Mar 12, 2024
00:00:00 Amrit
We have a responsibility to make the college a
lifelong learning engine. We have a responsibility to make higher
education something that people don't just do once at the start of
their career, and then never really return to, other than for
football games and donations.
00:00:12 Amrit
Like that can't be the relationship that we have with
people after they graduate. The relationship that we have with
people after they graduate has to be one that continues to be based
in learning access. It has to be continued to be based in
value.
00:00:28 Christina
The workforce landscape is rapidly changing and
educators and their institutions need to keep up. Preparing
students before they enter the workforce to make our communities
and businesses stronger is at the core of getting an education.
00:00:43 Christina
But we need to understand how to change and adjust so
that we can begin to project where things are headed before we even
get there. So, how do we begin to predict the future?
00:00:53 Salvatrice
Hi, I'm Salvatrice Cummo, Vice President of Economic
and Workforce Development at Pasadena City College, and host of
this podcast.
00:01:02 Christina
And I'm Christina Barsi, producer and co-host of this
podcast.
00:01:05 Salvatrice
And we are starting the conversation about the future
of work. We'll explore topics like how education can partner with
industry, how to be more equitable, and how to attain one of our
highest goals; more internships and PCC students in the
workforce.
00:01:19 Salvatrice
We at Pasadena City College, want to lead the charge
in closing the gap between what our students are learning and what
the demands of the workforce will be once they enter. This is a
conversation that impacts all of us. You, the employers, the
policymakers, the educational institutions, and the community as a
whole.
00:01:39 Christina
We believe change happens when we work together, and
it all starts with having a conversation. I'm Christina Barsi.
00:01:47 Salvatrice
And I'm Salvatrice Cummo, and this is the Future of
Work.
00:01:50 Salvatrice
Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Future of Work
Podcast, I am your host, Salvatrice Cummo. Today, we will learn
about The EvoLLLution, one of the best platforms for post-secondary
professionals to share their insights through a non-traditional
lens.
00:02:07 Salvatrice
We will also talk about what topics have been the most
popular since the start of the pandemic, and how other higher
education professionals can really contribute to the platform.
00:02:17 Salvatrice
With that said, we would like to welcome Amrit
Ahluwalia the Editor-in-Chief at the EvoLLLution, a modern campus
illumination. For over 11 years, Amrit has worked at The
EvoLLLution, an online newspaper, exclusively published by, and for
those who understand higher education.
00:02:37 Salvatrice
Amrit works personally with every contributor at the
EvoLLLution to produce the content that has supported the site's
rise to becoming the top resource for non-traditional higher
education. He regularly speaks on topics related to the change in
higher education environment at conferences across Canada and the
United States, and advises colleges and university leaders to help
frame strategic visions for their institutions. We welcome Armrit,
how are you?
00:03:07 Amrit
Hey Salvatrice, I'm well, how are you?
00:03:09 Salvatrice
Good. Good to chat with you again.
00:03:11 Amrit
Yeah, absolutely. It was a lot of fun last time. I'm
so glad we got the chance to connect again so soon.
00:03:17 Salvatrice
That's right, that's right. Now, the tables have
turned. I'm interviewing you, right?
00:03:21 Amrit
Yeah, no kidding. Sorry, I won't ask you
questions.
00:03:25 Salvatrice
Well, let's get started. I know very well who you are
and what The EvoLLLution is, but I always love to ask this question
to our practitioners out there and those within this arena, is
really share with us kind of what led you to this work and what led
you in journalism, and why education, why did you pick education as
a point of interest?
00:03:44 Amrit
For sure. Well, I've always loved storytelling.
Storytelling's always been something that's been interesting to me.
And I think storytelling is the best way for us to start
normalizing some of the things that may seem a little odd or might
seem a little outside the norms. It's through stories that people
can really start to connect and interact with ideas that are a
little outside their scope.
00:04:03 Amrit
So, my own story is actually not mine. It's my mom's.
