A Model of Sustainability, 1 of 8
Running Head: A MODEL OF SUSTAINABILITY FOR PROFESSIONAL
ORGANIZATIONS
A Model of Sustainability for Professional Organizations:
Using a Learning Management System for Offering Continuing Education
A pre-publication draft currently under review. Please do not distribute. For personal use only.
Gregory S. Sparrow, Ed.D.
Associate Professor
University of Texas-Pan American
Contact Information:
Gregory Sparrow, Ed.D.
Department of Educational Psychology
University of Texas-Pan American
1201 W. University Dr.
Edinburg, Texas 78541
gssparrow@utpa.edu
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(956) 367-2337
A Model of Sustainability, 1 of 8
A Model of Sustainability for Professional Organizations:
Using a Learning Management System for Offering Continuing Education
Abstract
Professional membership organizations have traditionally maintained their exposure and revenue
stream through memberships, sponsored conferences, and professional journals. However, each
of these traditional tiers of an organization’s identity and financial survival are at risk in a webdominated world. Knowing this, professional organizations are turning to various forms of online
expansion, including offering continuing education. This paper describes one organization’s
effort to expand its CE program by developing an online continuing education program, using a
learning management system (LMS). The author describes how the organization––the
International Association for the Study of Dreams––has been able to migrate its existing CE
courses into Moodle, and––more significantly––to convert its annual conference assets into
permanent sources of continuing education and revenue. The author argues that an LMS-based
online course center, built principally on conference resources, represents a model of
sustainability for professional organizations who possess assets that can be translated into
continuing educational courses.
Keywords: online education, continuing education, Moodle, professional organizations, IASD
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A Model of Sustainability for Professional Organizations:
Using a Learning Management System for Offering Continuing Education
Professional membership organizations have long maintained their exposure and revenue
stream through a variety of traditional avenues, most notably memberships, sponsored
conferences, and professional journals. The synergy of this traditional model has depended on a
certain exclusivity and enhanced status derived from membership benefits and proprietary
information that can be marketed separately to non-members. Indeed, it is customary for a
professional membership organization, such as the one that I have chosen as an example––the
International Association for the Study of Dream (IASD)––to have the following revenuegenerating components in its structure:
• Membership—IASD currently has about 700 members from 40 countries, who provide
21% of the annual net revenue.
• Conferences—A single international conference accounts for 55% of IASD’s annual
income, while a few regional conferences and an online conference provides additional
income.
• Publications—IASD’s peer-reviewed journal Dreaming contributes 16% of IASD’s
annual income. It is published by the American Psychological Association, and is a
membership benefit.
The Current Threats to Membership, Conferences, and Journals
Memberships. IASD shares a potential problem with organizations that have historically
depended on membership fees. Unless membership confers special status in one’s field, and is
effectively required for full participation in one’s discipline, its aura of exclusivity is being
progressively undermined by the growing access to information and benefits that were once
reserved for members. Like-minded researchers can easily find each other via web searches, stay
in touch through email, Facebook and Twitter, and then use videoconferencing software to
facilitate active collaboration; and individuals can find answers to virtually any question on web
forums and through Google searches. For better or worse, information is increasingly free, and
immediately available.
The internet also threatens the cohesion of an organization’s membership. Because it
reaches into geographically remote areas that were heretofore beyond an organization’s reach, it
attracts a more geographically and culturally diverse membership. For instance, IASD’s
membership is heavily represented by residents of the US West Coast, where it was founded 30
years ago. However, recent trends indicate that the greatest percentage increase in membership is
from overseas. Indeed, IASD’s current membership is represented by over 30 countries. This
internet-driven movement toward a global community raises the question of how organizations
such as IASD can maintain a sense of cohesion among its supporters. Historically, the annual
conference has satisfied that need by bringing members together for personal and professional
sharing, but in an era of an increasingly non-local membership, the annual conference may be
losing it hold on the center.
