Online

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Online Innovation

In 2006, I founded the virtual campus for Southern Adventist University. Faced with some competition from other established online initiatives, I included two differentiators in the first year of the new Sothern Online. The first differentiator was the inclusion learning games as a hall mark of every online course. The other differentiator was incorporating the synchronous component into each course. The synchronous feature was a necessary transition for faculty of a traditional residential campus as well as strengthening instructor presence. Fourteen years later, the online campus became instrumental in helping the entire campus move to remote teaching.

Several years later, the synchronous differentiator became the hall mark of the online education at AdventHealth University. With almost 1500 online students in three degree programs, the online division is the only online program in the country that utilized Blackboard Collaborate as the synchronous platform for all online courses, making it a convenient method of verifying online identification for online courses. The high student retention rate in the mid 90s speaks well of the strong instructor presence and great student support.