Evan Cortens (Mount Royal University) on Listening, Learning and Leading in Continuing Education

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Evan Cortens to discuss how CE thrives on responsiveness to workforce needs and student expectations by providing programming with strong ROI and student-first service. 

Transcript

Shauna Cox (00:02):Evan, welcome back to the Illumination podcast.

Evan Cortens (00:06):Thanks so much for having me, Shauna. It's great to be back.

Shauna Cox (00:08):Yeah, so we are in a very different space of continuing education, specifically compared to five years ago, two years ago, six months ago, and I just want to kick off our conversation and ask, how do continuing education leaders define and measure value today, especially as they balance things like cost management? Would that need to deliver an exceptional student experience?

Evan Cortens (00:36):Yeah, that's a great point. I think that first and foremost, universities, really, universities in general, but continuing education units in particular, I think we need to deliver value by listening to our communities and by responding to them, by providing high quality education that meets the needs of our students in our regions. So that's less about telling them what we think they need and listening to what they're telling us and then responding. But like I say, I think that applies especially to continuing education units. We need to be especially responsive because our programs tend to be shorter and they're tied to specific in-demand skills, specific careers they operate. The courses themselves are shorter, but also it's generally the case that we may run a program for only a few years meeting a very specific labor market needs. So that means being especially responsive, like you say, the landscape is always shifting.

(01:40):Education generally, as I say, but I think continuing education specifically exists in a competitive landscape. There are many education providers out there, some of which even deliver high quality online programs entirely for free. So when you think about, say, Mount Royal University competing with Google to offer a course on ai, well, there's really no contest there, right? It's Google, but what can we do? Well, we can deliver high quality programs uniquely connected to our local community, to our local employers who trust and respect what we do. Mount Royal University, as an example, has been around for more than a century. We have built that reputation. It's hard earned, hard won through that provision of high quality, high value education, and that provides that benefit to our students that you're not necessarily going to get from another provider that doesn't have that connection. But often, I'll say final point is that when people think of value, I think they're often also thinking of a financial return. Many of our students are mid-career professionals who are re-skilling or up-skilling looking for that promotion or that next job, looking for that professional development. And they're very often paying out of pocket, generally in the case of continuing education without the typical financial assistance that might be available to say degree students, government loans or scholarships or what have you. So cost management, to come back to that word, the phrase that you used first and foremost, means I think keeping costs for our students reasonable, while also delivering that strong value for money.

Shauna Cox (03:31):Absolutely. And I want to talk about the foundation behind it. So how does the cost recovery or that revenue generating model guiding most CE divisions shape their approach to programming?

Evan Cortens (03:48):Yeah, I think one thing to say off the top here is that the term continuing education covers an incredibly broad and diverse range of programming across, likewise, a diverse range of institutions really across the world. But I'm thinking here specifically of the Canadian context from coast to coast to coast, one of the hats that I wear is working with the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education on our annual survey. And in our most recent survey, which was done a few months ago, and the findings are being pushed out in the coming weeks, actually shows that there's just an incredible range to take. Mount Royal specifically, we offer about a hundred programs in terms of what we'd call continuing education to about 35,000 students every year. And some of those programs actually are provincially funded. They don't have a cost recovery or revenue generating mandate, but of course most of them do.

(05:00):When you look at some of our kus data, about 40% of institutions, sorry, 40% of continuing education units, I mean say that they are not base funded. They don't receive any base funding, and the vast majority, about 83%, are actually expected to return at least a portion of their revenue back to the central institution. So exactly to your point, right? They don't have that base funding coming in, and they actually have an expectation to generate more than they spend and return that back to the institution. So what does this mean for programming? Well, obviously it means that individual programs need to be run, such that in the aggregate they meet those financial expectations, at least recover their costs or in many cases, generate revenue. Now, I emphasize that word in aggregate. I'm often saying that in our context, some programs may have greater capacity to do that, the nature of the program or the prospective audience or availability of funding for learners or what have you, whereas other programs may not have as much capacity.

