Incubating Strategic Innovation (207034434)

8/13/2019 Incubating Strategic Innovation (207034434)

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EducauseIncubating Strategic Innovation

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different extent and slightly different way UMUC, for a very long time, all of us. And this new competencywave brought us into the game in really kind of an interesting way. So the new competency models thatyou're seeing in Southern New Hampshire and Northern Arizona and in Kentucky, for example, aredifferent than ours.

But at the heart, I think, what is disruptive about this is that we're giving students choices. They candemonstrate what they know, which we will assess and count, or they can learn what they need to knowfrom us. And, to me, that's the differentiator. So I believe that we'll get new, to use my own quote, andthat's Christianson's language, we're going to get new or underserved students in our program becausewe're going to enable them to bring the things that they already know and can do to us. We assess thosethings, which is faster and cheaper than teaching them. Students make more rapid progress. Kale tellsthey're going to be retained longer and that they're going to persist at higher rates. So in a nutshell, that'show Charter Oak sees this particular opportunity.

MS. MARIE CINI: So at UMUC, we have been in the adult student business, if you will, since 1947, andthat model has very much been about giving adult students choices. And it used to be that it was veryimportant to give adult students a lot of choices and a lot of time, and we would all joke about the 20-yearplan that many adult students were on. Starting about five years ago, and perhaps even before that,things have changed dramatically. It's a very different group of students that are coming to us, lessprepared, underprepared, underserved, people who are needing to get their degree so that they canmove on in their lives.

And what we discovered, actually through this process, was that we had to take a good look at our ownassumptions and kind of our theories in use about how we treat adult students. And so our breakthroughwas to think of new ways to increase retention and accelerate time to completion, and so we developedsomething called "Project Jump Start," which is a free one-credit course that we hope eventually allstudents will take, and it truly is a jump start. It's a four-week course. It gives them a credit by the end of it,but they will know themselves better, it will set goals, and we're hoping to use, really, research andscience, because there's a lot out there that, unfortunately, I think we just didn't use and integrate in ourprograms as much as we should have.

But if you overlay what we know about students, they need a good start, a fast start, a start where theyfeel like they've become efficacious, that they can do something, that they understand themselves better,

and so we'll be telling you more about Project Jump Start, but it moves them quickly into the collegedegree, and we hope will increase retention.

MS. DEBORAH AMORY: I'm drawing on what my colleagues both said. Empire State College has alsobeen serving non-traditional students for 40 years, also a state institution. We're a little bit different in thatwe have 35 locations across the State of New York, so from Plattsburgh to Riverhead, and from west toeast, we serve folks, both face-to-face and online, about 20,000 students. And similarly, we've had a long-standing philosophy and practice of personalized learning, so each of our students designs their owndegree, quite literally, with the exception of the nursing program, thank goodness.

And so we, in this moment of great innovation and rapid disruptive change, we've had to engage with ourfaculty around rethinking our educational models, and our project for the breakthrough models incubator,which I realize now was an enormous undertaking, to create a competency-based education program in

information technology, with, actually, a structured curriculum. That's the innovation for us.But what I think we share with other institutions in this moment of rapid change is the challenge of sort offiscal crisis at the national level, at the state level, certainly, at our individual student level, alongside theurgency of changing the very structures and philosophies that we had historically believed in. And thegood news in all of that is that, also, there's a lot of excitement being generated about new modes ofdoing things, and competency-based education is based in a philosophy, as Ed mentioned, of recognizingstudents' learning that they bring to us, and credentialing and assessing that. And so there's a piece ofthe philosophy we very much embrace, but we have to think of new ways to do it. So in terms of our




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definition of breakthrough, I've really come to understand that we had to create a sense of urgencyamong both the faculty staff and the administration, and some excitement around new possibilities.

MS. MORRIS: Thanks. So let's take a closer look at all three of your projects. I'll just start with you, Ed.Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about what Charter Oak has been up to, and start with that firstbullet in terms of –

MR. KLONOSKI: Well we're facing a challenge that's not our own. It's externally based and it's financial-aid based. So students come to Charter Oak. We have financial aid available if they take an online coursefrom us. If they decide to take a portfolio or a test, which are a half to a third the cost of the course, theyhave to pay out of their own pocket, they can't use their financial aid. So what we look at thatcircumstances as, as an essential unfairness to students, where the regulation is telling them how do weengage in learning, making them take a more expensive option, a longer option. We make a better returnon investment if they take a course than we do from a portfolio or a test, but there's an essentialunfairness.

