Tuesday, October 29, 2024 - On this episode of the Future U. Campus Tour, Michael and Jeff sit down with leaders from Western Governors University to learn about innovations around the university, with special attention paid to those at WGU’s fast-growing School of Education. They discuss the expansion of work-based learning with President Pulsipher and Provost Hills McBeth, examine the drivers of the Ed. School’s growth with Dean Ludwig Johnson, and hear from a WGU student (and 4th grade teacher), Madelyn Hurst, on how the college’s competency-based approach is shaping her teaching. This episode is made with the support of Western Governors University.
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03:26 - The History and Students of Western Governors University
09:48 - Drivers of WGU’s Growing Programs
16:36 - Expanding Apprenticeship-Based Degrees
20:52 - The Future of the Degree in Skills-Based World
24:10 - How AI Will Change the Work and Learning Landscape
29:47 - The Current State of K-12 Education
33:07 - How WGU has Evolved to Meet Changing Needs of Schools
36:17 - Taking the Long View
38:25 - The Downstream Effects of Competency Based Teacher Education
42:47 - The Growth of WGU’S School of Education
45:05 - How Apprenticeship is Transforming Teacher Education
47:35 - Closing Thoughts
Jeff Selingo
So, Michael, we're off to Disney.
Michael Horn
For the podcast?
Jeff Selingo
Yeah. I know both of us have been there in the last year with our families. I don't know about you, but I I know Disney has its fans and detractors, but I really love it. My kids are now teenagers, which allowed us to park hop and go on different rides. Tron, let me tell you, one of my huge favorites. But we weren't there for Future U to ride the rides.
Michael Horn
No. No. Although Tomorrowland might have been a great location for this episode because the original concept of that land, of course, was to reimagine tomorrow. And that's what we did in this episode recorded at the Western Governors University School of Education Summit, a gathering of WGU's faculty and staff from around the country.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah and this was our second stop on the Future U campus tour, which is expanding a little bit beyond its definition of a campus in this case, just like higher ed is more than just a physical space, anymore. We report it live in front of more than a thousand people in the audience, which is probably our largest studio audience to date. And the reference to Tomorrowland is not far off, Michael, because as you'll hear, much of what WGU is doing around education these days in and in their other key markets, whether that's teachers or nurses or IT professionals. It's really rethinking this model for the future of higher education. We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we enjoy recording it.
Sponsor
Western Governors University believes higher education must be flexible, connected to workforce needs, and provide a return on investment that pays lifelong dividends. Nonprofit WGU is delivering on the promise of higher education. Learn how at wgu.edu.
Jeff Selingo
Welcome, everyone. A huge thank you to Western Governors University for hosting us today. We have with us, President Pulsipher, Scott, if we may, since we have known each other for a while.
Scott Pulsipher
Yeah. You certainly can.
Jeff Selingo
A little known fact, Scott was actually on Future U about five and a half years ago. So it's been a little while since your first appearance. So it's great to have you here and welcome back to Future U.
Scott Pulsipher
It's awesome to be with both of you again. And, grateful just for the podcast that you do. I think, just a bit of a shout out to Future U, because for all of those who are also here, it is, certainly we have here with us today 2 individuals who are paying attention to the innovation that is, in fact, changing the shape of higher education and education more broadly. So many of the things that you bring awareness to and visibility to and insight into is certainly influencing how I and all of us here at WGU think about what we need to do for students as well. So it's been just a great, opportunity for us to continue to learn about what's happening out there in the space, and we're grateful for the opportunity to contribute to some of that thinking as well. And certainly, Jeff and Michael, a lot has changed in the five and a half years since we were last together on your podcast.
Michael Horn
That is for sure. We're gonna get into all of that, and it's gonna be a really fun episode. I will say, Scott, for all of you out here in the audience, you all know this, but for our listeners, I want to give them just a quick history lesson, because they may not be familiar with Western Governors University, they should be and they will be, but it really you all grew out of the frustration with the status quo. In 1995, some 19 western governors gathered for a meeting and ultimately agreed it was easier to form a new college rather than try to reform the existing ones. That happens to be music to my own ears or training, and the result was Western Governors University, which was established in 1997. You've now celebrated 25 years. You have a flexible online competency based model allowing students to demonstrate mastery as they move through programs at their own pace, And today, you operate in all 50 states, serve more than 175,000 students at any given point in time, and have more than 340,000 alumni. Now, Scott, although WGU was originally designed with adult learners in mind, which, you know, they were not being well served by traditional colleges and universities, we know that you've seen significant growth in traditional aged learners in recent years. Give us a sense of what you've seen and what's behind the trend.
