Small Bets – Innovating at the Edge

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified many trends that were creating disruption even before 2020 and accelerated elements of our society that brought the future to the present overnight. With enrollment declines and dramatic decreases in state and local government budgets, funding models for public community colleges have become more fragile than ever. Since 2007, the convergence of technologies has fostered the development of new and disruptive educational platforms, and this has only been magnified by the pandemic. Augmented and virtual reality, as well as robotics and artificial intelligence, are developing at rapid rates with tremendous potential to disrupt learning even further. And the ever-widening gap between the “haves and have-nots” in this country has grown to the largest among any of the G7 nations, with the wealth gap between the richest families and the poorest in this country doubling between 1989 and 2016. This has been made even worse by the pandemic — burying our most vulnerable students behind layered and intersecting barriers to advancement.

It’s enough to make one curl up and just hope for survival. It’s overwhelming at times to consider how fast everything is moving amidst such complexity. However, if the idea of making small bets — innovating at the edges of an organization — is embraced, an organization can shrink the change, as Dan Heath suggests. MVCC has been nurturing our organizational culture to continually scan the environment to monitor these macro trends and take bold actions to make small bets that will keep the College well-positioned for the increasingly complex and ever accelerating future. With partners like Jobs For the Future (JFF), the Community Foundation of Herkimer and Oneida Counties, and many others, we’re able to identify promising practices and rally the resources to launch minimal viable products (MVPs) and begin iterating our prototypes.

Securing the Financial Future of the Institution

State and local funding combined with student tuition have long been the primary revenue base of community college funding. Grant funding is mostly temporary and is not sustainable, so something more is needed. The MVCC Foundation created a separate Limited Liability Corporation (LLC), Tea Leaf Ventures, to support three social enterprises. If a social enterprise is a commercial venture that supports social good, why not make the College the social good? Tea Leaf Aircraft Exchange, Tea Leaf Manufacturing, and Tea Leaf Touring and Consulting are all in their infancy but hold great promise for new and sustainable revenue for MVCC.

Embracing Disruptive Platforms

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are disrupting the way in which people access content and learn. Coursera enrolls 73 million and edX enrolls 32 million individuals around the world. We are prototyping how to create non-credit to credit-bearing pathways for students to complete this content and apply it to their credit programs. Our computer science faculty created a pathway from the Coursera platform for the Google IT certification curriculum. In addition, we’ve also used the edX platform to deliver a non-credit leadership certification to students in our YouthBuild program at our Educational Outreach Center. As content delivery is changing, so is the transcripting of learning. MVCC recently launched the digital credentialing platform Credly to allow students to post their micro-credential certifications on their personal social media accounts like LinkedIn.

Anticipating Accelerating Technology

Technology is accelerating an incredible rate. Robotics, augmented and virtual reality, and behavioral “nudging” are all technologies of promise to increase student engagement and success. Robots have been the thing of science-fiction but they are increasingly becoming more prevalent in society. While some robots are available at substantial costs, MVCC faculty are working with the Cyberhawks student club to program Misty the Robot, which was purchased with a $2,500 donation. Misty will be available on the Rome Campus in the near future to interact with students.

Our YouthBuild program is implementing immersive learning technology through SkillMill Training through Interplay. We also implemented Persistence Plus this past Fall to connect with students through texting powered by intentional messages of engagement supported by artificial intelligence that is having a positive impact on student retention.

Muting the Impact of the Wealth Gap

Although College-Community-Connection (C3) is an important component in our current holistic student supports, it’s actually a “small bet” early prototype of what may very well scale to be a fundamental component in our future operations if the current national trends of a widening wealth gap between the “haves and have nots” and the growing complexity and stress of daily life continue. Ensuring that our students’ basic needs are met and that they can rely on the College to help make sense of all the learning options that will help them secure a good job or career will become more important over the next decade. C3 has all the makings of what will be needed if these trends continue.