I'm based in Canada. Both my parents are new immigrants. I'm the
first generation of my family born in Canada. And my father came
over in the early eighties, late seventies/early eighties to earn
his doctorate. My mom and dad got married in the mid-eighties. My
mom is from India in Bombay, so she came over as well.
00:04:23 Amrit
Now, she had her bachelor's in chemistry from the
University of Bombay. She'd worked for five years as an air hostess
with British Airways, loved math, loved science. You don't need me
to tell you she's super smart, but super, super smart. So , she
gets to Canada, goes to the employment office and says "This is my
background. This is what I'm good at."
00:04:40 Amrit
Obviously, like well-trained in crisis management,
well-trained in customer engagement, customer service, like all
these soft skills. Plus, she's got a technical background. And they
said, "Cool, so you could probably work at a diner because you are
a stewardist."
00:04:52 Amrit
She was like, "Well, no, that's not a thing that's
interesting to me." So, she went, she got her accounting licenses,
she became a certified accountant. She eventually got a job at the
Federal Government of Canada. She worked for 35 some years at
various executive levels within the Canadian Federal Public
Service.
00:05:10 Amrit
And the entire time continued to take courses to
first, to pursue her own interest, to advance her career. I
actually remember she earned a graduate-level credential in
accounting when I was three. And she didn't do convocation. We went
to Vermont.
00:05:25 Amrit
I distinctly remember that her entire life, she was a
non-traditional student. As she started to approach retirement, she
started doing professional photography certifications because that
was something that interested her as maybe a post retirement
job.
00:05:36 Amrit
So, my story isn't my story. My story is how do I make
life easier for people like my mom. The hurdles that she had to
overcome to just do the basics are something that I think those
kinds of obstacles exist for so many people. Both in Canada and the
United States, these are economies that are built on immigrant
communities. These are economies that are built on social
mobility.
00:05:55 Amrit
So, having the opportunity as I do to highlight the
work of folks that work with non-traditional learners, to work with
folks that develop programming and develop institutional divisions,
design specifically for workforce development and socioeconomic
mobility, is something that I take a lot of pride in and kind of
comes back again to that idea of storytelling.
00:06:15 Amrit
The more stories from people like you that we can
share, the more opportunity we have for folks that might see higher
education through a very specific lens to see that work through a
much broader lens that can serve so many more people than the
people we tend to serve.
00:06:30 Salvatrice
Yeah, I really love that. Parallel stories, the first
generation and I too, have an interest. I never realized that my
interest in higher education was going to be so strong. I never saw
myself in higher education until you just start to look at what's
around you and then look, you just grow up. So, you grow up and you
start to say like, "Gosh my career has taken me here."
00:06:57 Salvatrice
And I'm so incredibly grateful just like you are to be
in this space because I too, first gen, parents valued education
because they came to the States as farmers and your parents were
extremely educated coming into this country, my parents were not.
And so, they said, "Look we want a better life." Both parents want
a better life for their families.
00:07:20 Salvatrice
So, to share that story and for the EvoLLLution to
kind of be that source of that narrative and the storytelling and
how do we innovate within higher ed, how do we cater to the
non-traditional student is really, really important. And I'm super
happy that the EvoLLLution has really kind of taken pride around
that, and saying, "Look like this needs to be our focus."
00:07:37 Salvatrice
For those who don't understand what really the
EvoLLLution is, tell us a little bit more about the EvoLLLution and
how it kind of got started, because that'll be helpful to kind of
frame this conversation a little more.
00:07:47 Amrit
Yeah, it's valuable context and it's something that
I'm super, super proud of. So, first of all, for those of you
listening, it doesn't come across in the audio. We spell
EvoLLLution with three Ls, and the Ls stand for Lifelong Learning,
which is an insider-
00:07:59 Salvatrice
Oh, I didn't know that.
00:08:00 Amrit
Yeah, that's why we have three Ls, is for Lifelong
Learning. So, we had the concept in 2011, we launched in 2012. So,
I was the founding editor of the publication. Basically, we were
launched by a company that's now called Modern Campus. And at the
time, it was because there was no one really talking about what's
happening in the continuing workforce education space.