So what we decided to do was change the financial aid regulations, which is just as arrogant as it sounds.The good luck for us is that there were other institutions that were thinking along those same lines. Someof them had already gone down the road quite a ways at getting a directive, financial aid assessment. Sowe put this group together called "Competency-Based Education Network." We've managed to talk, Ithink, the Department of Education into giving some serious talk to experimental sites. So whether we getthe financial aid through Pell or not, our experiment will be to offer students financial aid to support theportfolio or testing choice, if they so desire, and then look to see if we can increase the amount of priorlearning assessment credit -- that's portfolio and testing credit basically -- on our graduates' transcripts.

Currently, 13% of those credits are from prior learning assessment. We're aiming to get that to 20. If wedo that, we have pretty good mathematical proof that students are getting their degree cheaper, becausethose other options, those PLA options, are dramatically less expensive than even a course at a low-costprovider. So, in a nutshell, that's what we're trying to do.

MS. MORRIS: Marie?

MS. CINI: Do you want me to look at –

MS. MORRIS: Yeah, let's start with internal institution challenges for all three of the projects.

MS. CINI: Okay. So what we're calling "Project Jump Start," which is this one-credit course that helpsstudents really jump into their degree, I would have to say that the biggest internal challenge for us issystems and technological integration, because we don't want this to be a standalone course taught faceto face. 85% of our courses are taught online, and so we want it to be an online course. We wantautomatic assessments and integration with all the other data that students can use, data analytics, etcetera.

And so that's enormous. I see some of you shaking your heads. I mean that's why many of us are at thisconference right now. We have to find ways to make all of these systems work together so that thestudents are getting a unified coherent experience. I would love to tell you that we have solved all of

these problems, but I think we've only just begun listing them. But we are working towards solving them. And when we talk about the role of leadership, I can tell you how important leadership is. So integration.

MS. MORRIS: Great. Deb?

MS. AMORY: We, too, have technology integration issues, but we're currently looking for a CIO. If anyoneis interested in applying, literally, you can go see our website. So we set those challenges aside for a fewmoments, and what I've sort of focused my comments on are the institutional challenges of engagingfaculty and administration in fundamental transformation. And also, we have 200 full-time tenure-trackfaculty who are unionized. So it's both a shared -- we have a very robust system of shared governance,




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as well as a unionized environment. And in the radical change that's happening, that's also been a lot ofstress, so we have had challenges with governance and with, in terms of our relationships with the unionaround the workload, around changing definitions of what faculty are expected to do.

And, in fact, this sort of conflict was to the extent that a year ago when we started talking aboutdeveloping a competency-based IT program with IT faculty, we sort of had whispered conversations inthe corners of rooms during conferences, because it was such a challenge to some of the received ideasabout education at Empire State College. I may be exaggerating a little bit, but there was a sense oftrepidation, certainly. And so actually the Breakthrough Models Incubator really helped us to develop aleadership team that could communicate the urgency of the situation and also the excitement about thesolutions, and we're able to address the internal institutional challenges that way.

MR. KLONOSKI: For me it was much simpler. Our initial challenge was me. I'm coming up on my sixthyear anniversary, and I had convinced my admissions staff that best return on investment came from out-of-state course-taking students. We have a out-of-state/in-state differential. So if you're an out-of-statestudent coming to Charter Oak taking courses, we make our best profit on you. Now I'm coming alongand saying we need to do more PLA. We need more portfolios. We need more assessments. Theylooked me in the eye and said, "But we don't make as much money on that."

So I have to undo my own work in a sense. So getting the staff to believe and understand that retainedstudents and graduated students represent our purpose and are good for our bottom line, even if, in theshort term, they begin to make some choices that are not profitable for us. We really don't make any rawprofit on a portfolio. We make nothing on a test. So we're doing the Lord's work in a sense, and trying togain by better retention and better graduation. So I have to sort of undo myself.

MS. MORRIS: I notice you said that your team was able to make sort of record progress on thegovernance issue. What do you think was the one sort of thing, the nugget that propelled your teamforward in the face of the governance issue?