COVID-19 has compromised our students’ ability to build the relationships they need to secure a great job and pursue the career of their choice. Our Career Services department is working with a cohort of about 125 students on a special LinkedIn project that will allow us to test a few things and gradually scale up the ways in which we get our students on the platform to expand their professional networks and build social capital for themselves.

Guided Pathways as Prelude

Guided Pathways is a comprehensive framework to increase equity and student success. Given the magnitude and scale of changes called for in the framework, it’s hard to imagine Guided Pathways would be a small bet. But if the trends of a growing wealth gap, decreasing support of public education requiring new business models, accelerating technology reshaping the student experience, and increased stress and complexity in society, the Guided Pathways framework is a prelude to the types of changes that will be needed 10 and 20 years into the future.

All of these small bets are in motion. Some are more developed than others, but all of them combined signal that MVCC is focused on how the present connects to the future. Making small bets like these positions us to learn with emerging and promising approaches to serving our students better and keeping the College strong and well-positioned in what will likely continue to be a very uncertain future.

If you have any questions or comments about this post, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Why Workplace? Why Now?

Why Workplace? 

Workplace by Facebook has the potential to transform communications at MVCC. With 70 percent of adults older than 25 using Facebook, it presents a familiar tool to dramatically change the way we communicate internally. Workplace can help evolve our organizational culture in meaningful ways to maintain and ensure continuity and input among staff and faculty. Everyone has critical insights, and this is a platform to scale and accelerate opportunities to engage with peers and provide key feedback.

One of the most powerful features of Workplace is its search feature that makes it easy for users to find files, old messages, and much more. Being able to talk to each other is one thing, but being able to go back in time and find content is critical. Workplace will provide lasting benefits for us by becoming an ever-growing knowledge base.

One of our core values is “Model the way.” Looking at innovative, collaboration platforms like Workplace helps us create an interesting and creative culture in the organization. Some might feel that embracing a leading-edge platform is a bit of a risk, but I believe it is an approach that is likely to be rewarding. 

There are three significant ways in which I believe Workplace can transform the way we communicate.

More efficient meetings: You’ll notice that many of the initial “groups” that have been created are committees and councils related to governance. Meetings can become more efficient if group members use Workplace to have conversations between meetings and share status reports and perspectives. As a result, the actual face-to-face meetings can be spent on important dialogue and debate versus the typical agenda comprised of mostly status updates and review, which leaves few moments for substantive conversation.

Increase awareness and sharing of ideas: Groups and individual posts can be used to share ideas and observations that stretch the thinking of others. The more we create affinity groups, post announcements, share articles, links, and other resources, the more we can connect ideas and find creative solutions. We can crowdsource our biggest challenges by engaging everyone in the solutions. As multiple authors like Steven Johnson write, great ideas come from a series of creative collisions, and the more organizations can find ways to create space for those collisions to occur more naturally and frequently, the more innovative the place will become.

Strengthen social connections: In this fast-paced society, slowing down enough to connect can be a challenge. Workplace provides an easily accessible platform for people to connect at work. Rather than leaving it up to chance or busy schedules to connect us in the hallways, colleagues also can connect on shared interests via Workplace. As individuals can join affinity groups with social interests via Facebook, they can do the same with Workplace. For example, if one person creates an open group titled “Adirondack Outdoors,” anyone who likes hiking or skiing could easily connect with co-workers who have similar interests — co-workers they might not have a chance to meet otherwise. Similarly, someone could create a closed group only open to a more defined group of co-workers to open lines of ongoing communications on shared topics of interest.

Why Now?

Our community faces a number of significant challenges, and MVCC is at the heart of offering solutions, so we need to be at our very best as an educational and community resource for the region. Society is changing quickly and in significant ways, and education is transforming even faster, with open educational resources, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence advancing exponentially. For MVCC to remain relevant and competitive, we need to continue finding creative solutions and, with limited resources, continue making the most of our efforts. An ever-changing and more complex future requires us to collaborate in new ways that can only occur by embracing the fact that information is power and connection is current to light the way. Workplace by Facebook is the energy grid by which we can accelerate our work together.

