Throughout his career, Dr. Richard Hezel, our founder and president, envisioned that media, telecommunications, and technology innovations are tools that should be harnessed for the benefit of learning and social good, not for only advertising and profit. In 1987, the opportunity to combine his academic, applied research, and evaluation expertise with his years of media and telecommunications teaching and experience came to fruition in the formation of Hezel Associates. The company’s earliest activities focused on communication planning and research with a strong orientation toward helping education and media organizations work together. As a result, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and many public TV stations were among our earliest clients—and they continue to return as clients year after year.

Our very first undertaking was research for the Annenberg/CPB Project about state coordination of educational telecommunications. This resulted in a long string of reports including Educational Telecommunications and Distance Learning: The State by State Analysis (EdTel), the seventh of which was published in 1998. One state report led to another, and we complemented the EdTel report with a report on state coordination of teleconferencing for the ITCA, and later, with Telemedicine: The State by State Analysis.

Our reputation for quality research and policy analysis in distance learning grew along with the robust market. We assisted many state departments of education and administrative services, as well as colleges and universities, with their rollout of technology and distance learning plans. In 1994, Hezel Associates was the first consulting company to develop a tool for distance learning financial planning and analysis, the Business Model for Distance Learning, and the first to analyze cost effectiveness of distance learning projects. Since then we have been offering business and market analysis and planning as part of our strategic services.

Our policy analysis brought us to the service of organizations such as the US Education Department, the Department of Commerce, and the Aspen Institute. We continue to ensure that policy recommendations are one element of our client reports. Now, our client policy concerns are as likely to be on issues of entrepreneurial development as technology use.

We have always viewed the mission of our company to help our clients make good decisions—through our consulting, our research, and our evaluation services. It is in the field of evaluation that we have been able to use our excellent design, data collection, analytic, and writing skills to craft for our clients reports that help them: understand what happened in their projects, determine whether new knowledge and skills were learned, how effective the dissemination process was, and evaluate whether the project was cost effective. As educational technologies have evolved, Hezel Associates has ridden above the waves. We have evaluated projects that have been web-dependent, such as PBS TeacherLine, as well as projects that are simply innovative, often without technology as an intervening instructional tool.

Our firm, though still relatively small in size, has grown with our clients. We continually focus on clients and learning needs. We measure our success by our clients’ success. By that standard, we’ve been doing well.