Life’s Only Constant is Change

Over the last four months, I have been in a gradual transition from my former position as the Founding President of Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU) to a new set of responsibilities at Kaplan as the Senior Scholar and Advisor to the President. (That’s shorthand for a transition to part time contractual work amounting to about one week per month.)

During this time, along with my work responsibilities, I have been preoccupied with “retirement-related” issues and chores; the type of things that, quite candidly, other people used to do for me. It has been quite a learning experience to transfer 401(k) funds and see how the disbursements work, scrutinize the practicality of Social Security, look into Medicare and Medicare Supplement Insurance. And so on and so forth.

And then there is the time management issue. When you’re used to a 50-60 hour week (as I was), time management means “how do I organize these hours?” Time management was like a constant within which I operated. Now it means “how do I manage my professional time use as a variable within the larger block of time that is all my waking hours?” It’s been interesting to sort this out with my family, but we’re getting there! As my wife Letitia joked, “I signed up for better or for worse, but not for lunch every day!”

As I have had a chance to sort through these kinds of issues, I have looked away from some of my immediate past work at Kaplan and then returned to it with fresh and time-defined enthusiasm. I am astonished by the cutting-edge nature of several things we are doing to respond to the new potential for lifelong, post-secondary education. Most of these freshly-developed efforts are generated by the dynamic interaction among IT, data analytics, mobile devices, and social networks.

Therefore I have decided to write a series of blogs about several of these new services and their potential to better serve adults. I will do so not because they are the only solutions or ways to address the new potential, but because they seem like “good starts” to me. I want others to write to me about their solutions as well. My hope is that this dialogue will stimulate a marketplace of ideas and practices supporting new services for the emerging new world of learning and earning.

As always, let me know what you think.