00:08:18 Amrit
If we think back to 2011, 2012, the economy was just
coming out of the recession, we were in that sort of early recovery
phase. So, all those students who'd come into higher education
because they'd lost their jobs, because they were in a challenging
economic period, all of a sudden, the job market was opening up,
they were going back to work.
00:08:35 Amrit
But at the same time, the state appropriations that
had been cut drastically over the course of the recession hadn't
recovered yet. So, you had this period where sort of higher
educations call it magic carpets started to descend a little bit
because during that period where state appropriations were
declining, enrollments were growing so that the tuition and the
fees kind of made up that delta.
00:08:55 Amrit
So, 2011, folks are going back to work. And we had
this concept that we wanted to give people a space outside of
conferences to talk about the things that they found interesting in
the continuing ed world. You know, those conversations that you
have in the hallways and interesting ideas for programming,
interesting ideas for support and student services. So, we wanted
to make that a 24/7 conversation.
00:09:15 Amrit
I distinctly remember this; about five months after we
launched, we thought it would be a good idea if we knew who our
subscribers were. So, we'd been running for about five months, we
were still a very fledging publication. We were fortunate in that a
lot of people who really could have published their work anywhere
decided to trust us.
00:09:34 Amrit
We're talking folks like Kathy Sandin, who at the time
was the Dean of Extension at UCLA. Folks like Adi Beda from UC San
Diego, Wayne Smutz, who at the time was the Dean of World Campus at
Penn State. We had some phenomenal people share their
perspectives.
00:09:48 Amrit
So, we looked at our subscriber base, we thought it
would be folks from the continuing ed world, and as it turned out,
we were serving largely provosts and CIOs and presidents. And we
thought that was kind of weird.
00:09:58 Amrit
So, we started to look into it and realized, well, at
a time when higher education institutions were struggling for
operating expenses, were struggling to generate enrollments, were
starting for the first time in the industry's history to recognize
the concept of competition - we were publishing articles by
continuing ed leaders talking about what it looked like to compete
for enrollments, how student-centricity can be a differentiator,
why programming needs to be relevant to student needs, why
workforce outcomes are valuable to academic programming.
00:10:26 Amrit
And I think what crystallized for me at that moment
and what's kind of driven our editorial philosophy since then, is
that the higher education industry can operate like a business
while still benefiting the learners it serves. We've always looked
at that as a dichotomy, as a binary. Either you're a business or
you're serving learners, but you can't be a business that serves
learners.
00:10:45 Amrit
And if you look at most businesses, it is in their
best interest to treat their consumers with respect. It's in their
best interest to serve the needs of their consumers. And then
there's benefit to that in terms of revenue and lifetime value of
engaging that customer for long-term. And there's no reason why
those principles shouldn't work in higher education as well.
00:11:02 Amrit
So, that idea really started to take root at that time
when we were looking at our subscriber base, because we realized
that those are the exact people who were starting to pay attention
to the publication. It wasn't just other continuing ed leaders who
wanted to know about continuing ed. It was senior executives who
were trying to understand how they could change their mindset about
what the institution could be.
00:11:22 Salvatrice
What a beautiful way to kind of pivot into something
that you weren't really anticipating.
00:11:27 Amrit
It's so funny because you mentioned yourself, you
didn't see your career leading to continuing ed or to higher ed. I
certainly didn't as well. That was a surprising twist. It was a
twist of fate. And I think if you talk to almost anyone in
continuing education, they wouldn't say that "Well, when I was
five-years-old and someone asked me what I wanted to do and I
wanted to be a Dean of Continuing Education," like that's not a
thing.
00:11:47 Amrit
Most of us found our way here by circumstance. But
then when we landed and when we found our spot, it's impossible not
to fall in love with this sector.
00:11:57 Salvatrice
Right. And it feels like home because we can
relate.
00:12:00 Amrit
Yeah. It's very human. It is kind of interesting as
you start to think about like how folks wind up in this space, how
folks build a passion for this work. And that's really a lot of
what we're doing right now. In fact, we're on our podcast, we're
about to launch a series with institutional presidents who came out
of continuing education.
