Putting the Students in Control

At OC@KU, we fully understand that learners want choices — among programs, pedagogical modalities, degrees, and price. People want to make up their own minds about these things, which is why we allow them to take control of their education.

The OC@KU approach to learning and degrees emphasizes that learners can move themselves towards reaching their personal, academic, and career goals. By documenting what they have learned from work and life experiences and by taking course assessments, learners can turn their lives into college credit

Starting with our flagship program, the Bachelor of Science in Professional Studies (BSPR), learners who choose to pursue a degree from OC@KU will enjoy the benefits of a very affordable, very personal, and very flexible degree program, allowing the learner to set the pace:

• Affordable: With a low monthly subscription fee, learners can avoid financial aid debt by enrolling in this program.
• Personal: Learners begin their journeys by completing an Individualized Learning Plan (ILP), which allows them to set an academic path towards reaching their goals.
• Flexible: OC@KU boasts a self-paced, fully online format that allows learners to maximize credits from all sources of experiential learning, while providing access to MOOCs for free, high-quality content.

 In my mind, while this is not the only way for a college or a degree program to operate, it does exemplify several characteristics which are fundamentally important in the era we are entering. First, it retains academic rigor and quality through personalized advising and excellent assessment. Second, it puts the learners first, in terms of what they do, when they do it, why they do it, and for how long. Finally, it helps the learners define their current status and future aspirations, giving them the tools and the information needed to determine their own paths. From there we help them travel the path selected.

Our message is simple: It’s your future; we’re here to help you get from where you are to where you want to go.

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!

Respecting Experience as a Qualifier

In their timely and perceptive book, “Life Reimagined: Discovering New Possibilities,” Richard Leider and Alan Webber lay the base for one of the most important things most of us do without any support or advice: plan for the future. In thoughtful and clear prose, they outline why planning consciously for and reflecting on what you want from your future will add great value and happiness to both the process and the outcome of this work.

At the heart of their recommendations and advice for planning lies the role of experience – life experience, professional experience – that amalgam of forces that combine to shape each of our current-day realities, outlook, and potential.

To this I would add that, as mentioned in my book most-recent book, understanding your experience, learning from the process of reflecting on it, and harvesting the learning that it has brought you is a powerful process with significant impact.

In a major development that heralds a new age in innovative collaboration, Kaplan Higher Education Group, AARP, and the authors of the book Life Reimagined have pooled resources to create the AARP Life Reimagined website. This website is chock full of helpful advice about planning for change in your life, including retirement and re-careering. No longer does this critical transition have to be navigated alone, with no structure or support to inform the process. Kaplan's contribution to this effort is LearningAdvisor. LearningAdvisor is a combination of career and educational assets that help the user sort through options and opportunities using up to date data and  exercises.

Not surprisingly, once again, the importance and value of understanding and building on the experience that adults have accumulated lies at the heart of the value proposition. Adults, while they may be interested in getting a degree at this stage in their lives, are more interested in solving the problems facing them and, in the process, getting the respect and lift that valued experience gives them. After all, why should someone be required to relearn something they already know?

An important part of the LearningAdvisor suite of services is the Learning Recognition Course Documenting Your Experiences for College Credit. This course helps learners organize evidence of their experiential and professional learning into useful course equivalents. If desired, that learning, assembled in a portfolio, can later be assessed for academic credit. There is great value to cataloging this learning and having it assessed. First, people who do it and proceed on to enroll at Kaplan University save, on average, nearly a year's worth of time and money in earning their degrees. Second, the information is also extremely useful in the workplace, supporting promotion and transfer.

Collaborations like the Kaplan/AARP/Life Reimagined venture mark a new frontier in partnerships that serve the human interests of the people involved. Furthermore, they also underscore the power of personal and informal learning and experience in our lives by providing a way to convert that experience to added value.