The Future of Learning is Already Here: Wildly Accessible Content

I remember the anxiety I felt in 2012 when it seemed every other day for several months I would trip across a story about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and how they were going to disrupt and fundamentally change higher education. When some of the most prestigious colleges and universities began offering their curriculum online for free, it was hard to miss the fact that things were changing. Fortunately, the headlines subsided and most higher education professionals took a cleansing breath and rationalized that MOOCs lacked a sustainable financial model and would soon go away — we didn’t have to worry about them. 

However, MOOCs amplified the fundamental structural flaws of modern postsecondary education — rising costs, questionable outcomes, lack of personalization, lack of flexibility, too much variability based on delivery by individual faculty members, and misalignment between programs and employability. Since 2012, MOOCs have indeed persisted to the point that in 2016 the three largest MOOCs in the United States earned a combined $100 million net profit and beat most every college to market with the concept of scaled employer-driven credentials. Check them out and peruse their offerings to see just how accessible and affordable they are, as well as the name brands providing the instruction — Udacity, Coursera, and edX.

Similar to MOOCs, the Khan Academy has infiltrated K-12 systems across the nation and is widely used (albeit discreetly in most cases) in higher education. With several large funders like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Khan Academy is providing supplemental learning through short, clear, and extremely useful videos on content across a range of disciplines. In 2018, more than 100 million people accessed content on Khan Academy’s website with nearly 5 million paid subscribers.

Another platform influencing modern learning is Google Classroom. In 2012, Google accounted for about 1% of all media devices used in public K-12 classrooms. With the launch of Google Classroom and Chromebooks, their market share grew to 58% by 2016. Colleges today are finding recent high school graduates arrive wondering why they must purchase large expensive textbooks when they’ve been reading short, relevant, easily accessible content online for the past four years in high school.

The explosion of online content and platforms like Khan Academy and Google Chromebooks have spawned the development of Open Educational Resources (OERs). The modern textbook is undergoing a complete transformation and is being replaced by online content — sometimes through OERs and resources like Collective Commons, and other times through licensing other online resources.

With online content so readily accessible and the power of platforms accelerating change, new models of delivery are appearing beyond MOOCs and OERs. For example, Udemy provides curriculum from independent educators offering standard undergraduate curriculum at reasonable prices. Straighterline.com offers the 50 most common undergraduate general education courses for a nominal fee. The curriculum is approved by the American Council of Education and offered through more than 130 college and university partners. In 2017, they enrolled 22,000 new students in addition to the 75,000 already enrolled and had students report successfully transferring their courses to more than 2,000 colleges and universities. While some may question their quality at this point, the arguments remind me of those I heard 25 years ago when the University of Phoenix, Walden, Nova, and others burst on the scene with online programs — and most of us spent the subsequent 10 years playing catch up once their quality improved.

The reality of wildly accessible content and people increasingly comfortable learning in varied ways is now facilitating the largest employers bypassing traditional higher education delivery systems (read colleges and universities) to simply offer their own curriculum to accelerate the development of a qualified workforce. Consider employer-driven content like AT&T and Walmart partnering with Coursera; Salesforce offering free curriculum to train associates across the country to take their product to scale; Google offering their IT Certifications; and the intense demand for computer programmers has prompted the rise of coding boot camps like the Flatiron School that is now approved for federal financial aid, Apple and their Everyone Can Code curriculum and Amazon coding camps.

MVCC is uniquely positioned to address these disruptive innovations because of the work we have done over the last several years. With the creation of a the Code Academy, the incorporation of the Google IT Training Certificate into our non-credit offerings and soon our credit offerings, and our current work in examining and redesigning prior learning assessments, we are ready to do the work necessary to stay relevant while maintaining the highest of academic standards. MVCC is the first community college in the SUNY System to adopt a Board of Trustees Policy on Microcredentials, and it is this kind of forward thinking — and our unique ability to take innovations and make them our own — that will help us thrive in these uncertain times. 

The future is already here. We must find small spaces to safely prototype and utilize some of these emerging delivery systems to eventually integrate into our regular, core offerings that in five to 10 years will need to dramatically change in ways we’re only now beginning to see.

