When Paul LeBlanc began as president of Southern New Hampshire University more than 20 years ago, the institution taught about 2,500 students on its residential campus and its future seemed uncertain. But LeBlanc, who was enthusiastic about technology and had worked in educational technology, made a bet that was unusual at the time: He decided to expand the university's online offerings.
That growth ended up exploding as acceptance of online learning grew and then received an unexpected boost with the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the university has one of the largest student populations in the country, thanks to online programs that have grown to more than 200,000 students.
This month LeBlanc announced that he would step down as president after this academic year. But he's not done trying to make big changes to higher education. He plans to focus on a new effort in southern New Hampshire to explore how to reshape college teaching using new generative ai tools like ChatGPT.
EdSurge connected with LeBlanc to talk about how the university took an unusually large step toward online education; how he responds to critics who fear the university has borrowed too much from for-profit colleges; and about the impact he believes ai will have on higher education.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Cloudy, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript, edited for clarity, below.
EdSurge: When you came to Southern New Hampshire in 2003, there were some online courses, but only a few. What led you to redevelop them when few nonprofit universities were doing so?
Pablo LeBlanc: In a way, we were dragged onto the Internet against our will. SNHU had these satellite sites on Navy bases. We were a preferred supplier to the US Navy, and we would have adjunct professors who would drive to the base and get their pass, come in and teach classes.
And the Navy said, rightly, that every time we put a ship out to sea, all those sailors suddenly drop out of college. They don't go to class the next day. But there is this new distance education, and if you want to maintain your status as a preferred provider, you have to start offering it. We were dragged onto the Internet, thank God, in 1995.
I came here in 2003 and there were about 18 people (teaching) and a few hundred students (online). I could see the writing on the wall. We could see that for-profit organizations were growing like crazy online. And when you could offer fully virtual degrees, most nonprofit higher education organizations looked down on it and said, “This isn't so good.” But nature abhors a vacuum. The University of Phoenix and Corinthians all got in. And at their peak, these for-profit organizations educated 12 percent of all American college students.
But I thought (online learning) is a card we can play. And what were my other cards? We were relatively unknown, very local. I don't know what the correct way to classify a school is, but a lot of people said we were a third level, if there are four levels.
There were two things I was really lucky about. The first was that there was something to work with. We still had a program. People were working very hard and there were really talented people in the early online operations. That initial team. The second is that this place had always been built to serve non-traditional students. Its real DNA was non-traditional students when it was founded.
We started with nontraditional students on the second floor of a store on Hanover Street in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1932. And it wasn't until 1968 that we got a campus. It wasn't until the 1970s that we began recruiting traditional-aged students on campus. This was always in our DNA.
And we were lucky that we didn't have a lot of money or a lot of status.
Were you lucky you didn't have money?
Because the two biggest impediments to innovation are a lot of money and a lot of status. Larry Bacow was a good friend and was president of Harvard University. And I said, Larry, it's very difficult for you to innovate. How is Harvard changed? There is not much urgency. And if you have all that kind of wealth, why change?
The first thing we did was take that division online and zoomed it out. We installed it at the Manchester mills, two miles away.
And I said, look, I'm giving you permission to play by different rules. We had a lot of work to do and it's not sexy. She was under the hood. It was changing our business rules. It was changing our technology. It was changing the way we did courses. There was a lot of work to do. We had to negotiate with our traditional faculty, who really controlled what we could do and what we couldn't do, to have a little room to breathe and do what we wanted to do. But at some point, the challenge I posed to the team was: How are we going to compete against Phoenix? We don't want to be like them. We want to learn about the good things they do. And people forget that the old University of Phoenix did some things really well that the higher education incumbents didn't do.
Like what? What is an example of something that for-profit companies at the time were doing well?
They said, 'Hey, you know what? You shouldn't have to put adult students through a million administrative hoops to become college students… like getting a transcript from a registrar's office that closes at 5 o'clock.' They thought about customer service. You don't have to treat your students badly just because they are students. You could do better for them.
I remember the early days, so we said, go to the website and click on this box. You are just giving us permission to obtain your transcript. We will locate your transcript and pay the $10 fee. And we had a guy who's still with us who used to go to the post office and get wads of money orders for $10. And we mailed them to the schools with the paper application, in this terribly manual process. It's all digitized now. But yeah, those are the things that made a real difference.
So he plans to step down as president in June, and his next project involves ai. Can you say more about that?
The plan involves a small team that is small and powerful, including George Siemens, who is probably among the world's top five experts in artificial intelligence and education. So I convinced him to leave his position and join us as chief scientist in this small team that we formed, and we have a group that works on well-being and health led by clinical psychologist Tanya Gamby. And so we have met. I think we are six people now.
And what we're looking at is this question: What would a top-down redesign of education look like if we didn't try to fit it into existing models? And what we're really working on is what a human-centered, relationship-centered version of education would look like if it could be powered and supported by ai.
So our idea is what does human-centered ai look like when we talk about learning? What are the human relationships we want to preserve in a world where humans are no longer the most powerful entities when it comes to declarative knowledge? ai hallucinations aside, we're losing that race pretty quickly.
We were greatly influenced by the book “Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of artificial intelligence.” It is written by three economists from the University of Toronto.
What kind of result do you think you will have? Will they publish a white paper or tools?
We believe we will have research and tools. We hope that by the time of the ASU+GSV summit in April, we'll be able to reveal what we're building.
We are working on a learning platform. We have a really interesting and important project apart from this one. That's not what they asked us to do. But George and I recognize that higher education is terrible at owning its own data. Even within institutions, we are terrible with data. And if we, as an industry, as a sector, don't manage our data better, we will be reacting to other people's ai applications and approaches towards us. That's why we're getting ready to build a global data consortium and we have some support from foundations.
The American Council on Education has agreed to be a kind of neutral arbiter. And we have several large-scale players. So we're working on the architecture and the governance, and we're going to have to have huge safeguards around student privacy data, and we don't want to minimize those. But our hope is that we can build a massive data consortium so that higher education, its researchers, its policymakers, and people who want to create learning applications have much richer data that really combats algorithmic bias, that really better understands The learning. We should take ownership of this as an industry. We hope to launch this data consortium in April and be able to announce it.
Listen to the full interview on the EdSurge podcast.