Conferences. Sponsored conferences, which are generally open to members and nonmembers like, are challenged by various other threats, including increasing hotel and conference
center expense, increasing fuel and travel costs, reduced travel support from universities
(Backmon, Kiel & Malone, 1999; Griffin, Malone & Cooper, 2005), and the advent of virtual
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conferences and webinars (Wilkinson & Hemby, 2000). While income from IASD’s annual
conference continues to be its largest source of income, IASD has found, as other organizations
seem to have discovered, that the annual conference must be held in member-saturated venues on
a regular basis to keep its attendance high enough to meet its annual objectives. Indeed, Griffin,
et al. (2005) found that proximity is the most important variable in determining attendance at
conferences, underscoring the vulnerability of conferences to rising travel costs and reduced
travel support for a geographically dispersed membership. Holding conferences at the
geographical epicenter of an organization’s membership may become increasingly necessary, but
it will nonetheless limit the extent to which organizations can effectively serve its far flung
members.
Publications. IASD continues to derive significant income from its APA-published
journal Dreaming, but traditional print journals have to compete with an increasing number of
open-access journals, which offer their authors immediate exposure to the research community
without the attendant publishing costs and delays of traditional journals. In addition, closedaccess articles are leaking out through author postings on personal websites and on social
networking outlets such as www.academia.com. This leads to the progressive erosion of the way
that publishers have traditionally sequestered assets and offered them only on a per-pay basis.
Significantly, the Dutch-based publisher Elsevier has recently engaged in a crackdown on the
practice of author postings, provoking a backlash from thousands of professors who espouse
“easily-accessible distribution of their work” (http://thecostofknowledge.com, 2015). As an
article in the Washington Post reports,
“…academics no longer need traditional academic publishers to distribute their research to
the world in paper form. And a growing number of researchers are beginning to wonder if
legacy publishers are becoming more of an obstacle than an aid to distributing their work”
(Pearson, 2013).
The Installation of an LMS
Given these potential threats to the traditional sources of outreach and support, the IASD
Board made a far-reaching decision in 2013 that has the potential of adding a significant revenue
generating tier to its existing sources
of income: It decided to create an an
LMS-hosted platform, and to focus
on migrating its manually
administered, book-based CE courses
into the automated LMS, and
converting annual conference
presentations into online continuing
education (CE) courses.
The Right Stuff
From an objective point of
view, IASD possessed the right
assets at the right time to launch such
an online project, and to make it a
success over the long term. Not only
did it jump aboard the internet
revolution in the mid-90s by creating its own website (http://www.iasdreams.org), but it soon
launched a popular online “PsiberDreaming” conference (http://www.asdreams.org/psi2014/)
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using phpBB (https://www.phpbb.com) forum software. More recently, it has been active in
exploiting Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/5493995967/), Twitter, and other social
networking platforms. But most significantly from the standpoint of launching the online course
center, the IASD decided in 2007 to apply to become an American Psychological Associationapproved continuing education (CE) sponsor. The vast majority of mental health licensing
boards in the US and Canada and in some other countries will accept credits needed for license
renewal from APA sponsors, so achieving the status of an APA-approved sponsor was a
significant enhancement in its CE offerings.
IASD had been a provider of continuing education for a variety of provider certifying
organizations since 1995, but after IASD was able to acquire APA-approved status, IASD
obtained APA’s approval for developing several book-based online CE courses that were posted
on IASD’s main website and administered through email by IASD’s office personnel. At the
same time, it began offering APA-approved CEs to its annual conference presentations, thereby
increasing the attraction of its conference to academics and therapists who could use CEs from
an APA sponsor for professional development and/or relicensing requirements.
An LMS Opens the Door to Automated Online Education
Until the creation of its online course center, IASD’s book-based CE courses were
administered manually, and its conference-based CEs were available only to the conference
participants. Something was still needed to exploit the CE program’s potential as a significant
revenue generating tier of the organization. IASD selected Moodle for the expansion after
considering its cost (i.e. free), its extensive and evolving plugin array, and its adaptable
configuration. While IASD’s volunteer site administrator had experience with Blackboard––a
widely used proprietal LMS system––its expense was prohibitive for this start-up project.