00:12:17 Salvatrice
Fantastic.
00:12:17 Amrit
And the idea there is basically looking at this exact
concept of why is higher education starting to pivot to becoming
more like a massive continuing ed department? And it comes back to
this core idea that there's DNA within CE about how to treat
learners, how to think about the institution, how to think about
the department with a mix of student-centricity and a business lens
and trying to find that middle ground.
00:12:43 Amrit
So, anyway, that was a very long way of saying we
launched the EvoLLLution because we wanted to normalize some of
this stuff that at the time, was really out of left field. It was
really stuff that no one was comfortable talking about. It was
stuff that you'd say, oh, students are customers. But you'd say it
in a hushed voice and you'd really make sure you knew who was
around you when you were saying it.
00:13:04 Amrit
And as a publication, we didn't want to have the
debate. We wanted to come in and say, "Yes, students are customers,
what does that mean?" That was our guiding philosophy for years.
And it still is to this day, is that we believe that students are
customers and everything we publish is written with that assumption
already established.
00:13:22 Amrit
So, now, it's a question of, well, what do you do?
When your students are customers, what does that mean in terms of
how do you structure services? How do you do pricing? How do you do
financial aid? How do you credential them? What kind of lifecycle
do your programs need to run on? How do you do program review
cycles? How do you interact with the creditors?
00:13:39 Amrit
All these things are through the lens of your student
is a customer, and - as opposed to trying to debate whether or not
our students are customers. And again, I don't think that's a
controversial view anymore, but I think it's because publications
like ours just decided that we were tired of the argument and kind
of just moved past it.
00:13:59 Salvatrice
Right. It forces us to examine our approach
differently. Even though when we say, for example - I'm going to
use your example about customer versus student. Yes, the customer
is the student and the student is the customer. But just in the
language that we use, in the words that we choose, forces us to
examine like a holistic approach.
00:14:17 Salvatrice
So, when we say maybe just the word "student," it's
this very transactional, it's one-sided. Sometimes, that's how I
feel. Like it just feels very kind of linear, super linear. But
when we use the word "customer," as you did, and coming from the
private sector myself, it forces us to examine the experience
holistically. And so, that we're looking at things through a lens
of everything you just mentioned.
00:14:40 Salvatrice
We use product cycle, program cycle, customer service
- all those things, all the wraparound things that we talk
about.
00:14:48 Amrit
It's important. It's a topic that's fresh on my mind.
So, this is our 10-year anniversary.
00:14:51 Salvatrice
Congrats.
00:14:51 Amrit
Thank you. We published our first article in January
of 2012. And so, a lot of my time over the past few months is just
out of nostalgia, kind of going back through our archives a little
bit and looking at some of the older articles that I feel have
really helped to establish our vision. And there was a piece by
Heather Chakiris, and she's now at Excelsior College in upstate New
York.
00:15:13 Amrit
At the time that she wrote this, she was the Chief
Student Experience Officer for UCLA Extension. And she was writing
about the idea of how do you create a high-quality customer
experience in a post-secondary environment. I'd encourage everyone
to go and read the article themselves, and I'm just going to share
one thought of hers with you.
00:15:29 Amrit
And she took on the idea of what does students as
customers mean? Because oftentimes, when you bring that up, the
first thing that someone would say back is the customer's always
right - well that doesn't work here. And you'd go into this
diatribe about, oh, they're customers outside the classroom but not
inside the classroom or whatever.
00:15:43 Amrit
And she said, "Look, forget that. "Treating students
as customers (and this is a quote) means we don't force them
through arbitrary processes that are intentionally complex. And
that concept has absolutely guided the way that I've thought about
this topic for nearly a decade. Because that's it. That's it in a
nutshell. It's just a question of respect.
00:16:03 Salvatrice
That's right. And speaking of content, help me
understand; so the EvoLLLution publishes these articles. How are
you vetting the content? You know, because anyone and anyone can
say anything. But to stay true to the mission of EvoLLLution and
true to its core mission, how are you vetting the content?