Scott Pulsipher
Yeah. We certainly have. I don't think we can underestimate how much the pandemic itself was a catalyst for how that shift started accelerating. But even during that time period, I think we at WGU also discovered we were inaccurately portraying our students as adult learners. It was probably better to think about the individuals that we are serving as working learners, that if there was one common thing that all of them had is that they already had so many demands on their time, it was really hard for them to fit into their already busy lives, a very traditional postsecondary model, a college model. And so if you think of the…The barriers could include affordability. That's true. But usually it was time and place and meaning that if I already had a family and children and a job, sometimes 2 jobs, that if I actually wanted to acquire the credentials I needed to advance my life, that classroom fixed time based, on a campus like that presented so many barriers to serve them now when you think about working learners. Guess what, even at age 18 there are a very large percentage of that population who are these working learners at age 25, at age 30, at age 35. And so we start to recognize is that and this was even prompted, I remember, this was even recognized by higher learning advocates, and Third Way also gave some visibility to this. If you look at the profile of today's college student, it's not like what you see in Hollywood or on College Gameday for that matter. It's not the I'm living full time on a campus, you know, I'm not working while I'm going to school, etcetera. More of what you saw is that the majority of them, certainly more than 50% of them are working at least part time if not full time. I think even if I recall, 25% of them had a child. Only 13% of freshmen live on a campus. You start to get a very different profile of those individuals that actually are pursuing postsecondary education. They look more like the adults that we're serving than they do, of those who are presented on a College Gameday like thing. And that's not to say that that's not a large percentage of the population, but I think even today, we see that those that are in that over 24 population, but if you also say working learners, you're likely to talk about the majority of those enrolled in the 19,000,000 today that are in postsecondary. So what we've seen at WGU specifically, just to give you some quick facts, I think those that were under 24 pre-pandemic was about 5% of our population. Today, it's closer to 18% if I recall the most recent statistic. Now, I think that's really important because if you consider 2019 or so, we were probably about a 110, a 120,000 full time students. At 5%, that's like 6,000. That's like a good size, you know, regional university. But now it's 18% of a 175,000. You're talking more than 30,000 students that are of traditional age. That makes WGU, even among traditional age, one of the largest institutions serving a traditional age student. But the other thing that you'll notice is that they are coming to us with different levels of preparation from different backgrounds. They're certainly more diverse than they were before, and I think a lot of that has really helped us make sure that we're continuing to expand access to those who have been historically or traditionally underserved by traditional models, and it means that we have to address barriers of time and place and affordability. We certainly are trying to activate populations too that are not well represented in post secondary enrollment. And that has, the last 5 years have just accelerated that focus on serving those who are underserved.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah. I like this idea of the framework of the working learner. You know, we've talked a lot on the podcast about education has always been education with a job on the side. Now it may it's transitioning into this idea of a job with education on the side.
Scott Pulsipher
Yeah.
Jeff Selingo
And really kind of a different paradigm shift.
Scott Pulsipher
Well, and I would even add to that further, which is, I think we're lending a lot more acknowledgment and recognition that so much of the learning that you're doing at that age is actually happening on the job, and we're just augmenting it with the classroom because even with the competency based model that both of you know that we have at WGU, it's about whether you're competent. It's not about how much time you spend developing competency and guess what? If you gain all that competency in a particular subject matter or on a particular course on the job, you can accelerate to that credit much more quickly in a model like WGU that they wouldn't afford that at a traditional university. The notion being that you could have been a software developer for 10 years, but if you want to go to get a bachelor's degree in computer science at traditional school, guess what? You're sitting in the class for 3 hours a week and supposed to study 6 hours, etcetera. Next thing you know, it takes me 15 weeks to prove that I already knew something that I earned, while on the job.
Jeff Selingo
So, Scott, we're gonna dive deeper on in the second half on on education programs specifically. But you've seen tremendous growth both in your education and your nursing programs. What about the design of those programs in particular do you think are attractive to working learners? And I know you're not always trying to necessarily give ideas to other people, but I think that, you know, one of your goals is to improve higher education across the country and across the world. So are there lessons to be learned for more traditional colleges and universities, particularly, again, in these two programs where there's so much demand?
Scott Pulsipher
Yeah. You know, I think one of the, maybe even starting off that same notion of a working learner, we should give a shout out to all of our school of education, our curriculum faculty, our school leadership, etcetera, because I just wanna start with this one simple point. Is that so many individuals that they're actually, that we're teaching and helping learn or progress in the school of education, they often already find themselves in the classroom. They're paraprofessionals. They're working with students of various different ages across, you know, the K-12 spectrum. And one of the things that I think they're always trying to do, this is why I wanna give a shout out to all of them, is that the first thing they have to do is actually design curriculum that's relevant to the job that they're supposed to do. Earlier, Michael, you were talking to our group too. It's actually not the way they were doing. It's actually the way they should be doing it. And so one of our differentiators is that we work closely, I think, with our school districts and the leaders in those respective, you know, programs, whether it's in math education or whether it's in history or writing and English and curriculum like that. They're trying to say is like, well, how should we be teaching it? And then we try to design our courses and our curriculum to be very relevant to where it should be going. And, that is, I think, really, that lends a lot of acknowledgment to the curriculum team and the faculty who's developing our programs to say, well, the first thing, it has to be really relevant to the job to be that you're gonna actually enter into. The second thing I think for us is that we obsess about making it possible or increasing the probability that every individual can actually learn. This means that we think differently about what the student journey is across that learning. The biggest threshold I would say is that we've invested in that's so different and atypical, and we'd love it if more institutions actually adopted it, is that we took the role of a faculty member and split it into parts. We've talked about this before, but this is really important because it's basically like saying, you have the combination of a subject matter expert, but it may be across 30 or 40 different courses, and that individual's helping you develop mastery and competency in that specific subject. You separately have a mentor who's helping you actually understand how those things thread together to create an overall competency across the specific program, but at the same time, they're helping you deal with disruptions to your learning progress. They're helping you actually understand what your life or role is gonna be like when you enter the job. You know, they're actually helping you deal with other challenges in terms of your instruction. So they're providing you augmented instruction. And, and that model, Michael, you hinted this too, that is more of a team-based approach to teaching, but that's not at all within the frame of a conventional model. It's like that's so conventional. It's like this. Oh, no. This one person…
Jeff Selingo
Can do it all.
