The University of Oregon announced Deborah Keyek-Franssen as the new associate vice provost for UO Online and Continuing and Professional Education. As vice provost, Keyek-Franssen will be in charge of facilitating the merging of in-person courses into online accessible courses.
“A lot of (my job) is learning what are the needs and desires. What are the most wonderful things about UO that the world needs to know about? Helping (to) identify those and then providing services that make it easy for those academic units to get that learning out to the world,” Keyek-Franssen said.
UO Online is an online service that allows students to get their degrees or complete required courses remotely. CPE is a program that allows students to expand their education, whether they are fresh out of college or alumni of 50 years. With the hiring of Keyek-Franssen, the two programs will be working together.
“If you think about where higher education is going, what we’re seeing more of is a crossover between online (and) continuing professional education.There’s this big realm of lifelong learning that kind of swings back and forth between academic and professional. That’s why these two units really work well together, and that’s why they’ve been brought together,” Keyek-Franssen said.
Keyek-Franssen comes to UO after serving as the associate vice president and dean of University Connected Learning at the University of Utah since 2020.
“Knowledge of the landscape, knowledge of higher education (and) knowledge of how things work at a university. It’s different in every university, but the rhythms are the same (and) the themes are the same,” Keyek-Franssen said.
Keyek-Franssen earned her bachelor’s degree in Germanic languages and literature from Dartmouth College. After two years of teaching in secondary education in Austria and New Jersey, Keyek-Franssen achieved two master’s degrees, one in Germanic languages and literature, and the other in higher and postsecondary education.
She later received a doctorate in Germanic languages in literature and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from the University of Michigan. Despite her degree choice, Kayak-Franssen says her love for IT goes back to her undergraduate days at Dartmouth.
“A requirement as an undergraduate is that we learn how to code, so very early in my career as a student, I was like ‘oh, this tab stuff, this is pretty cool. I really like this,’” Keyek-Franssen said.
Later on at the University of Michigan, Keyek-Franssen was able to expand her love for IT at the institution’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching.
“They did a lot of workshops and courses (on) classroom teaching, but a lot of them were about technology, so I just started to play around,” Keyek-Franssen said.
According to Keyek-Franssen, she was drawn to UO due to “the excellence of the institution, the excellence of the leadership (and) the openness of the leadership toward innovation.”
Now in her new role at UO, Keyek-Franssen has plans for how to expand UO’s Online and CPE program, including helping units that want to contribute a workshop for the professional education community.
“What we’re saying is, ‘We can help you, we’ve got the instructional design for you, we have the programmatic design and we have a way that you can actually operationalize in this non-credit space.’ So I see us, in a year, having a whole bunch of new non-credit courses in the professional education space,” Keyek-Franssen said.