Expense aside, a careful analysis of the differences between Moodle and Blackboard (Beatty &
Ulasewicz, 2006) provide ample reason for adopting Moodle as the LMS for the online course
center.
While the initial thrust since launching the LMS platform in 2013 has been to convert
conference presentations to courses, IASD plans to further capitalize on its LMS platform by:
• adding to its traditional book-based CE courses.
• adding the video to some of its online conference conversions.
• building a separate category of courses based on papers from its journal, Dreaming.
• offering university-style courses for students who can experience teacher-student and
student-student interactions, and receive CEs as part of their participation.
• hosting its first conference entirely on Moodle in late 2015.
• adding a synchronous videoconferencing option to its Moodle partition, such as the
Moodle Integrated Synchronous Teaching/Conferencing (MIST/C) (Pullen & Clark,
2014).
A New Model for a Sustainable Future
IASD’s online course center has almost unlimited expandability, given Moodle’s
flexibility and evolving plugin library. Not only can the organization reach into its vast audio
archives and construct courses based on presentations from past conferences, but it can plan
strategically for high-quality audio and video capture, organize on-site evaluations of live
presentations, and actively solicit the participation of presenters well ahead of the conferences,
many of whom see the online course center as a way to increase exposure for their work while
helping IASD increase its revenue stream.
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For a professional membership organization such as IASD, the benefits of an LMS in
providing a largely automated, online educational outreach at a minimal cost are significant to its
future exposure and solvency. A visitor can:
• open an account at the Online Course Center without assistance;
• enroll in a variety of CE courses through the Paypal plugin within Moodle;
• complete online exit evaluations that can be used for course revisions and improvements;
• receive personalized downloaded certificates of completion, the access to which is restricted
until the student achieves a passing grade on the quiz, and has completed the exit survey;
• leave behind a server-based activity record that can be used to verify the student’s
successful completion.
Further, an online educational center can become yet another SEO-optimized platform for the
organization’s exposure, thereby channeling more interest and potential recruits into its
membership roster. Indeed, IASD’s Moodle site is already on page 1 of Google for searches
related to online dream courses and APA dream-related CE courses.
The Threat of Cannibalization
The offering of online courses could conceivably result in a decline in conference
attendance, especially for prospective attendees for whom CEs factor into their justification for
attending. By adding enhanced elements—such as video, synchronous exchanges, and mentored
modules—to its online offerings, an organization could inadvertently compete with its own live
conferences. However, in one study that assessed the reasons faculty members attend live
conferences, respondents ranked continuing education as only 7th in importance for attending,
after 1) geographical location, 2) presenting a paper, 3) expense reimbursement, 4) research
related network and sessions related to research interests, 5) program topics, and 6) non-research
related networking (Griffin, et al., 2005). In contrast, when it comes to the factors that attract
academics to online or virtual conferences, respondents in one study (Wilkinson & Hemby,
2000) confirmed that professional development ranked as the second most compelling reason for
participation, after cost. Given these data, one might conjecture that online CE courses will
attract academics and therapists who need professional development at a reasonable cost, without
undermining the attractiveness of physical conferences.
Summary
To summarize, the IASD represents any number of professional membership
organizations that have heretofore managed to thrive largely on the basis of three principal
strands of income-producing outreach, but may wish to develop an online CE course center as an
additional tier for its future sustainability. Of course, an organization’s status in the professional
community will influence the success of online course offerings. For instance, IASD is
positioned to succeed because of its standing in the world as a respected clearinghouse for
dream-related research and study, as well as its status as an APA-approved sponsor of continuing
education. If any membership organization occupies an equivalent role in its own professional
community, possesses available conference resources, enjoys CE provider status from relevant
certifying organizations, and can marshall modest technical savvy, it is likely that it, too, can
succeed in adopting the model of sustainability described herein.
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