Scott Pulsipher
Can do it all. And the one thing they do really well is they're a domain expert. But guess what that's not how all of learning occurs. And the worry of the domain expert means in the traditional model, if it's just a lecture, well, that's just content. And so, if I'm learning in a postsecondary level, it's like, why don't I just go out to YouTube or all the other platforms and say, actually, I'm just gonna get the best content from the best subject matter expert in this particular area, and I'll consume that content rather than go sit in a lecture hall for 3 hours a week. You know?
Jeff Selingo
It also doesn't scale very well either.
Scott Pulsipher
It doesn't scale very well either because you already have that limit. It's like, well, how much can one lecturer, you know, teach in a class? Like, well, I'm a fan of Scott Galloway even with as irreverent as he can be, but he tries to point this out. It's like, well, if millions of people can consume really expert content in a particular field, like why wouldn't you wanna enable that? And that's a much easier way to scale something, and then you focus on the individual instruction that has to happen. And so that's a different model. That delivery of content being the focus versus, no, our focus is is helping every individual learn. That's true. The last thing I'll just say, this is a long answer to that short question, but the last thing I'll say and was highlighted earlier in our sessions here is that we've gotten really, really good at the practicum portion of this learning. If you think about being the largest teacher's college in the country, being the largest school of nursing, college of nursing in the country, we operate that in 50 states. Most institutions never contemplate beyond their own state. And you're like, that regulatory and compliance is already enough for one state. We're like, yeah. The hell with it. We're gonna do it in 50. And, it was a little bit like that. You're like, I imagine what that was like. And you're like, our poor accreditation compliance teams out there going like, Yeah, I know. It's like, Yeah, you say that, Scott to hell with it, but it was like, you don't have to do it. But, But, it went even beyond that, which is, how do you develop the relationships? Not just relationships, but the real partnerships with school districts and schools. And, even with those teacher-supervisors in those schools, so that we can not only place thousands of individuals into the classrooms, but we also have experts who are observing the practical application of the knowledge they're gaining in their coursework. You're gonna have to do that for thousands, tens of thousands of people every year. Like, that is, we've built, I joked with Stacy Ludwig Johnson, previously about this. I joked that it's like we built the SABR system for travel, air travel. American Airlines realized this was really complicated. We've got to build this huge system to coordinate all these different airline routes and everything else. And it was so good, all the other airlines ended up adopting it. It became the platform for it. Well, we've built the same kind of thing for teacher placement, for nursing placement, for all of our FMPs, everything else that says, guess what work based learning and the practicum that's associated with those particular areas and fields of study, it's vitally important to to do it, and we have to do that at scale.
Michael Horn
So you announced all recently that you had acquired Craft Education, which for those that don't know created a technology platform for really monitoring, reporting for apprenticeship, based programs allowing you to do it at a greater scale over time. And for those who listen to our podcast, we had Reach University on a couple times, and they, of course, were the platform for Reach. So Western Governors University wants to move into offering apprenticeship based degrees too. You have several 100 already in them. What does that look like though for WGU, and and and why do it given that you are already so affordable? What's the value proposition for these learners, for WGU? Because, you know, one of the things we often hear around apprenticeship based degrees is that it makes it more affordable. My sense is it's that plus other things.