(06:07):So in aggregate, everything has to sum up to meet that. But a final point here in terms of how it shapes our approach to programming, I would say it really shapes it right from the get go in terms of what programs we can and can't offer. It's not unusual for things to be, I guess, crossing my metaphorical desk, crossing my emails is more typical these days. Great programming ideas, but we need to consider factors like sustainable demand or market price sensitivity or appropriate instructor compensation, really from the get-go as part of program development and as part of program renewal. And not to be overly blunt here, but sometimes that means there are programs that we simply can't offer in the first place.

Shauna Cox (06:58):Absolutely. And then another component to the model would really be the student side, the engagement side. So how does that CE financial model shape their approach to those student services and that level of engagement?

Evan Cortens (07:13):Yeah, I know there is, and rightly so often, great resistance in higher education to referring to students as customers. I share that reservation, I think of our students as students, students first and foremost, but there is an element of what you might call customer service here. We need to be incredibly responsive to our student needs, not just in our programming like I was talking about before, delivering value, but also in our provision of student services. So for instance, we need to be accessible to our learners via their preferred methods of communication rather than ours. That could be they want to come down to a registration desk and talk to somebody in person, but more typically it means phone or email or chat or I don't know, Instagram dm, whatever it is that they need. We need to be sure that we are trying to provide that.

(08:12):And again, I'm not trying to be critical of our colleagues at universities across the world, but as a general rule, I would say we tend to say, this is how we're going to do it. You need to fit what works for us. The registration desk is open from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM Monday to Thursday, and you have to come down to solve your problem. That doesn't work in continuing education. It's also not unusual. As I mentioned before, short cycle courses. We have learners who will register for a course on a Friday afternoon, and that course starts Saturday morning, and it's a one day long course. So don't get me wrong, it can be extremely frustrating if you're a brand new degree student starting out your first semester and your computer account isn't working, or the online meeting system Zoom or what have you, isn't working properly for you, that can be really frustrating.

(09:09):But imagine now if your course is only six hours long and the soonest it can solve it is Monday morning when the desk opens again, well, you've missed the entire course. So that simply isn't manageable. We need to be not on call 24 7. I don't want to exaggerate, but we need to be responsive so that if we're going to allow you to register for a course 12 hours in advance, we need to be available to provide you that strong student service experience. You also mentioned engagement. So we can't take for granted that our students are committing to us for longer than the course they've registered. Again, in general, when a student enrolls in a degree program, they're committing, they want to complete that degree, they're going to stay at the institution for four or five years. When you look at average retention rates to complete that program and often take nearly a full course load, a continuing education student often doesn't approach it that way.

(10:11):They're committing to one course at a time, and if they have a bad experience in that course, they're not coming back. So we need to provide that strong student experience to them, and then we need to continue that engagement. Sometimes I say that our current students are also our prospective students, if you will, if kind of get where I'm going rather than you bring them in once they go from perspective to current and then they go to graduate. Our students are always prospective, current completer in a kind of cycle, and we need to be delivering that strong engagement. Final point here, I would say is we also need to think about the delivery format and the scheduling of our courses. So that could be asynchronous or synchronous online or in person on campus or off campus, evenings, weekends, during the day. We need to understand back to my point about provision of services, the lives of our students. So students may, for instance, be taking that professional development course and they want to take it at their desk from the office. Their employer is supporting them to do PD at work. Well, they're going to want that daytime course. But for somebody who is maybe looking at a career change, who's part of the reason, maybe why they're looking for that career change is that their employer maybe doesn't support their development. Well, they're going to look for an evening or a weekend option. So we need to be responsive in that way as well.

Shauna Cox (11:43):Absolutely, and I think in order to deliver on the student services engagement programming, all those things that we've mentioned, there's that underlying theme of, well, how does it all get done? So how does this approach to that financial model impact cece's approach to their operations, which as we know are very different from a traditional college or university

Evan Cortens (12:08):In a word efficiency.