00:16:22 Amrit
It's an interesting question because we think of
ourselves as a big opinions page. And to a certain extent, we are
not a neutral party. I recognize that in the world of journalism,
there's an expectation that a journalist is supposed to be neutral.
And I think you could look at any publication to know that that's
not at all the case.
00:16:39 Amrit
But we are a lens. So, we have a perspective, we have
an opinion, which is we believe the higher education space
fundamentally has to change to serve the demographic it serves. We
believe there's an enrollment cliff on the horizon that's backed by
research. We believe that treating students like customers is the
best way for post-secondary institutions to meet the crux of their
mission.
00:16:59 Amrit
So, we do look for contributors that speak to that
broad philosophy through their particular lens. We tend to reach
out to folks, we tend to find folks, and we've built a contributor
community, which by the way, has about 2,500 now, higher education
leaders from colleges and universities across North America, an
incredibly diverse cross-section of post-secondary institutions
represented in our contributor base.
00:17:23 Amrit
And the goal is how many diverse opinions can we find
that share different points of view on the same topic? And the more
layers that we can add to the diversity of our contributor base,
all speaking to different parts of the same core, the more we can
actually start to form a vision of what that core looks like.
00:17:41 Amrit
And in aggregate to a certain extent, I'd be
interested actually to do a word cloud study on every piece ever
published in the EvoLLLution because it would be fascinating to me,
to see what kinds of terms it would actually be. It's an incredible
source of data. There's some 4,600 articles that we've published
over the past decade.
00:17:56 Amrit
So, vetting, we don't do peer review, we don't have a
double-blind review process. Everything that gets published comes
through myself and my associate editor.
00:18:05 Salvatrice
Excellent. Is there anything percolating out there? Is
there anything percolating that you said, "Hey Salvatrice, we
really ought to be paying attention to this? It just hasn't been
..."
00:18:13 Amrit
Yeah, I'd say like from a trends perspective, there's
some fascinating stuff happening. And it's frustrating because if I
think about like ... again, I'm feeling very nostalgic today. Like
if I think about like some of the stuff our publication's done,
like we were publishing about badging in 2012. We published about
competency-based learning in 2014.
00:18:28 Amrit
Like we tended to be well ahead of the curve. And I
think what's fascinating about where we are today is that we're
seeing some of these ideas that were super, super peripheral
becoming core concepts for what the future institution's going to
look like.
00:18:42 Amrit
So, what I think is really interesting about where we
are right now is how we're starting to define these ideas that have
historically been experimental and how we're starting to bring
those ideas into the core of the institution. So, the question
becomes a balancing act between what's the thing that made that
idea necessary in the first place, and what's the thing that's
going to make it legitimate in the eyes of the academy.
00:19:06 Amrit
And that idea of legitimacy, that idea of defining
what rigor looks like, what quality looks like, what a credential
means, are some of these topics that I think are going to
absolutely control the conversation in the higher education space
for probably the next five to seven years.
00:19:22 Amrit
Because we recognize that credentialing needs to
change, and we recognize that micro-credentials and that
competency-based credentials and alternative approaches to
assessing and awarding knowledge, we recognize that these are
becoming increasingly important. We recognize that it's becoming
increasingly common.
00:19:37 Amrit
The question is how do we strike that balancing act
between the necessity of launching them in the first place, and the
necessity of creating something that makes sense in the context of
what the institution does. So, what I think is fascinating right
now is this year, and you know my background's more the continuing
ed world. That's where our publication is rooted.
00:19:54 Amrit
I've been to two conferences this year about
micro-credentialing where there were a combined seven people at
both conferences that are from the continuing ed world. And it was
mostly registrars getting together to talk about how do we do
micro-credentialing. And I did a session at both conferences, those
basically saying on each of your campuses, I guarantee you there's
a department that's been doing micro-credentialing for 30 years
because that's the crux of what CE is all about.