Scott Pulsipher
Yeah. I think, it actually attaches broadly to our mission and vision. And so maybe I'll start there just pointing this out, which is our mission statement is really, really, I think, simple, and straightforward, to change lives for the better by creating pathways to opportunity. We certainly believe that those those pathways that we're creating are primarily learning pathways. How you're acquiring knowledge, skill, and abilities so that you can actually change your life for the better by acquiring a new opportunity, new job, etcetera. And, I'll start pretty broad on this point. You could tell me if it's too broad, but this is the way we thought about it. It's like there's only 20,000,000 people enrolled in post secondary education or 19,000,000 today post pandemic. That's nowhere near enough people. That's producing, what, roughly three and a half to four million new newly credentialed individuals every year. But then when you compare that to the stat at around, like, 65 to 70% of the jobs of the future are gonna require postsecondary credentials, like, we need to be producing three or four times more individuals every year for solving the skills gap in the workforce. So then we thought more broadly about, well, okay, among those that are new rising high school graduates, or those some college with no degree, or others who are going to come back to a traditional academic pathway, it's probably about one fifth, if not even one tenth of those who are actually already learning. And guess where they're learning? They're learning on the job. But what none of those who are learning on the job are being afforded is a recognition of the knowledge, skill, and ability that you've acquired. It's like we've only granted that to these four thousand regionally credit institutions like, oh, no. If it's not from there, then you're not worth anything. And it's absurd. Right? And so, we also thought more broadly around the fact that like, alright, you know, a third of the workforce in the US has a post secondary credential, but two thirds don't. You're like, well, that's like a hundred million people who are all working and who are all learning while working. And we just thought like well, with a competency based approach and a skills foundation, that if we work closely with all those roles and the tasks and activities associated with them, we can map those to skills the same way we mapped all of our learning outcomes, of course, as to skills. And when you do that, the next thing you know is like, well, we can build a work based pathway. And so, what Craft Education and the joining Craft Education with WGU, what it allows us to do is two things. One is that we can accelerate our own development and launch and scaling of work based pathways and work based learning even in the academic pathways we have. That's important distinction because a work based pathway, fully half, if not more of the credit you're earning may be done entirely on a job. But work based learning means even a good portion of the course that you may be taking may be project based or some other practicum related thing. Or you may have 12 or 18 credits like we do today. You're like, a point of note is the school of health we convened last week. Last year alone, we had 26,000 placements into practicum or into clinical. This year, that number will be well over 35,000. You're like, oh, yeah. We're already doing a ton of work based learning at scale. And now, we're just like, how do you create that more as an accessible pathway? And we anticipate that just at WGU, it's very likely that in ten years from now, we may be serving as many individuals through work based programs as we are through academic based programs.
Jeff Selingo
So Scott, if that happens, then what is the future of the degree? Right? If skills are going to be the coin of the realm, are degrees still going to be necessary someday? Like, what is the future of the degree in that world?
Scott Pulsipher
For sure they are. Yeah. And I'll emphasize that. I just wanna make one other point because the other thing that Craft Education that's doing is is that we know that not every individual that needs post secondary education is gonna enroll at w two. But Craft Education actually allows us to have that transformative effect that we can also invest in creating a work based platform to enable work based learning across the whole talent economy, if you will. That not just WGU will be leveraging its capability and technology and reporting and data, but so will employers and so will other institutions, etcetera, to say, we're investing in creating a platform for a work based learning ecosystem. That's a new endeavor for WGU. Now, to this point of your question is, a skills architect, it doesn't diminish the value of a degree. It actually increases the value of the degree, and this is why. Because think of a degree today. It actually mostly signals that you survived something. You know. You made it through. You made it through. But it probably is the, it's a value signal in the sense that you've demonstrated capacity for learning. But for the employer hiring someone with a degree it’s like, I still don't really know whether you possess the skills for the job I'm hiring you for.
Jeff Selingo
Which is why we go to the name brand then.
Scott Pulsipher
Which is why you go to a brand. And I'm not even certain there's a great study that shows even the brand on the degree shows that that's where the value is in the degree itself. There's no doubt that there are misguided institutions out there who default to, like, well, I only recruit from this institution because I know this. And that's my joke at going back to our shared alma mater, Michael, at HBS. So I was, like, having recruited there for a prior employer, I'm like, I don't even know why I bother interviewing. Harvard's already done all the hard work. I should just give you a blanket offer and, you know, those of you accepted, please come, and we'll figure out the culture fit later. You know? But Harvard's already, like, said, oh, we think these are the individuals who are gonna be awesome anyway, and we admit them. That's to me, like, the delusion of meritocracies. Skills-based says, hey, we understand what is it that you need to demonstrate to be successful in this particular role, as well as how the career develops as you develop new skills. And the reason degree increases in value, because now with the skills architecture, the degree itself signals specifically that which you are prepared in, that which you're proficient in. And so now I can do much more targeted recruitment of even those holding degrees. That I don't do a blanket like, hey, if you have a degree in economics and finance and accounting, whatever, then maybe you're a candidate for investment banking. Or, hey, if you have a degree in computer science or software development or information systems or math, you may be a candidate for a software developer software development engineer here. Like, actually, why don't you articulate the skills that you need in those jobs, and then if someone's holding a skills based transcript, you've now dramatically expanded the pool of talent that you can draw from, including those who hold a degree. But now it starts to put a degree on equal footing with those who are acquiring the skill through other learning pathways.
Michael Horn
But you, of course, are doing that work of translating and building that architecture. Last question as we wrap up this first half of the episode with you. Let's talk about the ever present topic of AI. Yeah. How do you see that changing the skills in the job market? What role does it play in remaking education at WGU?