MS. AMORY: What Holly is referring to is we had the faculty draft a proposal for the new program thatwent through governance, and from these sort of discreet meetings in hushed tones with faculty, to, then,they developed the proposal. And it was a series of presentations that the college presented to otherfaculty, and also to administration, but the concept and some of the -- again, returning to the needs of the

students. Our faculty are incredibly eloquent about talking about working with someone who has come upin the IT field, arrives at their door, does not have a bachelor's degree -- this is their target population --but has ten years of experience, has been able to learn on the job and develop, but hits a certain wall.There's a plateau where they just can't get any further, and oftentimes they think it's about a degree, sothey come to us looking for, I need a degree, get me a degree, I don't care how I get it.

But also what the faculty talk about, that's very inspiring, is that oftentimes it's a level of understanding of -- it's about quantitative skills. It's about understanding discrete math and calculus, and math stuff that Idon't understand, but that you need to totally understand in order to progress in the IT world, and so theywere able to talk in pretty inspiring ways about how if we could just assess the students' knowledge, thequantitative knowledge, when they walk in the door, in a very careful detailed way, then we can both workcredit for what they have that is college level and send them off quickly, and this is the time to completion,in the right direction. And, again, it was this partnership between the faculty and, I think, the leadership of

the president and the provosts and the Office of Academic Affairs that was able to be presented. Theproposal for the governance committee, it was approved within three months. Record.

MS. MORRIS: Yeah.

MS. CINI: Astounding, and unanimously, and generated some excitement along the way, so.

MS. MORRIS: Yeah, so all three of you were able to enroll and partner with different stakeholders tomake advancements in terms of –




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MR. KLONOSKI: Well you did something for us on that front that I had never seen anybody else do.When we put our team together to come out and work on this project with the other teams -- I had to writethis down because I forget -- it was the president, the provost, the chief financial officer, our prior learningassessment person, an instructional researcher, a faculty member, an IT member, and an instructionaldesigner. I have never had a meeting with all those people at one time in my college in just that group.

And we continue to meet with them. We meet every two weeks. So this created an institutional team thattraveled together for two or three days in Seattle, and that is continuing to persist as a team. That's prettyunusual, in a good way.

MS. MORRIS: Yeah.

MS. AMORY: And we also, as a member of a state, included as the state administration level in our team,so we're able to garner some support at the state level, which is also now linked to the open SUNYInitiative that the chancellor of the State University of New York has launched, as well as connectingsome people who don't -- certainly rarely travel across the country to attend a meeting that's exciting andchallenging and have conversations across levels.

MS. MORRIS: That's a perfect segue into the second bullet. I know all three of these projects wereadvanced by leadership, and I know you wanted to talk a little bit about that, Marie. Why don't you justdive in there.

MS. CINI: Sure. And I've said this to Holly over and over again, the value of having the president, provost,chief financial officer, chief information officer, just those four people all in a meeting, but then we addedfaculty, program directors, et cetera, and it was incredible, in many ways. One is, it gave the opportunityfor some of our faculty to get to know our president, provost, CFO, CIO in a very different way. And ourpresident got to see some of our faculty in ways that he would not normally have seen them. It's greatrespect that went back and forth. We also, because of that leadership team being together -- we call ourproject "Project Jump Start." If you walk into my institution, everybody knows what it is. I've never seenanything like it, because it came from this group that -- everybody we knew we went off to Seattle to theGates Foundation. It really gets you a certain amount of -- you know, so you want to get in on one ofthese new programs, because that really gets you something.

People hear that, they listen to it, and it's a badge of honor. But our president can talk about Jump Start.

Our marketers know about Jump Start. Many of our faculty know about Jump Start. We have many, manyfaculty, so that's why it's not gone all the way down yet. It will as soon as we spread this across all of ourstudents. It just really made a huge different. Had a small group of faculty and a few administrators fromlower levels gone off, this would never have taken off the way that it took off in my institution. So as hardas it is to pull those people together, I really highly recommend it if you want to make institutionalchanges.

MS. AMORY: I also, just to follow up on something that -- mentioned, that in this current context we'refaced with making really difficult choices. You know, when, do you do the good work that doesn't bring inany money? How do you try create some revenue that will support that work, and having exactly this mixthat's the CFO, along with the chief academic officer and the president, understanding the incrediblechallenges, and being willing to come to compromises around what you can cut, what you can invest in,sort of that's been very helpful. And the finance template, that was part of the breakthrough models

incubator, also we got a worksheet that was very fun, that allowed us to model different financial models. And that was incredibly helpful too.

