Mission: The mission of Newlane University is: “To make quality online liberal arts higher education accessible to anyone on earth by breaking down the barriers of cost, schedule, and geography.” The mission is also a proxy for the more complete Newlane manifesto.
History: Founders of Newlane University, Ben Blair and Josh Stanley, studied education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In addition to their studies, they have each taught and worked in online and higher education for over a decade. Ben Blair holds a PhD from Columbia University in Philosophy and Education. Josh Stanley is ABD in Instructional Design from Columbia University, and holds Masters degrees in Mass Communication and Digital Media Studies from the University of Denver.
Newlane started as an effort to build a platform that would simplify and improve curriculum and curriculum development, and apply some of the powerful ideas, values, and trends in online technology (e.g., crowd-sourcing, content-ranking, micro-payments, etc.) to education, and leverage the abundant instructional resources available today. The founders created the platform for Newlane because it was a tool that they wanted to use. With their background in online and higher ed, they saw the need for something that would not only cut down on the time it took to design course content, but also improve the quality.
As they worked on developing the platform, they also worked to significantly bring down the cost to build a stripped-down degree program that was comparable to the essential objectives at other universities, but built on a platform optimized for this, and delivered and tested online.
Their research took them all over the place, reviewing programs at conventional and online universities, as well as readily available disruptive resources like MOOCs, instructional online websites and videos, etc. When they looked seriously at the cost of rigorously verifying a student’s mastery, on a platform optimized for this, their analysis ultimately led them to focus on the two keys of the Newlane mission: quality and accessibility. That is, in the context of an online environment with abundant quality instructional resources, with a platform optimized for verifying student mastery, one could realize both quality and accessibility.
This conclusion was energizing for the potential to open and offer education to a much wider audience–and shift education from a scarcity to an abundance model. It was also disheartening to see that, while technology was enabling much more potential for educating the world, U.S. universities were still charging $120,000+, and there was no clear end to their raising prices. In this context, Newlane University has emerged as a force for making quality education available and accessible to everyone.