We’ve had more than 300 faculty and staff join Workplace in the first week alone. My expectations are that this will be an organic effort that evolves at the pace at which people are comfortable using it.  I imagine there will be some “voyeurs” initially waiting to see who posts what, but I anticipate that the more people post and use the platform to try new ways of sharing ideas and information, the more we’ll all reap the benefits I’ve described in this post.

Let’s get started. 

If you have any comments or questions, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

SUNYCON 2015 – A Window into the Future? (Part 2)

-->Like past SUNYCON agendas, this year’s theme of “Building a New Business Model for the Academy: Partnerships, Affiliations, Mergers, and Acquisitions” planted the seeds of what likely will grow into fundamental change for the SUNY system. 

The biggest question of all is, what change will that be? I don’t come by this prediction lightly, as it is based on my experience of the past four SUNYCON events. The conference provides an active learning environment with powerful speakers and “creative collisions” at the breaks to consider the shifting sands of the postsecondary sector and what will be needed for the SUNY system to clarify and pursue the change necessary for the future.  

Consider the SUNYCON themes and related subsequent actions over the years: 

SUNYCON 2011 – Universities as Economic Engines. Not too much later, we experienced the passing of the Start-Up NY legislation, and today we have 143 new companies that have created more than 4,000 jobs throughout New York.
 
SUNYCON 2012 – Harnessing Systemness and Delivering Performance. We’ve seen continuous progress toward systemness with the work on shared resources, IT platforms, and the seamless transfer initiative. 

SUNYCON 2013 – Building a Smarter University: Big Data, Innovation, and Ingenuity. Not too much later, we saw the development of SUNY Excels and the Performance Improvement Plans. 

SUNYCON 2014 – Executing Change to Drive Collective Impact. Today, SUNY has more than a dozen communities with active partnerships in the Cradle to Career Alliance across the state. 

SUNYCON 2015 – Building a New Business Model for the Academy: Partnerships, Affiliations, Mergers, and Acquisitions. We shall see.

The not-so-subtle pattern of a connection between the SUNYCON theme and some significant forward progress within SUNY is an interesting signpost and source of inspiration for everyone to consider answering the Chancellor’s top ten questions sooner rather than later, because the future will not wait for us.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

From the Internet of Things to big data and the quantified student

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Hawk Vision group keeps an eye on the future for MVCC and identifies trends worth watching. This is the first of what will likely be several guest blog posts in the future that warrant our attention. Enjoy.

The Internet of Things is happening all around us, and it has been for some time now. It is a movement to connect physical things to the Internet and to each other through wireless technologies to form a seamless, coherent experience  (http://www.entrepreneurial-insights.com/internet-of-things-future-data/). The future of the Internet of Things raises questions regarding big data and what we do with it. There is much discussion about how everything connects through wireless technology, but what happens with all the data that gets collected? Is there a place for the Internet of Things in higher education? And if so, what? 

According to a white paper written by software company Oracle (“This paper provides an overview for the adoption of Big Data and analytic capabilities as part of a ‘next-generation’ architecture that can meet the needs of higher education institutions”) on enterprise architecture, “Institutions have traditionally measured students by grades and attendance. Students facing severe academic challenges are often recognized too late. Many institutions are now starting to look at Big Data solutions to better understand student sentiment (gathered from social media) and other aspects of the campus life experience. For example, sensors in buildings enable tracking of students and the time that they spend in the classroom, in their dormitory, in the cafeteria, or in the library. The effectiveness of their instructor can be partly determined by analysis of student sentiment. Problems can be detected and corrected earlier, with less dire consequences for all involved.” (For the complete report, click here.) Although written and researched by a for-profit company, the implication of the direction of one of the largest data companies is staggering. 