MS. CINI: Yeah, I just wanted to add one thing. Amazing things happened during these phases as we allgot to know each other. So you would think that the CFO would be the voice of don't spend money, don'tspend money, don't spend money. In fact, our CFO had some of the most interesting innovative ideasbecause he really understood, because he was part of all this in the design of the new program, heunderstood the value of spending money in certain ways if, in fact, it would increase retention. And we allknow, if you increase retention, students are there longer and they're paying more in tuition. It's not theonly reason to do it, but if you're trying to balance the books, that's important to look at.




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So we kept looking at him whenever we would talk about spending money, thinking, oh, he's never goingto say this is okay. But he often gave us an idea that helped us to kind of jump forward, again, in waysthat would have never happened if we had just all tripped down to his office and said, "Hey, we reallyneed to talk to you about spending some more money." The answer then is usually no. So it was just,again, very, very important.

MS. MORRIS: So it sounds like all of you had help in driving things forward from different levels at youruniversities, and some tools that spurned some conversations that were helpful in driving things forward.

Any other comments about moving innovation forward before we move on? I want to leave some time forquestion and answer, but I did want to open one or more opportunity about driving innovation forward.

MR. KLONOSKI: It does require real honest conversations across multiple silos. You can't drive a part ofyour institution forward and not talk to the rest of it. I mean I sit in that seat where I'm supposed to be ableto do that. It's not easy to do. And they're painful conversations, I mean in both directions. So my financialaid director raised her hand and said, "Why would we want to do more of this, we're going to make lessmoney." And she was right. And so coming up with an intelligent answer for that, which someone else inthe staff did at that meeting did, not me, and that was really impressive. The PRA person stood up said,"No, we know this and this will happen, so we'll be okay. We just don't know the specific parameters ofwhat okay is." To have sort of senior people, but not executives, having that debate in my presence, thatwas very good, very scary, but very cool.

MS. MORRIS: I want to talk a little bit about the inter-institutional collaboration that happened with thesethree projects in particular. Hopefully we get to the question and answer. So I invite you to kickoff thatconversation.

MR. KLONOSKI: First of all, we cheated. We have known each other for 40 years, and we havecollaborated across that 40 years in a variety of ways, from honest collaborations where we get to ameeting and talk about things, from stealing from each other the good ideas that we've each produced.So I think if you went to Empire State and asked about Charter Oak, they would know some things aboutCharter Oak. And if you came to here and asked about Empire, we know a great deal at a variety oflevels. And the same with UMUC, who has been in this game even longer, and internationally.

So we have that advantage. The thing that we wanted to talk to each other about, first, Empire has agrant, a global learning qualifications framework. In other words, I think, and you can correct me if I getthis wrong, but I actually read it and brought it. I did my homework. It's a way for students to createportfolios without a lot of hands-on support. It sort of sets a framework for a portfolio. So for this projectwe needed to figure out the right language to talk about prior learning assessment. So Charter Oak hadthe responsibility of doing some interest groups, surveys, and we did all that kind of stuff. And then weagreed collectively that we would try to produce the front-end widget that would link up with the back-endportfolio qualification system that Empire is looking at.

And what we want this front-door widget to do is ask enough questions of a student that they could figureout where they're eligible to do your portfolio or a test. So they show up at our advising Center, and I'llconfess, that was our weak link at Charter Oak. Our admissions people were not talking students throughprior learning assessment, they were just putting them in courses because it was a more efficient

admission strategy. That being said, as students show up at admissions and say, "Oh, by the way, I wantto do these three tests and I want to do a portfolio in this," it makes it much easier for our admissionspeople to simply get them in the places they need to be. So the widget was the area in which we thoughtwe could collaborate in this policy.

MS. AMORY: And the global learning qualifications framework is an initiative funded by a Lumina grantthat our group of experts, faculty within the college, and also with external experts, had developed aframework for assessing for both identifying what college-level learning is and then how to assess it, andsort of like a set of rubrics that would help guide the student through identifying areas of learning, asopposed to simply experience, and then also facilitate the evaluation of that by faculty experts. So it's




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going to be great to have the prior intake sort of methodology that's web based and interactive forstudents to help facilitate that.