00:20:18 Amrit
So, I think the future, the next 5 to 10 years is
going to be shaped by a de-siloing of the post-secondary
institution of an intentional internal collaboration between the
administrative structures that have defined how the institution
operates and the continuing ed world that's had to balance both
development, delivery, and management of programming. Because in
the main campus, those three functions tend to be separated. They
tend to be siloed out because they're massive responsibilities.
00:20:44 Amrit
For the continuing ed world, we've really asked the
same people to do all three of those things simultaneously. So, I
think it's going to be fascinating to see how we navigate that
transition of responsibility. How do we navigate the transition of
enrollment management responsibilities from a staff team that's
very consumer-oriented to one that may be more process-oriented.
And how do we find a middle ground between a customer service
mentality and maybe a more process-oriented mentality.
00:21:09 Amrit
I think what we're going to see is that the
institutions themselves are going to start to seem to feel more
like what continuing ed divisions feel like, because the students
we're going to be serving will be increasingly older. They'll be
more and more experienced as consumers, and they'll recognize that
they operate in a marketplace, that they have flexibility and
freedom of choice that they've never had before.
00:21:32 Amrit
We just went through the first ever recession in the
last hundred or so years where enrollment in post-secondary
education did not go up. And it's not that people weren't looking
for education access, it's that they went to boot camps and they
went to YouTube. They got credentialed in totally different ways
than we've ever really experienced before.
00:21:46 Amrit
And we tried to run a playbook that we ran during the
great recession and said "Oh-oh." So, I think, higher education in
general - this is not a micro trend, this is going to be a macro
trend. I think we're going to see the post-secondary space look and
feel more like a continuing ed unit.
00:22:00 Salvatrice
Now, do you think that that was forced due to the
pandemic? Or do you think that that was a natural - we were already
kind of going in that way?
00:22:09 Amrit
Yeah, I think we were already going that way. See,
this is the problem; the pandemic is one thing, the stay-at-home
order is something else. It's a related thing, but people getting
sick didn't lead to the transformation of higher ed. It was the
stay-at-home order. Because that changed the way that we thought
about our interaction with physical spaces. And I think like the
trend of online learning had been progressing for decades.
00:22:32 Amrit
There's an organization that was doing an annual
report on uptake and enrollments in distance programming. And every
year for the 10 years they'd been tracking this, the percentage of
learners that had been going online was ticking upwards steadily.
Now, obviously, it went to a hundred percent in 2020. You can
probably disregard that number.
00:22:51 Amrit
But up to that point, it was showing that about half
of students were already hybrid students in that way. They were
taking some distance and some on premise. So, on the one hand, we'd
already been moving in this direction of students seeing their
options as being national, global. But I think what the pandemic
did was accelerate the trend of people looking to alternatives.
00:23:10 Amrit
Because for the most part, you had people out of work
who really had no business being out of work. The stay-at-home
orders led to the greatest spike in unemployment in the history of
either of our nations. More people were unemployed in the month and
a half after the stay-at-home orders were issued than were
unemployed in the entirety of the great recession.
00:23:28 Amrit
So, when you think about that in context, like that is
a massive foundational shift in the way that people spend their
time. And again, these aren't people who could have seen that
coming. This wasn't a thing that was slowly boiling over time; that
was pandemic, stay-at-home order, you don't have a job anymore.
00:23:44 Amrit
So, what folks were looking for was very different.
Folks were looking for very short-term offerings that were going to
help them get to a job. And in that one year, we saw the percentage
of adults considering education who preferred short-term
alternative credentials go from 50% in 2019, to 68% in 2020. That
is a massive, massive shift in the way that consumers are
thinking.
00:24:05 Amrit
From half to two-thirds in one year, and that largely
came because that group of people suddenly needed short-term
options to get that new job, to get that job they could do at a
distance or work remotely that wasn't really affected by the
pandemic that they didn't need to be in a physical space to do.
00:24:20 Amrit
So, I think where before we'd talk about the
short-term credentialing space and we'd say, well, the consumer
doesn't really understand it - I don't think that's the case
anymore. I think consumers have a much clearer vision of the kinds
of education offerings that are out there than they might have had
once before. And it's incumbent upon post-secondary institutions,
especially public post-secondary institutions, to fulfill our
missions by making those kinds of options available to people.