Scott Pulsipher
The AI does feel a little bit like if I knew the answer to that, it'd be like that scene from Back to the Future 2 where, like, you could go place all the bets that you already like, hey. I already knew the outcome. I gotta make all the bets so that you make tons of money. Like, I, to be fair, I was like, I think I'm a little bit of a skeptic. Meaning, I think everyone who's prognosticating right now is just making stuff up. Like, I just don't think we know yet. So I think we're in the process, like, since we don't know, let's just try everything. And so what that means is, like, maybe two things just to highlight. One is we certainly know the skills are gonna be required in the future work are gonna be influenced by AI. And that means that even as fast as we're developing our curriculum at WGU versus conventional models, like today, it's already a whole a program will have a wholesale kind of redo every three years or so, because all of the learning outcomes and all the courses and the scaffold of that, it's changing so quickly even at WGU today. But that three years may become one year. Because you start to see, like, AI is changing the nature of work so quickly that you're gonna start iterating really, really quickly on designing the curriculum. But for us, the second big thing is we are certainly figuring out how the use of our gen how do how the use of artificial general intelligence, that becomes really interesting because it basically says, instead of just a large language model and generative AI that can improve the quality of content and the quality of the instruction, etcetera. What does artificial general intelligence do if it actually starts to have reasoning and adaptive ability to be much more effective in providing an individual student a very personalized experience? The reason I bring this up is, sitting with Sal Khan at something some time ago, we both referenced the same thing, which was you probably both heard of it, Benjamin Bloom's study from forty years ago. And you talked about mastery education too. It's a combination of conventional content delivery, that's the lecture model, mastery instruction, which is corrective instruction. You get feedback in corrective instruction, but the third one was tutor. And he saw when he combined mastering and tutoring relative to conventional instruction, the average student was two standard deviations more proficient than any subject matter than the student in a conventional model. What AI, I think, is gonna do for learning is it will democratize learning, meaning it will so personalize it that every individual is likely to have that kind of personal tutoring with corrective instruction in a way that you'll have ninety plus percent of everyone will actually be demonstrating proficiency in any subject matter versus the 20 to 40% that we have today. It's like that to us is miraculous in terms of what it can do. And so we hope at WGU that we'll be part of shaping what that looks like. We certainly, you know, reinvented higher ed for the last 25 years and now it's our like, we're trying to figure out how to reinvent WGU.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah. Scott, as I was sitting here, I thought about, you know, almost 30 years ago covering WGU in the very early days as a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education and the growth that you've experienced in that time is just tremendous.
Scott Pulsipher
Thank you. You didn't think we're nuts like the rest.
Jeff Selingo
Well, I did a little bit. I must admit. I'm like, where is this thing going? And I cannot believe we're sitting here with all of these people today at this point. So thank you so much for joining us on Future U and we'll be right back.
Sponsor
What is the future of higher education? At non profit Western Governors University, it's low cost, flat rate tuition that allows students to graduate faster with less debt. It's courses built around workforce needs so students can get hired for the job they want and apply what they've learned immediately. It's tech enabled learning that allows instructors and mentors to quickly identify students who need help and keep them on track. It's online education that ensures a degree is attainable, affordable, and adapts to students' lifestyles. At WGU, the future is here. Learn more at wgu.edu.
Jeff Selingo
Welcome back to the second half of our FutureU campus tour which is being recorded before an audience, faculty, staff and the leadership team here at Western Governors University's School of Education’s event. There's a summit here in Orlando, Florida. As a reminder, this stop on the Future U campus tour is also brought to you by Western Governors University. And we're really pleased, Michael and I are really pleased to now welcome to the stage, Courtney Hills Macbeth, who's Chief Academic Officer and Provost at Western Governors University, Stacy Ludwig Johnson. Stacy Ludwig Johnson, who's Senior Vice President and Dean of the School of Education here at WGU. And we're thrilled to welcome Madelyn Hurst, who will graduate, at commencement here in Orlando with a teaching degree and currently a 4th grade language art teacher here in the state of Florida. Welcome.
Michael Horn
So I want to start with the student on the panel, Madelyn, who, as you heard is also a teacher. We're now a few years post-COVID. You teach in Florida, which of course had fewer schooling interruptions than other places around the country. But but nonetheless, you're teaching a group of 4th graders whose preschooling experiences were interrupted. Fall of 2020 when they were in kindergarten was certainly uneven for those as individuals. You have colleagues, family connections who teach all across the country. I'd love you just to give us a picture, a sense of what does the post-COVID classroom look like on the ground? Has there been any rebound?
Madelyn Hurst
So what I was thinking about when we were, like, talking about this session, and I realized that we have 50 different options of what each post-COVID classroom looks like. So every state dealt with it differently. For example, my brother who lives in Oregon didn't return to school until his junior year of high school and he started when he was he was in a freshman when COVID started, but then here in Florida was only a couple months and they were back in the classroom. So I was like, okay, how can I make this relatable for each educator in each state and what that looks like is educational and digital literacy? So the post-COVID classroom, we were forced to use technology as our number one resource when students were we were put into lockdown and what that looked like is, we were kind of slowly inching in technology into our classrooms but then it became the only option. We had to use it immediately. Some of our students are whizzing way past us when it comes to this technology literacy. I had students last week who were playing Five Nights at Freddy's on their laptops and I was like, how does this get past the school firewall? Like what? Apparently, people are like taking replicas of the game and putting them on Google sites. Like there's things that these kids know that we don't. And so this technology, this technological literacy is so important for educators to understand and use as we shift into this this era where we're using our laptops, our Ipads. Everything we're doing is almost online which is incredible but it's also so difficult because if you look at the age range of educators across the United States, it's all over the map. So to have them understand how to do that at such a fast pace and keep up with the way the kids learn with that technology is quite a feat in itself.
