Capella University | 225 South Sixth Street, Ninth Floor | Minneapolis, MN 55402 | Phone: 612-339-8650 | capella.edu
Keith Koch doesn’t want anyone to notice his work.
As vice president of next-generation learning at Capella University, Koch is responsible for creating, updating, and maintaining the university’s courses, which are all online. “I want the learner’s experience to be a seamless one,” he says, “so the goal is to keep the technology out of the way. We have a saying around here: The academic portion of the course should be the only hard part.”
Koch’s work as a designer of online courses is a natural outgrowth of a longstanding interest in the way people interact with their surroundings. While studying for his master’s degree in human ecology at the University of Minnesota, he stood out from his classmates by focusing on humans operating in virtual environments.
Koch’s position is also a natural evolution of his work at Minneapolis-based Capella. He started out as a manager of Web strategies in 2000, when the university had 1,000 students, 200 employees, and about 300 courses. He became director of next-generation learning in 2004—then vice president in 2009—and he now leads more than 100 employees for a university that boasts more than 38,000 learners, 3,000 employees, and 400-plus courses every year. “For my team, that means that we basically have to maintain and update 100 Web sites every quarter,” says Koch.
Koch is developing new ways to make Capella’s online courses even more user-friendly. He’s developing applications for mobile devices “so that learners can take advantage of those 10- to15-minute time slots that occur away from a computer.” He also is trying to create more ways to measure achievement so that when a learner is struggling with something, “the program will automatically let them know how to get extra help. We want the learner to realize that the whole institution is behind them.”
