How Strategy Design Transformed a University
One school grows their online enrollment by marrying UX thinking and business thinking
Sometimes life gets in the way of a college degree. To help students who experience this, Olivet Nazarene University (ONU) did something no other school has: make general education courses tuition free.
YourWay launched in January 2021. Its existence has been a paradigm shift for both adult learners and the university itself. When I saw the case study on the Salesforce.org blog and on the CBS series “America by Design,” I wanted to know how the team created enormous change from a design perspective.
During my conversation with the team at ONU, it became clear: Strategy design propelled this project.
Strategy design is different from visual or interactive design. It engages systems-level challenges, maps ecosystems, aligns stakeholders across organizations, and activates user insights for innovation. [Skill up in the Learn Strategy Design trail on Trailhead.]
ONU’s Chief Strategy Officer Kathy Lueckeman and her team embraced these skills.
They married UX thinking and business thinking from the onset. To begin, they framed and scoped the challenge. Success was defined as giving adult learners’ an on-ramp back into their degree and increasing the university’s enrollment in the face of a shrinking target audience. ONU knew it needed a differentiator. That’s why they honed in on adult learners who had “some college, no degree.”
In the journey to create a more inclusive education pathway, design played an instrumental role.
Here’s how.
Crafting a vision
Kathy brought stakeholders together to imagine what it would take to engage a new target and engage in strategic vision creation. Storytelling and empathy building were key tools. “We were imagining accommodating adult learners in a different way,” says Kathy. “Before hearing student stories, we had to set the stage and open minds with data points first.”
Research for strategy design included a seminal National Student Clearinghouse study and end-of-course survey data. Then, they layered on a human voice.
Stories have clear characters and paint a picture that’s desirable and believable. Current adult learners in ONU’s Division for Adult Studies were invited to speak at meetings with administrators. Many listeners were moved and enrolled in a greater vision. “It was really emotional for some of them,” Kathy recalls. “They didn’t realize the things they did had such a positive or negative impact.”
A new product idea emerged: tuition-free, online gen-ed classes.
“Higher ed cannot just pay lip service to being student centered. We literally have to build ourselves around the student — to design our experience around the student. If we don’t, why would they choose us?” says Kathy. “By using design, we now have a differentiator. We’re doing something no other school is doing. Not a single one. Now, we’ve changed the idea of what an enrolled student is.”
A compelling new go-to-market idea like this is only as strong as its core supporters.
Identifying key relationships
Kathy and her team worked to build partnerships across competencies. In many ways, alignment is a strategic craft.
Adult learners valued being successful.
Her research showed that many of these working professionals were paying off debts and would sacrifice their education for other responsibilities. To learn more, her team met with the current and prospective adult learners. A few adults with some college experience worked at a local hospital and volunteered to do focus groups, surveys, and demos. They shared that the playing field needed to be leveled. “By designing in such a way — self-paced, tuition-free, builds confidence, low-risk — we’re flattening those barriers that would normally not serve marginalized students,” says Kathy.
Faculty valued academic rigor and process.
Other stakeholders for this new vision were the faculty. Through conversations, Kathy discovered their greatest challenge was learning how to translate lectures into a curriculum for an online, flipped-classroom experience. The new product had students consuming content before engaging in online classrooms and in live office-hours event calls that expanded the discussion. “This changed the way they taught,” explains Kathy. “So we had to design it in a way that the faculty could understand how it could best serve and how it could expand on the knowledge in asynchronous ways.”
Administrators valued financials.
Last, the administrators influenced many decisions. Their relationship strengthened when Kathy shared similar business models that had been successful in other industries (e.g. freemium or try-before-you-buy models). The goal was to convert students taking tuition-free classes into paying students when they took upper-division courses. She showed how many universities award “institutional” scholarships that effectively reduce tuition by 50 percent to entice students. But this new product would lead to fully paying students with only up to one-third of their degree at no charge. “I showed that offering tuition-free gen-ed classes for the first third of their degree would effectively lower the industry-average discount from 50 percent to 30 percent,” she explains.
Over time, each stakeholder saw the opportunity and felt good about doing their part.
Creating roadmaps for implementation
It helped that Kathy spoke both the language of the business and of the technology. ONU built YourWay on Trailhead, a platform that she is highly engaged with.
Her team considered all the parts of the implementation. This ranged from course-content templates for faculty to course selection for students. Plus, course frequency, student onboarding, and an extensive list of features. They used design strategy prototyping and iterated along the way. This is a practice they continue to do post-launch. “We didn’t stop iterating just because we went live,” says Kathy.
New features include the addition of completion indicators and progress bars. Now students can easily tell visually when a class is complete and how far along they are in their courses. Another example: Homework and test forms used to be custom per class. Now they are auto-populated by Salesforce data based on a universal form. “We created the forms to consume any data, making them scalable and allowing them to be maintained by the curriculum team instead of admins.”
The results
YourWay is a success by many measures. Adult learners are regaining confidence and nearing their degree. Connie, one ONU student who was featured on the “American by Design” segment, has already completed her gen-ed courses and is now taking her paid major courses. The university is also achieving its goal of increasing enrollment — seeing a spike of 1,600 percent in addition to a 30 percent reduction in recruitment and advising administrative costs.
“Whenever you take a chance like that and reformulate a system, retooling how you approach something, it’s a risk. We are so pleased to look at a more modern approach to higher education and meeting the needs of the audiences we serve,” says Andrew Corbus, Director of Learning Solutions at ONU.
Courage like this is a mindset that pushes leaders to align with their own values, even if it makes them feel vulnerable.
The university is where they are now because they pushed themselves and the limits that exist in the status quo. Today, people everywhere have an opportunity to further and finish their education.
Design allows us all to engage creative problem solving skills and inch the world to a better place. Eager to skill up on Strategy Design? Take the Trail today.
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