Michael Horn
So if you have that unevenness on the technology side, I imagine you also have the unevenness on the education side. Talk about that and then how does it affect you and your colleagues as teachers, like the human side of it for you? We read about burnout and the stresses on teachers, but give us a sense of the human toll and what that educational picture looks like.
Madelyn Hurst
Education is going through a huge shift right now. We're coming out of a time where we were not able to be in the classroom for a while and everyone is transitioning into this new era of education. So as we are shifting, our students are shifting. That makes it more difficult for our kids because we are feeling a little bit like, how do I utilize still this like pen and paper, but we're also trying to put things on a digital classroom. So as we are trying to learn how to do this, we're trying to teach our kids at the same time, and I think the burnout will lessen as we settle into a new chapter of education. Because we're kind of in this middle zone right now where we're trying to figure out how to be competent so that our students can be competent in it and control it all at the same time.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah. So Stacey, I wanna bring you in the conversation because given what Madelyn just described and, you know, this is a period that may be around for quite some time, we just don't know how long. How is it changing how you're preparing students to teach in k through 12 schools? How how is it changing that?
Stacey Ludwig-Johnson
So when you think about it, I love the way that you explained what that experience is like in the classroom. Because as we're going into classrooms now, we're watching the role of the teacher fundamentally change, where it's more like a facilitator. Right? So you've with the pandemic, technology just swooped in. The schools were buying different platforms. They've moved things onto the platforms. And so now when you're in a classroom, it might be sort of introducing the topic and then directing the kids to go into their Google Classroom or whatever the platform may be to actually work on a problem set while the teacher's now able to sort of walk through the class and personalize the learning. It's actually a really interesting sort of push towards innovation, which is really what we've needed in P-12 schools anyway. So how do we take advantage of that? One thing that we've been really thinking about at WGU is really two different ways. One is, because you've also talked about burnout. And there was interesting data, that teachers are, like, twice as twice the rate of burnout as even first responders. Like, during the pandemic, it was crazy. We are actually integrating into our curriculum what we call healthy learning. So how can we, as educators, as a school of ed, equip our future teachers and leaders with the skills so that they can have a greater sense of belonging, so that they can personalize that education for students, and then how do they thrive in those classrooms so that they actually retain longer. It's also forced us, honestly, in a really great way to completely rethink our curriculum. So the schools are really focused on learning science, and we have had to adjust our curriculum in, again, a really great way so that we're equipping teachers and leaders with those skills so that they're ready to teach the kids of the future.
Jeff Selingo
When you think of rethinking a curriculum, I think in traditional higher ed, how long that takes to happen. Like, it's studies. It's moving through the faculty senate. It's like years later. And especially in education, you could have an entire generation almost go through middle school and high school and never be impacted by that. How quick how are you able to do that so quickly?
Stacey Ludwig-Johnson
Well, we have what's called a master curriculum. So, whereas at a residential campus, these changes might be done in pockets. So they are adjusting individual courses, etcetera. We have the ability to actually turn over the entire curriculum, and that’s what we’ve done. It’s a very regulated profession, and so it's aligning to different standards. But then building a curriculum that we know at the end of the day, we'll be able to recommend for licensure across 50 states, but we can redesign, redevelop that entire curriculum. It's a holistic approach versus something in pockets.
Jeff Selingo
Courtney, I wanna talk about the long view of this, because I think in Michael and I on Future U, we've talked a lot about student success right in these first couple of years after the pandemic. And I think most college officials that we talked to think, oh, you know, we'll get past this in a couple of years and things will go back to being normal. You know, I have a seventh and a ninth grader at home who were in elementary school, when the pandemic hit. I'm not quite sure that that will ever be quite the same as it used to be for them. Right? And for a whole generation of students. So as you think about WGU long term, how you prepare, how how students come to you, how they're prepared, how they're ready to be, ready for education. How are you thinking about this in terms of who you serve and how you serve them?
Courtney Hills McBeth
So I think if we step back and think about the larger higher ed landscape, a lot of institutions were competing against nothing, actually. So many of the students in the K-12 system are leaving high school and they're opting out completely of additional education. So this, I think, fundamentally shifts the paradigm of how we think of traditional age students and then working learners and is really helping us, think about what is the change in our model and how do we continue to evolve our competency based model given that the students who are coming to WGU are coming out of classrooms, like Madelyn talked about, where they're more engaged in, digital learning and iPads and, you know, various technologies, the students coming to us are younger with less credits, more are single, coming from very diverse backgrounds, geographically dispersed. So it requires us to take a model that we built at the dawn of the Internet and now think about how do we evolve our digital learning, our community, what does that curricular experience, what does the faculty support look like into the future to make sure we can really meet the moment of the changing needs of these students coming out of the K-12 system?
