Page 18 - WesternU View Summer 2019

know what they are teaching, how to teach it, and how technology,” Wilson said. “His wealth of experience
technology can partner with them to improve that.”
Houston-Brown spent his first six weeks on campus
meeting with faculty and staff and gauging IT needs.
Similarly, Daitch spent his first several weeks meeting
with people and gathering ideas for new online learning
opportunities at the University. An opportunity could be a
new degree program, creating an online program from an
existing ground-based program, continuing education,
standalone courses, non-accredited certificate programs,
and more. Stackable programs that build up to degree
programs also show potential.
“We generated about 100 different opportunities, many
of which could be repurposed across multiple categories,”
Daitch said.
“Mr. Daitch has sprung into action from the first day to
analyze and begin to fill gaps in our capacity to
modernize our students’ experiences via online and other
Clive Houston-Brown, EdD, is a
veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and has
worked for 35 years in higher education with
a core focus on IT. He earned his doctorate in
educational leadership from the University of
La Verne, a master’s degree in systems
management from Golden Gate University,
and a bachelor’s degree in business
administration from California State
Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is a board
member for Pomona Hope and is current
Foundation Chair and a past president of
Pomona Rotary. He and his wife,
Sherry, have five children and
one granddaughter. Houston-
Brown was born in Zimbabwe
and raised in Zimbabwe and
Zambia. He and his family
enjoy travelling and have
made many trips to visit family
and explore countries in sub-
Saharan Africa. In his younger days,
Houston-Brown also enjoyed scuba diving,
sky-diving and bungee jumping, “anything to
get the adrenaline up.”
16 | WESTERNU VIEW Summer/Fall 2019
informs and enhances every interaction as he helps ready
our teaching for the future.”
WesternU has a longstanding history of online learning,
with the College of Graduate Nursing pioneering a
Master of Science in Nursing degree program that
combines online learning with seminar weekends that
allow nurses to continue working while earning their
degree. The Master of Science in Health Sciences program
in the College of Health Sciences is 40 percent online.
“I did have something of an impression that I would have
to be building a lot from the ground up. My biggest
pleasant surprise was the tremendous amount of talent
already in place,” Daitch said. “But it feels like the puzzle
pieces are spread out over the University. It’s a matter of
putting pieces together and filling in the gaps. Many of
the functions and technologies that are needed to build a
robust online program already exist.”
The key will be harnessing that talent to create a uniform
experience for online students across the colleges.
“We want to have a signature WesternU online brand so a
student within any college has certain expectations about
what it means to be in a WesternU online course,” Daitch
said. “At the same time, we want to retain creativity and
flexibility within each college so each can have some
measure of identity relevant for their program while also
staying within the brand.”
Online students can find themselves learning in siloes,
working independently without a sense of collaboration
and community. To combat this, Daitch wants to explore
opportunities to provide online students with a sense of
connection, starting with a robust online orientation, and
then potentially through team-based learning, online
extracurricular activities, peer and staff mentorship, and
even collaboration within gamified learning and virtual
reality.
“They need to feel like they are part of the WesternU
family even though they are not setting foot on campus.
This requires us to develop the processes and incorporate
the technologies that will support these goals,” Daitch
said. “It will make online learning a less lonely
experience. We want to make sure that we are known for
being innovative in terms of what we’re teaching and the
way we’re teaching it, for being supportive and
humanistic, and that we produce a high level of outcome
mastery and student satisfaction. We want to be
considered the best of the best. We want to create a five-
star online student experience. That relates to the
technology being used, the level of support that we
provide, and most important, to the quality of our
teaching online.”