Phill Casaus: Can NMSU be global and homegrown? It's not an Aggie joke

Apr. 29—I'm gonna refrain from Aggie jokes today, because nothing has been funny at New Mexico State University in the past year.

(Also because my wife, an Aggie who can sing the fight song, will smother me with a pillow if I go for the cheap shot.)

So, here it is. All is not lost, Pistol Pete and Pistola Paula. In the midst of perhaps the worst 12 months in school history, buds of good news are popping through at Aggieville. Incredibly, the seeds were germinated on, yes, the internet, where something called NMSU Global is beginning to take hold.

At its most basic, NMSU Global is the university's digital learning outlet. By itself, big whoop. A lot of schools offer online content to their students — and other schools' students. Welcome to the 21st century, where you can do coursework during the day, between dinner and bedtime, or after midnight.

(Which may have been the way I did it all those many years ago, but I didn't have Zoom. I also didn't pass many classes, either. But back to the story.)

Which leads us here: About three years ago, New Mexico State landed a whopper of a transfer — sorry, sports terminology; not a good topic right now — when it hired a woman named Sherry Kollmann to head its efforts on the digital learning front. Kollmann's career is vast, but the thing that pops on her résumé is the years she spent at Southern New Hampshire University.

Southern New Hampshire ... Southern New Hampshire ... Southern New Hampshire!

That's it. The online school in the TV commercials. If you just went by those spots, you'd swear Southern New Hampshire oughta be in the Rose Bowl (damn, more sports; sorry honey). The school is everywhere, with heart-rending stories about how someone got a degree and a future at their own pace through the magic of an internet connection.

That's pretty amazing, when you consider SNHU not long ago was an accounting school on the verge of disaster when it decided to plug into digital learning.

Kollmann is quick to note NMSU has no intention of becoming an online behemoth like Southern New Hampshire, in part because there are pitfalls to that kind of approach. But she does have big plans for NMSU Global, with a five-year growth strategy that would grow the university's online student population to 5,000 students by the end of the 2026 fiscal year. That would help the crimson and white become the No. 1 provider of online higher ed in the state.

In doing this, Kollmann says NMSU Global would scale up by its own bootstraps — or to use her words, "grow organically." To use my words, New Mexico State wouldn't outsource its badge to private, online learning companies — known as online management providers — as some schools do now. Or, in the parlance of Aggies, this would be much closer to the famed Chope's than the drive-thru at Taco Bell.

"My philosophy is that our state institutions should be the ones educating our students," she says.

Kollmann doesn't deny that if this works, NMSU Global would be attractive to students in, say, New Hampshire or Idaho or Mississippi. But the growth potential more likely would be with smaller universities that might not have the on-campus learning program or bandwidth to get a student from Point A to Point Z in certain fields. Courses from New Mexico State, a full-service institution, might just be the difference.

The timing could be perfect as higher ed emerges from the pandemic.

Kollmann says digital learning, at least the good kind, isn't just about turning on a camera and sending out the Zoom link, which you have to suspect was the case at a lot of places as COVID-19's clouds darkened in-person classrooms. She describes an NMSU Global effort that includes job descriptions like "instructional designers" who focus on the science of online learning — what works, what doesn't.

And there's more.

"When you're designing online programs, you have to think about the cognition, the learning piece," she says. "You have to think about the motivation, because you need to keep students motivated. So how are you going to do that as you're building these programs? You have to intentionally weave that in. And then the third thing is the emotion, because you have to be able to elicit that emotion. They need to see themselves in the curriculum."

When Kollmann says it, it's not woo-woo talk. A Ph.D. in instructional psychology and technology, Kollmann says she wanted to come to New Mexico State to see if some of the things she'd done at Southern New Hampshire and her other stops could be incorporated into a publicly funded state university.

"My next strategy if you will, or my next goal, was to say, 'OK, Sherry, you've done this here, all up in the New England area. Can you now build this for a bigger state school?' " Kollmann says of her motivation to head to the desert.

There's much to be done, of course. Kollmann says she's been approached about upping the online-student goal, and she's game. But she wants this to be NMSU Global and not Southern New Hampshire Massive. Homegrown and smart, she says, will serve students better, even if there are no TV commercials during NFL games. And serving students, she notes, is the whole point.

Hey, that's a win, right?

(I'm done. Sweetheart, please put the pillow away. Please.)

Phill Casaus is editor of The New Mexican.