Michael Horn
So if that's the impact of our recent past and, frankly, current K-12 students on higher ed, I'm curious about causality in the reverse direction. As listeners know, one of my hypotheses and passions has been that it's often hard for teachers to change how they teach unless they've in fact learned differently themselves. And I'm a big fan, it turns out, of the competency based learning model.
Jeff Selingo
I mean, if you listen to Future U, that's all you'll hear from Michael. It's all about mastery and competency based.
Michael Horn
So I'm a bit of a one note pony, you could say. But I think K-12, frankly, should operate the way you all do as well. Competency, mastery based, more personalized, that designs for success of each student rather than designing for failure as we currently do. I'm just curious, Stacey, for you, you know, do you have a sense of that? Like, if you're preparing teachers like Madelyn in a competency based model, are they more likely then to go out into the K-12 schools and get away from this antiquated factory based model and evolve that as well?
Stacey Ludwig-Johnson
I think, Michael, that's at the heart of it. Right? They're going to teach. This is our hypothesis. They're going to teach in the way in which they've been trained. So they are traversing a competency based model at WGU that has disaggregated the faculty model. So our roles, our faculty roles, so if you flip that and this is your teaching role, right, in the school, are very specialized. So we have mentors who are like advisors, along the way. They have course instructors who are content experts. They have evaluators who are experts at providing substantive feedback. We have program developers who are experts at building curriculum and assessments, and we have success teams that are expert at filling in all of the gaps along the way. Right? So as a future teacher, as you are experiencing that model, then our hope is that they then take those learnings. They take that experience. They take all the things that they've gained and take that into their classrooms. So I think that's the core of what we do and why we're so committed to this approach.
Michael Horn
So, Madelyn, then if that's the theory, I wanna know what the practice is like, if you will, and bring you in here. I'm just curious, you know, is like how you've learned at WGU impacting your own practice or frankly maybe, you know, you're among the thousands who are already converted to this idea, but it's not going to ripple out. Obviously, there's a ton of things in the external environment you don't have control over. But I'm just curious in your classroom, does it change how you actually approach teaching and learning with your kids?
Madelyn Hurst
So with my school district, Osceola County, we actually have, it's kind of similar to competency based learning, but it is standards based learning. So when we are grading them, when we develop, when they're developing our curriculum, when I'm developing my lesson plans, they are all encompassed around a single proficiency that they need to show us. It is one sentence like I can interpret figurative language in a text. That's it. That's what it translates to. So what I'm hoping in the future is like as grade books develop, for example, for my students is that I'm gonna be grading them not on did you turn in your homework about prefixes. It's going to be this learning standard that correlates directly to prefixes for example, is what it's gonna go in the grade book. So I'm gonna be grading this standard and not your prefixes homework. That was the one of the reasons I picked WGU. Actually like the number one reason is that all I want to do is show you what I know. That's all I want to do. I do not I do not want to waste time writing random essays or filler as I've seen some of my students partake in. No. I wanna show you what I know and move into what I prefer to do with my time. For example, I want to instill my kids in moving forward into what they are passionate about and not randomly learning about birds and grading them about birds when probably 95% of my students probably don't care about birds. So it's important for me to instill that because that's what I receive and that's what I went after.
Jeff Selingo
So let's stay with that for a little, a moment, Stacy, because traditional colleges and universities, particularly those that have historically, educated most school teachers in this country. So I'm thinking of the normal schools that became teachers colleges that became regional publics. Many of them are shrinking incredibly fast. Some of them are even shutting down a lot of their teacher education programs. Meanwhile, you're growing tremendously. So could you give us a sense of that growth? And are you on a trajectory to educate just the largest proportion of teachers going forward?
Stacey Ludwig-Johnson
Yes. I'll just put it that way. So when you look at over the past decade, more residential campuses, their school of ed programs have been shrinking by 20%. Some statistics are even higher. We ended our last fiscal year with about 12% growth, and we're actually seeing greater growth this year as we move forward. I think the core behind that is what you said, which is, hey, coming out of the pandemic, there are greater gaps in equity and achievement than there have ever been. And this personalized competency based approach is the way for us to close those gaps, and we've got to. Or our future, our economy, everything is gonna be really challenged if we don't actually fundamentally close the gap. So, again, that's, I think, the core reason, the competency based approach. I think because of our model, because it's accessible, it is less expensive than any other sort of broadly, you know, national institution, will continue to drive enrollment, but primarily around sort of the personalized ability to accelerate, which I can hang my hat on that every day because I know regardless of how quickly someone moves through our program or if they need more time, at the end of the day, we're gonna validate those competencies with our assessments. So I'm worried. I don't worry. I don't worry about how long it takes. I worry about whether or not at the end of the day, they've demonstrated the competencies. And that's what our teachers need. We need to know that when they're going into classrooms, they are quality teachers. And that's what the CBE program absolutely stands on.
