The University of Everywhere

KevinCarey's March 5th NYT article is right on the money. Carey asserts that college as we know it will be seriously challenged when free and affordable learning resources are coupled with excellent and valid assessments of learning that are equally affordable. This adds up to very affordable, well-documented evidence of learning that will trump current transcripts and time spent in college with academic and career-relevant information that can be expanded on throughout life and through multiple careers. (For the complete discussion, see Carey's book, “TheEnd of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University ofEverywhere," Riverhead Books, 2015.)

As Carey says, the “future of learning and the University of Everywhere” is here to stay, and at Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU), our team has been working towards just this future. Led by Drew Ross, Susan Huggins, and myself, OC@KU already has the elements of that university in play.

With OC@KU, learners can

• Build a portfolio of all prior formal, informal, and experiential learning at no cost and without the commitment of enrolling until they want the portfolio assessed. This reduces time and expense toward earning a degree, respecting the learning already accomplished.
• Take our free open courses and have access to course assessments for $100, also without enrolling.
• Access the free Career Journey program, which provides excellent career advice with data drawn from the LinkedIn economic database.
• Enroll in the accredited Bachelors of Professional Studies (BSPR) degree program for $195/month, which includes the assessment of their prior learning portfolio, design of an Individualized Learning Plan, ongoing academic mentoring, and access to free and open resources to fulfill the requirements of their competency-based degree program.

As members of the higher education community, we have a responsibility to make sure that everyone who wants access to learning, has it. As I reflect on Carey’s article, I am pleased to see that OC@KU is on the right track with adapting to the changing landscape of higher education. At OC@KU, we acknowledge that the future is now and we are proud to provide learners with the opportunity to take advantage of it today.

OEC and OC@KU: Putting the Learner First

I have had the honor and privilege of serving on the National Advisory Board to the MIT OpenCourseware project since its inception in 2001. Through this experience, I learned of the Global Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC), also established by MIT a few years later. OCWC was founded to promote open educational resources and encourage institutions around the world to offer open courses. At last look, OCWC had grown to several hundred participating institutions offering thousands of courses under a variety of Creative Commons licenses, resulting in tens of millions of course downloads annually.

Last year, OCWC changed its name to the Open Education Consortium (OEC) and the Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU) has become a proud supporter and participant in this community. As an OEC member institution, we offer our MOOCs on OEC’s website, complete with course assessments for academic credit. We are excited about our ability to link MOOCs with rigorous academic assessments that can go on a college transcript. The potential for learners to benefit from high-quality free content and then convert that learning to academic value seems very significant to us.

In addition to offering our MOOCs and course assessments, we have also developed a portfolio which will act as a repository for OEC learners to collect and store their open course learning. Called the “Open Portfolio,” this tool fills a previously significant gap for OEC learners by allowing them to create a living record of their progress through open courses. The ability to collect and store throughout the open course experience immediately adds value to the learning itself by making the evidence and record tangible and public. It also opens the door to additional value-adds should the learner want them, including the option to use “Learning Plans.” Learning Plans are groups of open courses that help the learner meet specific learning goals. Using Open Portfolio, learners can develop their own Learning Plans, select/edit pre-developed Learning Plans, and share their Learning Plans with other Open Portfolio users if they choose.

We are very excited about our growing relationship with OEC. It combines the freedom and fairness of the open education resource movement with a practical reality: Learning, wherever and however it is achieved and recognized, ties powerfully to the learner’s career aspirations, academic goals, and personal fulfillment. By making the choices elective and learner-driven, our partnership puts the learner first, supporting whatever pathway he/she chooses to take.

The OC@KU Difference

We know from Dr. Allen Tough’s research — first published in his seminal book, The Adult’s Learning Projects (Toronto, Canada, OISE, 1971) — that adults learn continuously throughout their lives. In fact, the average adult learner conducts between 8 and 10 such projects each year, committing over 700 hours to these cumulative efforts.  But in the 1960’s, when Tough began his research, we were pre-Xerox machine, let alone the cloud and tablets. So these adult learners were left with precious few resources – libraries, books, friends, experts, clubs, etc. – to achieve their learning goals.

Today, as we dream about how to support, value, enhance, and bring this informal “personal” learning to the surface, we have the extraordinary resources of the internet and cloud-based data.

With this in mind, as we brainstormed the setup of the “free and open” space in our college (OC@KU), we asked the following questions.

1.       What would a learning model look like if college were placed not as a required passage to your future, designed to interpret aspirations and require solutions for the learner, but instead as a collaborator that clarified and supported the learner’s needs and desires?

2.       What would the learning model look like if certificates and degrees were not the raison d’etre, unless required by professional standards or the law?

3.       What would college look like if learners could use existing resources to understand learning requirements and design their own pathways?