00:24:43 Amrit
If people are saying they want short-term
outcomes-oriented learning offerings, then it's a responsibility of
the public postsecondary institution as having a community
responsibility to fulfill that need. And if that means like we're
going to create something that's stackable so that when that
individual has a need for further education, they can come back,
great.
00:24:59 Amrit
And if it means we're going to offer it as one-off
because that's what the community needs, that's great too. But we
can't just seed an entire sector to the private sector and say,
"Well, we don't do that so we're not going to do that." That's not
how public organization of any type should work.
00:25:15 Salvatrice
And having said that, are you finding that there's an
opportunity and/or (maybe they're one of the same) an issue kind of
coming out of this - I'm going to call it stay-at-home order
because you made it very clear. I like the way you separated
that.
00:25:27 Salvatrice
So, coming out of this stay-at-home order where the
world's kind of coming back - the world did come back, but it's
going back a little bit slower. Anything pressing that you're
saying, "Hey, Salvatrice, we need to address this" within higher
education based on what your findings and contributors are.
00:25:40 Amrit
And this is a question we've been asking folks over
the past year or so. I am very worried that this next generation is
going to be very, very nervous about online programming.
00:25:52 Salvatrice
About online programming?
00:25:54 Amrit
Yeah. Now, this is flying in the face of everything I
said five seconds ago. You have an entire generation from the age
of 4 to the age of 23 now, who for a year of their life had to
completely change the way they interacted with education
offerings.
00:26:11 Amrit
And that transition was not to what we in the higher
education space would consider high-quality online learning. There
was no facilitated instructor to learner or learner to instructure
participation or interaction. There was no facilitated
learner-to-learner, peer-to-peer interaction. It was lectures on
Zoom.
00:26:31 Amrit
And if the memes are to be believed on Reddit or
whatnot, it was kids being disciplined in their own houses for
drinking water because they were on Zoom during a class. That's not
a positive online learning experience. And what I'm genuinely
nervous about is you'll have an entire generation of digital
natives who fundamentally don't think online learning works,
because what they were exposed to was really bad quality remote
education.
00:26:56 Amrit
So, that I'd say, is something that we need to take
very seriously as a sector, is how do we reintroduce that
generation to high-quality, well-defined, well-structured,
consciously built online programming that does all those great
things that we know online programming can do. Absolute worst-case
scenario is that we have an entire generation of digital natives
who are more comfortable with technology than any generation
history.
00:27:21 Amrit
Move forward and say, "That's all good, but for the
learning part, it has to be in classrooms." Like it would limit
their capacity to expand, to upscale, to reskill. It would limit
their access to education so massively that I think it would be a
disservice to our industry. And beyond that, it would mean a return
to the highly regional approaches to education, which are
incredibly valuable in some circumstances, but also, create this
insularity of what we consider quality.
00:27:49 Amrit
We're starting to move to a point now where you can
look at access to education as being either regional or global,
depending on what an individual looks for at a point in time. And
the access to both is what makes it so interesting that you can get
local context on a global learning opportunity or that you can get
global access to learning that you otherwise wouldn't have.
00:28:08 Amrit
So, as we're creating this like balancing between
global access to education for those who want it, and local access
to high-quality learning opportunities, I think at the same time,
colleges and universities are in a position where they can start
seeing how learners are being engaged with at other
institutions.
00:28:25 Amrit
Because our value proposition isn't just the offering
of programming, it's not just access to learning opportunities -
it's the experience that goes around it. It's our capacity to
engage students, it's our capacity to build relationships with
those learners.
00:28:38 Amrit
It's our capacity to maybe take programming or take
knowledge that's accessible in one place and making it contextual
to those who are in our neighborhoods. So, that's where I think is
the power of online learning can really come from, is how do we
create local context for global learning? And by the same token,
how do we create local access for folks who need to be served?