Jeff Selingo
So, Courtney, Michael mentioned earlier when we were with Scott, the acquisition of Craft Education and, and we had the founder of Reach University on the podcast last year. And it's just a fascinating model to me. Right? I've said this on the podcast. My mother was a teacher's aide. She didn't go to college. What Reach Education does and the idea of an apprenticeship based degree for paraprofessionals like my mother would have been perfect for her. Of course, it didn't exist. Right? 30, 40, 50 years ago. So could you tell us, it seems like education is about to change again. Right? Teacher education is about to change again through this idea of the apprenticeship. Can you give us a window into what we might be seeing and what you're projecting?
Courtney Hills McBeth
Sure. We are really excited about the acquisition of Craft and to have Mallory and her team join us here at WGU so that we can build the best scaled work based learning and pathway platform for WGU and also for the larger higher ed and talent economy, really. That's what we're endeavoring to do. And, you know, I wanna note there's a strong operational muscle that that WGU is building on here. So Stacy talked about how we've reimagined this master curriculum. While we did that, we also reimagined what that teacher clinical placement experience looks like. Instead of just having it at the end of the experience, it's having earlier in classroom teaching experiences and weaving that throughout the experience. So with our traditional students that are coming through the teacher prep program, they will have earlier and more often clinical placement experiences. And launching our teacher apprenticeship program really just tightly couples that working and learning experience. So truly, we're excited about this evolution of the competency based model to become a work based model so that those amazing paraprofessionals in the classroom, they can continue to get paid. They can work and learn, and they can move through our curriculum and take our assessments and validate the skills and the competencies they have at their own pace and not skip a beat. They could do it in their time, in their place, and at their pace.
Michael Horn
I’m just blown away, frankly, as I listen to this about the teachers that are gonna be entering our classrooms. They already are there, but now skilled, in a way that's just gonna be phenomenal for the K-12 students. Jeff, let's wrap up just with a couple closing thoughts. I'm gonna take the liberty, and go first. It's gonna put the pressure on you. But just a couple thoughts out of these two conversations we've now had, Scott and with all of you. Number one, I'm just struck by how much you all are not resting on your laurels as I think about Western Governors University. You all have created structures to refresh and frankly disrupt yourselves. I hear what's working with the apprenticeship based degrees. I hear it with AI. Like, this is a constantly innovating engine. It is impressive. That I hope is something higher ed can replicate because that refreshing is incredibly important as what we need in the classroom, as what we need in hospitals, as what we need in IT continually changes. We need to continually be refreshing. And so that is something that I hope we take away from it. The second one I'll say is, Scott mentioned that we should be giving a seal of approval for skills wherever they are learned. And you think about how you flip the practicum to being embedded and not at the end of an experience and taking credit for, you know, something you've been teaching in a 4th grade classroom and being able to, actually credential that. And it just reminds me, Jeff, of a, well known education foundation, that works in higher ed that years ago was trying to figure out what should their goal be for the percent of students that had post secondary credentials, and I said 100%. And they looked at me like I was from Mars or something, which many people do. But the, and my answer was, like, they all have skills. Let's credential them for what they in fact know and can do. Western Governors University is doing that, Jeff.
Jeff Selingo
Two thoughts. First of all, you've been applauding everybody up on stage. I want to applaud all of you. As I mentioned, my mother was a teacher's aide. My father was a high school music teacher for 30 plus years. My father-in-law was a high school, social studies teacher. What everyone, in the education world does, both at the K-12 level and the higher ed level is is just tremendous and so important to what we're doing. So let me, first of all, applaud you. Applaud yourselves. Two quick thoughts, first from Scott's, conversation was about skills based learning and this idea that it won't do away with the degree. In fact, it will strengthen the degree. And his his, you know, putting out those stats that he put out that, you know, 19 to 20 million people in higher ed, even though we have tens of millions of jobs that are going to need to have a further education, you know, the solution so far has been to reduce the degree requirements, rather than try to skill up, to the degree requirements. So I'm really impressed with the growth, here at WGU because I think we need, you know, 10, 12, more institutions like it, in order to fulfill the needs of the workforce, in the future. And then the second piece is around this idea, Stacey, as you said about the number of teachers that you're educating, and the result, as Madelyn said, that that's going to have in the classroom. I think that for teacher education programs to change, frankly, for traditional colleges and universities to change, they need some competition, and some real competition to say, hey, there's a better way of doing this. And when I think, maybe after they listen to this episode, when college presidents and trustees at these other places start to see and listen to what you're doing, somebody might raise their hand and say, well, why aren't we doing that, right, in our programs at our schools? It's the question that I always wonder about when there is so much competition in higher ed and people look down the street and they want to be like another institution, I always say, well, look at what WGU is doing. Why don't you do what they're doing instead of trying to copy a model that was created, you know, a 100 plus years ago. So, again, thank you for for being with us, today and and and we're going leave it there. Thank you again, for being with us today. Thank you. Please join us in thanking this great panel. As well as President Scott Pulsipher earlier. And, again, thank you all for what you do for WGU and being part of WGU. As a reminder, you can follow both, Michael on, Michael B. Horn on social media, JSelingo on, social media. We will have the video from today at Future U podcast, where you can also listen to past, episodes and subscribe, there. The video will be up in a couple of weeks. And again, thank you for being with us today on Future U.