Please send comments and questions to presblog@mvcc.edu. 

Embracing Paradox: the Future of Community Colleges

Thomas Friedman’s latest book, Thank You for Being Late: The Optimist’s Guide to the Age of Acceleration, provides a thorough examination of all the forces driving and truly accelerating change, with an emphasis on the manner by which technology is disrupting every sector of our lives … and likewise, higher education itself is in the early stages of disruption. 

As community colleges, we pride ourselves on thinking about how our communities are changing and thinking about the future of work; however, we talk about the future of work as though it’s a detached, existential concept — someone else’s work and not our own. When we think about the future of work, we must make a special effort to also consider the future of OUR work and how it is fundamentally changing.

The general notion of college as we know it is not going away anytime soon. A smaller percentage of Americans will attend a traditional college setting as they clock in their 45 hours of seat time for each credit hour of sitting— er, I mean learning. We will, however, have fewer colleges, as smaller colleges are unable to weather the storm, and close their doors or merge with others. Most colleges will rather retain many of the familiar elements but will morph into adaptive enterprises with creative networks and unique partnerships to meet future student needs. Students are already learning differently. Many teenagers today are fearless. Why wouldn’t they be when they can search for YouTube videos on how to do, build, create, fix, and learn most anything? As I’ve heard my friend and Amarillo College President Russell Lowery-Hart say, “Let’s face it, things need to evolve — faculty have students fact-checking them on smartphones in real time during class!” Even many returning adults are learning in new ways, as they too can search YouTube videos to learn new things and are often more motivated to access content through podcasts and other means.  

To summarize Peter Smith’s focus in his recent book, Free-Range Learning in the Digital Age: The Emerging Revolution in College, Career, and Education, the new reality is that colleges and universities used to be an oasis of knowledge surrounded by a desert only a few could cross. With technology today, the desert has gone green. It’s not that disruption is coming for higher education, it’s already here in the form of wildly accessible content, private companies with transcripting platforms to document all that learning, and accelerating technology that will fundamentally change how people learn.

Although disruption to this point feels more like an uncomfortable itch than a broken limb, many colleges are already in the midst of managing a profound array of unprecedented paradox. With organizational cultures rooted in and shaped by more than 300 years of academic traditions, behaviors, and beliefs, community colleges must find ways to:

• productively honor the past while creating the future;  
• adapt to change by following the principle of preserve the core and stimulate progress that Jim Collins set forth in his book Good to Great;  
• balance access through enrollment (which drives 75 percent of MVCC’s operating budget through tuition and state aid) and student success and graduation (which requires processes that counter access at times); and
• respond to increasingly strained fiscal resources while adapting to change by managing simultaneous personnel layoffs and hiring for new positions in college budgets necessary to keep the institution evolving and vibrant.

And all of these paradoxical elements can be summarized in the new reality for community colleges — the need to do more AND better with less. MVCC is undergoing changes at a rapid pace, and the need for further and more innovative change is only going to accelerate our efforts with Guided Pathways. From new intake systems to redesigning developmental education, MVCC is anticipating the need, and every day is learning to do more and better with less. 

As I mentioned in my previous post, the wave of change is coming, and those colleges that recognize it sooner rather than later (#anticipate) will make it to shore safely. They may have a redesigned or reimagined surfboard or will have manufactured an even more efficient, relevant, and successful mechanism to ride the wave, but they will make it to shore nonetheless. Those colleges that fail to turn into the wave just enough to accelerate out of the tube will be overwhelmed and vanish — it’s just a matter of time.  

Please send comments and questions to presblog@mvcc.edu. 

Guided Pathways: Prelude to Disruption

CNN photo

I recently saw a video on Twitter showing a surfer setting the world record for riding the largest wave (82 feet tall) and I retweeted the first thing that came to my mind: "I don't know why, but I can't help but think that this is a metaphor for public higher education leaders in the next 5-10 years...#anticipate."