(12:11):So as I said, CE units are typically not base funded and typically have to cover all of their own costs largely through student tuition. Sometimes there's a bit of grant funding here and there, or maybe some investment returns or endowments, but generally it's it's dollar for dollar student tuition. And that means working hard to always find opportunities to maintain and even increase the efficiency of operations so that we can do two things, which is put as much of that resource into the classroom for the students learning experience, and also keep our tuition affordable, as affordable as possible. Understanding that students may not have the means to cover very expensive courses. It also means that we need effective and responsive tools. So for instance, registration systems that feel more like an online shopping experience and less like a clunky pre-internet solution from the 1980s, like you're registering by fax machine.

(13:14):Again, not to say that degree registration really works this way in 2025 anymore anyway, but again, if somebody is coming to your website and says, yes, this course is a fit for me, yes, it meets my schedule, and then they can't efficiently navigate the website, well, they're lost. You may not even ever know who that student is so that you can reach out to them where again, that degree student, if they're having trouble, they'll come down to the registration desk, you can work with them and you can troubleshoot that. Also, kind of final point in this area, I sometimes think about, I don't know what a good way to put this is sort of philosophical or mental return on investment. So I don't mean put together a spreadsheet, measure every second of your time summit and look at the difference. I mean more like try to think through as you're thinking of the operations in your day-to-day role within a continuing education unit, is this marketing initiative or this student outreach or this community event? Is it really helping us increase our reach within the community, or is it, well, we do this event because we did it last year and we did it the year before that. So always thinking is the return proportional to the investment or ideally is a multiplier of the investment. So that work that we're doing is having that effect of helping us reach our community.

Shauna Cox (14:45):Absolutely. And I want to dovetail off of the ROI and the reaching of the community because of the day most, if not all higher ed leaders are here to serve their students, and at the same time you are faced with those financial responsibilities, revenue generating, things like that. So how do CE divisions kind of balance those financial responsibilities against their access mission? Well,

Evan Cortens (15:13):I think where I start is by saying first that we do have an access mission. I think sometimes folks erroneously think that the sole purpose of a continuing education unit is profit generation, and I reject that. I think our primary purpose is as an academic unit of the university to deliver high quality programming. When you think about our students, as I said before, diversity of programming, while diversity of students, some of them are mid-career professionals who may be fully employed and have the ability to pay out of pocket, or maybe they have employer support, or maybe we're talking about corporate or custom training where we're working directly with an employer, but we also have students who might be new Canadians or refugees or adults with developmental disabilities and so on. Take say a hypothetical example of someone who has just moved to Canada from let's say Ukraine, maybe they already have a degree, but they're looking to move into the Canadian labor force.

(16:21):Who better to help that student than a continuing education unit who can quickly teach the skills that they need that are labor market relevant skills, as well as make those connections to the local employers, to the local region. It's not a good use of resources or time or anything to say to that student, well, you just need to take another degree. Well, that doesn't make any sense, but that access obligation is sometimes, as I say, antithetical to the notion of pure profit generation. So I think in general, it makes little sense to task a university unit solely with that goal of profit generation if it comes at the expense of serving the needs of the community. I flip that equation around serve our community first while meeting a sensible financial mandate, which I think brings us full circle right back to where we started focus on providing value to our students and our communities, and the rest will follow.

Shauna Cox (17:21):Absolutely. Well, Evan, those are all the questions that I have for you. Is there anything else that you would like to add, any advice you'd like to give? Anything that I may have missed?

Evan Cortens (17:32):Oh, thanks so much, Shauna. I really appreciate the chat. No, I think we really covered everything. Yeah, nothing more to add.

Shauna Cox (17:39):Perfect. The only thing we have to cover is a restaurant recommendation. You are, of course based in Calgary, Alberta. Someone's coming to town. Where do they need to go?

Evan Cortens (17:48):Indeed, I am in Calgary, so I recently had a fantastic meal at a restaurant, kind of Japanese fusion called Kunan. The chef there is chef Darren McLean. Some people might know him from, there's a Netflix competitive cooking show. He's opened a few restaurants now. This restaurant really, it's kind of hard to describe, but it does things with chicken you didn't know were possible. It's a fantastic dining experience. Would highly recommend.

Shauna Cox (18:18):Amazing. Evan, again, thank you so much for the time and for the conversation.

Evan Cortens (18:23):Thank you.