SLIS Network, Alumni Newsletter, Fall 2000
When UNext, an Internet-based education company, set up shop in Bloomington earlier this year, administrators looked no further than Indiana University for talent, finding a wealth of it around the halls of SLIS.
Today, SLIS professors, graduates, students, staff, and interns apply their skills in helping UNext create online educational curricula for professionals all over the world.
"Two thirds of the people here are IU alumni, with SLIS people working primarily in our user experience areas," says managing director Bill West, a graduate of IU's computer science department and former chief information officer at the Indiana University Alumni Association. "One of the reasons to locate in Bloomington is to draw on the wealth of talent generated by IU."
But UNext, founded three years ago in Deerfield, Ill., hardly is local in scope. UNext seeks to offer postgraduate education to professionals worldwide through its subsidiary, Cardean University, an accredited university. The private, for-profit firm's advisory board includes two Nobel Prize winners in economics and Don Norman, an international authority on human cognition and on the interaction of technology and society.
The idea is to make postgraduate education accessible.
"Busy professionals can't always take the time, or they have other issues that prevent them from returning to school for an MBA," says West. UNext sells the curriculum directly to the businesses and consumers then oversees the students' progression in the 25-35 hour courses. In addition, the company offers a series of eight-hour executive education courses.
To ensure quality, the Cardean courses are developed in collaboration with experts from Columbia Business School, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. West says this multifaceted partnership allows Cardean to select curricula of professors who are leaders in their fields and from prestigious schools.
UNext course directors meet with professors from those schools, then define the content for UNext course designers and user experience teams. Courses are coordinated and organized for presentation online. They are problem-based, so that students learn by doing. They are given a range of tasks, some existing conditions or parameters, and then must figure out solutions for these problems.
Course designers work to capitalize on the unique attributes the Web offers for online learning, West says. Students may never "meet" the professors, but they do correspond with online instructors and participate in online discussions with other "classmates."
"We also use interactive objects, video clips, self-assessments, and guided problems to explain complex issues and engage the student into the course," he explains.
SLIS expertise, specifically in usability issues, is necessary to ensure that the users, or students, on the other end of the connection can easily see and understand the course materials.
"Our user experience staff tests courses as they are developed and makes changes based on those tests," says West. "We bring students in to test the courses throughout the development."
SLIS Associate Professor Andrew Dillon is spending sabbatical time studying and advising on UNext's usability processes. This means working closely with former students from his human-computer interaction classes.
"Students who have studied HCI are well equipped to perform these tasks in a professional manner, and the success of many of our students in obtaining jobs and internships at UNext is evidence of this," says Dillon. "The choice of Bloomington as a location for UNext is in part a reflection of IU's excellence in graduating students with the right mix of skills to work in this interdisciplinary domain."
Michael Wilson, MIS'99, user experience senior analyst at UNext, lauds Dillon's HCI class as integral to his success in his current job.
"My passion for the field was kindled by taking Professor Dillon's courses, which provide a very strong foundation for understanding essential theories, methodologies, and applications of HCI principles," he says. "The SLIS curriculum is unique because we gain an overall understanding of many facets of designing for an online environment and are then given the chance to focus in an area of specialty.
"In my position at UNext, having this level of understanding allows me to communicate intelligently with all groups in the company from Web development to content development to multimedia and to participate with them in designing and developing our courses."
Both the Deerfield, Ill., and Bloomington locations are producing courses, with Bloomington generating 28 of the company's 80 courses in just 10 months.West says the Bloomington location's success since opening the doors in February has been beyond expectations. The teams have consistently met or beaten their deadlines and goals to produce courses from concept through completed delivery.
"We hit the ground running with 25 people, all of whom we were able to hand pick," he says. Now, there are 65 people plus about 20 free-lancers producing about a third of the company's online educational product.
"UNext is committed to finding the best people in their fields and allowing us to afford to hire them," West says. "In addition, we spare no expense to treat our employees well. Our organization promotes individuality. This spawns creativity and excellence. The employees are motivated by 'pride,' and the quality of work proves that."
For more information on UNext, see http://www.unext.com.
PHOTOS:
UNext managing director Bill West, far left, leads a discussion at the company's Bloomington office as SLIS alumnus Michael Wilson, next to West, and SLIS Associate Professor Andy Dillon, far right, listen; UNext.com logo; Michael Wilson MIS'99.
Photos Courtesy of UNext.
Related SLIS NEWs stories:
From SLIS To UNext: An Alumnus' Success Story
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Posted December 11, 2000