondered how we could structure a student’s academic experience to focus on these outcomes and not on the time the student spent in a course. I thought about this through an adult student lens, honoring the knowledge that students bring.

I wrote a proposal for a competency-based focus, which I passed on to our chancellor at Wisconsin, and the two of us brought this to the system president and then to the governor. We argued that the best way to ensure learning outcomes is by measuring what students know.

Jay Halfond: You encountered challenges in this work—tell me about those.

David Schejbal: The big obstacle was Title IV and its credit-based requirements for federal financial aid. We went ahead and launched the UW Flexible Option at two Wisconsin campuses. This allowed students to subscribe for a particular amount of time and go as fast or slow as they wished in their assessment. This was an incentive for students to accomplish as much as possible in their lives and ensure their completion.

Jay Halfond: How did you motivate your colleagues to adopt this model?

David Schejbal: We worked with a coalition of the willing. We invited faculty to convert existing curricula into a competency structure. Several departments on several campuses got on board. The hurdles were greater with administrators, who had to change their policies and systems and work with government agencies.

Jay Halfond: You now lead Excelsior, which originated as a public, competency-based college and has, in recent years, transformed itself into a fully online institution that is private/non-profit. How did Excelsior’s transformation unfold?

David Schejbal: New York State’s Board of Regents was concerned that the SUNY and CUNY colleges were not adequately graduating enough of their students. So, in 1971, the board created a new entity, dedicated to degree completion, particularly for those coming from the Vietnam-era military. Originally called the Regents External Degree Program, this was built on a competency-based model. This fledgling institution soon began to offer its own classes and earned Middle States accreditation as a true academic institution. Its first degree was nursing, starting in 1975, and now we have the largest nursing program in the state of New York.

Then, as a governing board, the Regents decided it would be best to separate themselves from a program it oversees. And so, in 1998, the school’s name was changed to Excelsior College and its status shifted to a private, not-for-profit institution, with a new charter and its own board of trustees.

Jay Halfond: But perhaps the more things change the more they stay the same?

David Schejbal: Exactly. The goal from Excelsior’s inception has been to recognize students’ academic achievements and expedite their college degree. The major development, though, is that we are now a fully online university. But the original mission is still in our DNA. 40 percent of our students are veterans or active military. Our focus is still on adult learners and on the accumulated academic credit they bring.

Jay Halfond: You said Excelsior’s program is fully online. Can you describe how that works?

David Schejbal: Our courses are typically eight weeks, offered year-round. We confer degrees monthly. Our classes are mainly asynchronous, so students can do the schoolwork independently whenever they are able in their busy, challenging lives. Their faculty reach out to them several times a week.

We have about 60 full-time faculty and 500 part-time faculty, distributed all over the country. The full-time faculty are the primary subject matter experts, who work with instructional designers and media developers to bring a course to fruition.

Jay Halfond: Online learning has expanded student choices regardless of where they live. How will you differentiate your institution?

David Schejbal: We are now creating hybrid experiences for our students. As most schools look to go online, we’re working with other institutions with campuses where we can use a physical presence in consumable chunks our students can manage. This provides the convenience of online with intensive site-based experiences. For example, we partner with industry experts and corporate partners in Albany, Chicago, and St. Petersburg, Florida to give our executive MBA students an opportunity to spend short, immersive residencies in each of these three cities building professional skills and relationships.

Jay Halfond: Excelsior has gone from a credit aggregator to a fully remote online learning experience—and now supplements its online education with experiential opportunities.

David Schejbal: Higher education institutions are generally campus- and faculty-centric; not student-centric. Excelsior’s model is the opposite. We have always focused on students’ learning experiences. Our goal is to create a robust, frictionless learning ecosystem that does not penalize students moving across institutions.