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What's It Like to Work for an Online Campus?
10/1/2008
If you've thought about moving to the online adjunct of your institution, or one of the big-name virtuals, here's what you'll need to consider.
THE UNIVERSITY OF PHOENIX makes little secret of the fact that it offers higher IT
salaries than most state institutions. According to Joe
Mildenhall, CIO of Phoenix parent company Apollo Group, there's also the potential for staffers
to earn stock options as they move into management
ranks. Then too, because the IT organization supports
about 330,000 students worldwide, the hardware and
software in use tend to be high-quality and cutting-edge.
"We invest heavily in our technology because we have to
for our scale and for what we're maintaining from a reliability
and security standpoint," says Mildenhall.
And Karen Tan, the tech support and operations manager for UMassOnline, points out her favorite advantage of working for the online side of her school: "You're not fighting with students for a place to park."
Sure, there are plusses to the "virtual" side of IT ops in higher ed. Yet negatives exist, too.
Phoenix: Deep Expertise on a Large Scale
When Mildenhall meets with CIOs from other schools, "They talk about the resident populations of their students; the challenges providing bandwidth and dealing with downloads, filtering, and more. We don't really have that," he says, pointing to Phoenix's core challenge: supporting hundreds of thousands of students. "The amount of design and attention to supporting scale is something most colleges don't have to worry about. We don't have many off-the-shelf options; we've had to build a lot of our own stuff."
In fact, that scale requires an IT organization of about 1,300, including a call center with a staff of 400 to support students and faculty; 200 to 250 desktop support staffers to support the 17,000 employees; an infrastructure group to manage the operations of servers, storage, and the networks; plus three software application groups-- one focused on back-office systems, another creating customer and outward-facing applications, and a third for developing inhouse apps to support staff. With the exception of desktop support to provide help in 170-plus physical locations, IT operations are centralized in the Phoenix, AZ, area.
While the sheer size of the IT organization provides opportunity for promotion from within, Mildenhall admits that some employees feel boxed in. "There's a world of difference between an infrastructure where 50 people interact with servers, versus a shop where three people do," he says. Yet, "An advantage is that people are able to develop deep expertise that they may not be able to if they're generalists; expertise in intrusion detection technology, virtualization, or database administration, for instance."
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