Upon further reflection, I think the metaphor came to mind because higher education is quietly being disrupted. The ripples are small right now, but the tide is definitely going out, and those who fail to see it will be overcome by a tsunami of change in the coming years. Fortunately, MVCC is one of more than 250 of America’s 1,100 community colleges engaged in Guided Pathways reform in some way. MVCC is one of the 13 community colleges in the American Association of Community Colleges Guided Pathways 2.0 cohort and is fortunate to simultaneously participate in the New York State Success Center Guided Pathways cohort funded by Jobs For the Future (JFF). With funding from our Oneida County sponsor, we are able to send teams of faculty and staff to institutes to receive technical assistance and coaching that expose us to national best practices and a framework for fundamentally reimagining the student experience. We are also fortunate to have financial support from our County to be members of the Achieving the Dream (ATD) National Reform Network since 2014. The culture shift that we’ve experienced through this network served as a critical pre-cursor to our Guided Pathways work.

My early experience at the Guided Pathways institutes gave me the impression that this reform was about two things — organizing academic program curricula into clear career pathways for students; and rethinking student onboarding and support systems. Simple and clear, I thought. The deeper our teams got into Guided Pathways, it became abundantly clear that there was more to this reform, and it was anything but simple. To truly apply the Guided Pathways framework and reimagine the student experience, we are in the process of:

1.    Remapping our entire curriculum across all programs.

2.    Rethinking our student onboarding process from admissions to the first day of class.

3.    Overhauling our student advising system to consider more intentional and personalized models at scale.

4.    Frontloading career services to support students in making better choices at the beginning of their academic experience — as a two-year college, our students don’t have time to drift around and “find themselves.”

5.    Transforming our approaches to developmental education by embracing national research and evidence-based practices that have demonstrated more effective models to address student learning needs.

6.    Disaggregating our data to understand the impact of our systems on low-income and minority students to put equity front and center in our collective work.

7.    Infusing data into our regular decision-making processes.

8.    Providing inescapable wrap-around supports to address students’ non-cognitive needs associated with everyday living, like housing and food insecurities, transportation, and other priorities that can compromise student success.

9.    Evaluating all of our technologies that have grown in number and complexity in an effort to leverage everything we have toward increasing student success.

10.  Finding new ways of working together as we do all of this simultaneously, when in the past any one of these efforts alone would have taken two years or more.

Guided Pathways is not a fad or a project, but rather a comprehensive, evidence-based framework that requires a long-term, ongoing institutional commitment that will continue to evolve as we fundamentally re-examine our approaches to student success. As dramatic and disruptive as the pending changes from this work will be, I believe it is only a precursor to even more disruptive changes that lie ahead for postsecondary education — changes that will likely unbundle, accelerate, and once again re-imagine learning and student success at our colleges. Organizational success in the future will require us to challenge our assumptions, question much of what we believe to be true, and accelerate our own learning to embrace changes and models of learning that were impossible to even conceive of let alone consider in the past.

During my time at MVCC, I have seen the College community face various challenges, and in each instance the College has shown a unique ability to synthesize the best of these ideas and national research, and at its own pace, make these ideas our own. We embrace the need for change, and we find a way to make it fit our unique culture. This tempered and considered approach to incorporating best practices has proven to be a hallmark of MVCC’s resilience. We are guided by our values, and we make change our own. 

For my first five years at MVCC, I wrote a blog post most every week during the fall and spring semester. It was a way for me to make sense of the College and the community that were so new to me, as well as share my thoughts on what I was learning. For the past seven years, I have written far fewer blog posts, as we’ve gotten into the thick of a great deal of organizational change — and I rechanneled my writing energies into a book titled Competing on Culture: Driving Change in Community Colleges. I am immensely fortunate to have a supportive and visionary Board of Trustees and amazingly talented staff who provide me with the opportunity and mental bandwidth to deeply consider what’s happening in the world around us and clarify a path forward through some great unknowns. 

I think I have the beginnings of that path and am once again compelled to post weekly. For the next several weeks, I intend to describe how this wave of disruption is coming together, why organizational culture is the way through and out of the wave for community colleges, and how the culture at MVCC provides insight on the building blocks to create a culture of connection and anticipation that I’m betting will see us through to shore, poised to ride even bigger waves in the future.

Please send comments and questions to presblog@mvcc.edu.