MS. CINI: I would just as in a general sense, you know, we're talking about the huge changes in highered., we really are at a point where it's all about collaboration. I think we all have to figure out who arepeers are that we can learn from, learn with, and partner with. And that hasn't been something thatuniversities do very easily in the past. I think we all thought we had secret sauce. You know, there's goingto be a coming consolidation, and I think it's really important to find out who you are best able to work withso you can start forming those partnerships now.

MR. KLONOSKI: That's the sales pitch I always do. So if you want to do more work in competency-basedlearning, it may be to your advantage to partner with an institution that's already sweat some blood andtears in that arena and learn from them, with them, because there's things that we need from you that wedon't do or can't do or shouldn't do financially, and there's things we might be able to do for you. So this isthe business-to-business collaboration piece that I think -- this coming consolidation is going to requirefrom all of us.

MS. MORRIS: So we'll close out the panel part of this discussion and get to the questions and answers inabout two seconds, but I did want to give all of you an opportunity to talk a little bit about the results you'reexpecting from your Breakthrough Models Incubator projects. They were just turned in at the end ofJanuary, and we should be seeing them launch in the spring, in about six months later. So a little bit fromeach of you.

MR. KLONOSKI: Well we've already launched. The one question that I have on my mind is where I'mgoing to get the dollars for it to substitute for the financial aid that we're not eligible for yet. And I think wehave a way to do that. We don't have a really good financial model built because we're a little odd. But weknow what the key experimental variable will be. Can we increase the amount of PLA credit on atranscript? That's very easy to measure so that in a year or two, we should see whether or not we'vemoved that needle, and we measure retention and graduation rates now. So I don't think the map of theexperiment is particularly difficult. So I think we're good to go.

MS. CINI: So, for us, we're very data driven, and we'd like to be even more data driven. But what wefound is that we have a large number of students who come to us who don't return after the first term,

because, you know, we have adult students, maybe they're trying college, maybe they didn't understandexactly what they were sort of getting themselves into. They might not have the skills. They might haveacademic skills but they don't know how to negotiate issues with faculty, et cetera. And, again, as I said,because we have these adult students, we just had this assumption that somehow they knew how to doall this, and, in fact, we know like any group of students, varying levels of skills, et cetera. So for us, JumpStart is very simple in terms of what we hope to see happen.

We've tried to address all of the issues that we think are stopping a certain number of students frommoving forward. So we'll be looking at course -- well first of all, term-to-term reenrollment. So after thestudents take Jump Start, do they reenroll the next semester, in the next term; and their coursecompletion rates and grades in the next term; and then eventually we'll look at graduation rates, but that'sfar down the road. So this spring -- in fact, we started too, we started the pilot in the fall. This spring weshould be able to tell you if we have bumped up our term-to-term reenrollment rates. We'll begin that right

now.MS. AMORY: And our project, again, is to launch a full program in the fall of 2015, so it's a little bit furtherout. But our most immediate goals in the next 12 months are to both develop that quantitative skillsassessment piece that will incorporate learning analytics and adaptive learning technologies to supportthe launch of the student into the program. To finalize governance requires one more proposal, the finalprogram proposal to be approved, which we expect to be done next fall as well. And we're also stillplaying with the financial models and looking at a subscription-based model, as opposed to acquaintingthe competencies to credits, and some really interesting learning happening as we watch the numbers goup and down, depending on the modeling of how many students doing what when, and looking at our own






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MS. MORRIS: I should note here, too, that this group of three represents innovations that are sort ofdirected towards competency-based education, but those aren't the only innovations that were part of theBreakthrough Models Incubator. The other four institutions chose to do completely different types ofprojects, all rooted around boosting student success and retention. And they've all taken different paths,from highly analytics-driven major choice advising system, APICU. There's Ball State's "Gameification" ofhow to get Pell grant students to do the things that they know will make them successful, and they'veprototyped a really interesting app that will help their students keep track of what they're doing that isgoing to promote their success and reward them and reinforce that community amongst them. So there'slots of different types of innovations going on, and if your questions are more generally towardsinnovation, we welcome those as well. So we have a few more minutes, so if there are any otherquestions from the audience, please take advantage of it now. Any takers? Okay, then I will say thankyou for joining us this afternoon.

MR. KLONOSKI: Thanks for listening.

MS. MORRIS: And if there are any other questions, we'll be around afterwards.

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Incubating Strategic Innovation (207034434)