So does the Internet of Things begin to quantify our students? Can we use the examples of a quantified self to increase student performance and completion? What is quantified self and what data are used to quantify one’s self? Currently the trend in quantified self is using personal data, such as fitness trackers, calorie counters, etc., to track one’s fitness and health. According to the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), “Quantified Self describes the phenomenon of consumers being able to closely track data that is relevant to their daily activities through the use of technology.” It is enabled by wearable technology and the mobile web. This is a notable trend because it gives us a glimpse of what our daily lives will be like in the near future, in which many of the emerging technologies that we are just getting used to – the mobile, big data, wearable technology – will come together for a seamless consumer experience. (Full article) 

Only when the Internet of Things, quantified self, and big data come together in a student profile can we begin to understand how much impact the data can have on higher education. In the near future, we will have to address how these three come together to better aid our students in study habits, health habits, and academic planning to truly enhance the entire student experience. The future beyond big data will be the true quantified self through learning experiences, and competency-based education through just-in-time learning and creating a fully quantified self that will serve as an e-portfolio of a person’s true qualifications and ability. The future of higher education will be credentialing competency-based education, experiential learning, and lifelong learning. Self-tracking websites such as LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) give us a peek into the future and the quantified self. 

Do you have any comments or questions about the Internet of Things and the quantified self? Hawk Vision would love to hear from you! Share your thoughts with us at hawkvision@mvcc.edu.

Anticipating the Future

The world is changing fast, and change in the world of community colleges (and higher education as a whole) seems only to be accelerating in pace and complexity. One question that might give many community college presidents pause is, “What mechanism do you have in place to anticipate the future and build capacity to position the college accordingly?” I’m proud to say that the Strategic Horizon Network is the primary mechanism for MVCC, and more recently, Hawk Vision is the newest piece to our future-anticipating puzzle.

Since 2008, MVCC has been a member of the Strategic Horizon Network (SHN), a small group of community colleges from the Eastern and Midwestern parts of the country that twice a year bring teams of faculty and staff together in fascinating colloquia. I like to call it common learning through uncommon experiences, because the premise of the network design is that in order to more effectively anticipate the future, we must go beyond the boundaries of higher education to get exposed to new ideas and concepts necessary to help us do so.

For example, about six years ago, SHN took us to California to spend time with IDEO – a design firm in the Silicon Valley that helped create Apple’s first mouse and several other products that have helped to change society. We learned about their use of design thinking. On the surface, one could say design thinking is a modern form of brainstorming, but it’s so much more: It’s a process to understand the root cause of an issue that needs to be addressed; it changes the problem-solving process by continually asking “how might we?” and adds the value of accelerated prototypes. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review highlighted design thinking as a necessary tool for creatively building organizational capacity for the complexities of the future – six years after our first contact with the topic. 

About five years ago, SHN spent time hearing from researchers on abundance and positive psychology work with the Gallup Strengthsfinder. The colloquium experience gave us a view of how it all applied in a food company in Ann Arbor where they operate eight different businesses (deli, creamery, bakery, restaurant, etc.) and explored similar application in the culture of Quicken Loans. Simultaneously, we began to more intentionally prototype our use of the Gallup Strengthsfinder with our employees and students. As a result, we launched the use of the Gallup Strengthsfinder with all degree-seeking students in our ED 100 College Success Seminar class, and “Strengths” is part of MVCC. This past summer, a Time magazine article focused on these topics and espoused that 457 of the Fortune 500 companies use the Gallup Strengthsfinder in some manner. In a world of growing similarities among colleges, MVCC students have a distinctive experience when they discover their “strengths” and learn how to apply them for personal and academic success.

Now we have Hawk Vision.  Similar to the InnovationWorks group at fellow SHN member, Montgomery College in Maryland, Hawk Vision is a small group of faculty and staff with a significant role at MVCC – to continually scan and explore trends that will shape the future of community colleges; identify where innovation is occurring at MVCC and find ways to amplify it and help bring it to scale. As the first community college in New York State, MVCC takes great pride in anticipating the future, and with the Strategic Horizon Network and Hawk Vision in place, we’re increasing our odds to continue that tradition. 

If you have any questions or comments on this post, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.