00:28:57 Amrit
So, that's where I think there's so much power to what
online learning can do, and it's really important that we find a
way to bridge that gap for all those kids who might have had a
really bad experience with online programming over the past few
years.
00:29:09 Salvatrice
This is the Future of Work Podcast and you've given
these beautiful golden nuggets of information, and I feel like
they're little treasures and we can talk for hours, and I know that
we'll continue this dialogue at some point.
00:29:24 Salvatrice
But I wanted to kind of propose this question to you,
is if there's one thing you'd want our listener to understand about
the future of work and where we need to be within higher education
- we just continue to mold and evolve - what would that one thing
be?
00:29:40 Amrit
For sure. It's a simple concept that I'm going to
explain unnecessarily complicatedly. Computing power doubles every
18 months. The concept in Moore's law; as computer processing power
doubles, the capacity for tasks that were once manual can be
automated, and what human work looks like starts to change
fundamentally.
00:29:59 Amrit
So, in this environment where access to learning has
to be shorter term, the future of work I think is going to be
defined by more consistent access to upskilling and reskilling. The
structure, the definition of human-specific work is going to be
constantly evolving.
00:30:15 Amrit
I think if there's one thing that folks take away
after listening to this episode, it's that we have a responsibility
to make the college a lifelong learning engine. We have a
responsibility to make higher education something that people don't
just do once at the start of their career, and then never really
return to other than football games and donations. Like that can't
be the relationship that we have with people after they
graduate.
00:30:38 Amrit
The relationship that we have with people after they
graduate has to be one that continues to be based in learning
access. It has to be continued to be based in value. That's our
value proposition. That's the impact that post-secondary
institutions can have on their communities in an environment where
there's fewer and fewer 18-year-olds every year.
00:30:53 Amrit
That's where I think we start to see a change in the
way that people interact with learning. So, if there's one thought
to take away, it's look at your own institution, look at your own
environment, look at even if you're coming from industry, look at
your own relationship with local post-secondary institutions and
ask yourself, what's one thing that we could do to make this space
better for adults. That's in a nutshell, it's how do we make
upskilling and reskilling more part of what we do.
00:31:20 Salvatrice
You're absolutely right. It is simple, but yet very
complex when we've got multiple gadgets kind of running this
engine, and we really appreciate that.
00:31:28 Salvatrice
This has been such a lovely, enthusiastic, high-energy
conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed our dialogue today, Amrit. As I
said, I'm sure that we'll have more of them.
00:31:37 Salvatrice
For our listener, if they wanted to connect with you
and learn more about the EvoLLLution or potentially even contribute
to the EvoLLLution, what's the best way to do that?
00:31:45 Amrit
Yeah, absolutely. Visit evolllution.com. That's again,
EvoLLLution with three Ls dot com. We publish every business day,
so you'll always see there's something new or different on there.
Please do subscribe on the sidebar. If you go to our
evolllution.com homepage, on the sidebar, there's a tab that says
"get the newsletter."
00:32:01 Amrit
We send a newsletter out every Monday that just kind
of recaps the stuff we published over the past week. And yeah, you
can absolutely contribute to the EvoLLLution. Again, visit
evolllution.com. There's a contribute link. You can also feel free
to shoot an email to info@evolllution . com. And yeah, we're more
than happy to explore whatever topics are top of mind.
00:32:20 Amrit
So, please do get in touch. It's a contributor-run
publication. We are just a conduit, so feel free to reach out at
any time.
00:32:26 Salvatrice
Excellent. Thank you so much. Now, get back to work,
Amrit.
00:32:30 Amrit
Hey, thank you so much for having me. This was so much
fun.
00:32:35 Salvatrice
Alright, have a good one. Thank you so much. We'll
chat soon.
00:32:38 Amrit
For sure. Bye now.
00:32:41 Salvatrice
Thank you for listening to the Future of Work Podcast.
Make sure you're subscribed on your favorite listening platform so
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us by clicking on the website link below in the show notes to
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We'd love to connect with you.
00:33:01 Salvatrice
All of us
here at the Future of Work and Pasadena City College, wish you
safety and wellness.