Based on the answers to these questions, we decided that our space for informal but organized learning will feature several resources, including

·         Access to free open courses

·         An electronic portfolio where evidence of all kinds of prior learning can be submitted for review for college credit (LRC100: Documenting Your Experiences for College Credit)

·         Services which allow learners to refine their thinking about careers and academic goals, while better understanding their behavioral characteristics and cross-cutting intellectual abilities (Career Journey)

We want to help learners make sense out of their lives, frame their questions about career and education, and get good answers to those questions as they design a path forward.

For some learners, these services will fulfill all of their educational needs. However, others will want to use OC@KU to gain access to degree programs. And one such option will be the topic of my next blog entry.

LinkedIn and Kaplan: Redefining the Professional Development Space

What a blockbuster! After years of planning and development, LinkedIn and Kaplan University have recently unveiled their collaborative resource to help professionals of all ages advance in their careers.

Utilizing one of the largest API integrations with the LinkedIn platform, the Career Journey microsite provides a highly personalized experience based on each individual’s LinkedIn profile and network. As one of several new services offered by Kaplan, Career Journey is the first free online course and customized application dedicated to teaching people how to advance in their careers using the LinkedIn network. The partnership is a step for both organizations towards a fundamental redefinition of how we think about value, career, credentials, and education. It also suggests that evidence of learning and the link between learning and career advancement can be located in a dynamic setting far from a college or employment office.

There are several critically revolutionary components in the LinkedIn/Kaplan service. Although each of the components taken individually would be a significant service to LinkedIn users, taken as a cohort of services, there is no equivalent to what they can do. In its initial stage, Career Journey allows users to access current and specific information about jobs, careers, and the fit between their experience and knowledge and job requirements. In a friendly, almost game-like way, Career Journey walks with users through a series of questions and answers, gradually helping them form their vision and understanding of what a given career path might mean for them.

Embedded in Career Journey is the Learning Recognition Course LRC100: Documenting Your Experiences for College Credit, offered by Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU). So, not only will the users be able to identify the skills and abilities they need to advance professionally, they will also be able to get a clear reading of the value of their experiential learning in terms of the future they seek. This all adds up to a major advancement in the way we use big data to inform career preparation, academic fulfillment, and work readiness.

The ability to network information about learning and careers using rich and current data, to calculate impact, economically and educationally, and to network with others in a professional community is unparalleled. Moreover, the establishment of a repository for learning, career, and economic data that is accessible and public is, in and of itself, a significant development. With these tools, we will be able to determine when a person is ready to work, not simply ready to graduate.

The Thrill Is On!

Every now and then, something happens in one’s professional life that is simply thrilling. For me, such a moment came when I was asked earlier this year to become the founding president of the Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU).

I can’t call this a “once-in a-lifetime opportunity” because I have had the opportunity to do this twice before at the Community College of Vermont in 1971 and California State University Monterey Bay in 1995. The thrill is in embracing the opportunity to develop a third college that is as appropriate to its time and purpose as I believe the other two were and are to theirs. Given that opportunity, the challenge this time is two-fold:

1.       To develop a college that harnesses the resources of the web and big data to transform learner access, choice, persistence, and completion using evidence-based evaluations and,

2.       To serve post-high school adult learners, including those who have not completed college, who have career, academic, or personal needs to pursue further learning.

As the mission states, OC@KU offers individualized, affordable education that integrates technology and personalized service to help learners meet their career, academic, and personal goals. This mission links learner-centeredness with our intention to keep the total cost of the bachelors degree under $10,000 and remain free of Title IV.

We are developing an institution that will ultimately have three components.

1.       A free and open space that allows learners to self-assess their learning, explore career opportunities, diagnose their work-related behavior, and explore educational opportunities through learning support services that we have developed.

2.       A “lifelong learning club” that serves lifelong learners who want a home base with some guaranteed support services for a low monthly fee, but who are not immediately (or maybe ever) interested in a certificate or degree.

3.       Evidence-based Bachelor’s Degree programs that begin where the incoming learner is, helps him/her chart a path to the desired degree, and provides support while he/she travels down that path. We are beginning with one degree, the Bachelors of Science in Professional Studies. This degree will be outcome-based and tied to course-level learning outcomes. Assessment will include exams, portfolio assessments, and acceptance of other accredited or approved assessments.

For the near term, we are focusing on the free and open space (#1) and the degree programs (#3). In later posts I will discuss how OC@KU uses a group of integrated services in a new institutional design to provide these two service areas. But in the meantime, I am drawing on a fabulous staff and all the experience I have gained over the years in program development, learning processes, assessment, and learner-centered policies to get this thing up and running by September 29th. Hence, the thrill is on!