 Joanne Kozarev is the Vice President of Design and Development for a partner of ours, Western Governor's University, and we're really excited to hear what she's got to say about design and all the cool things they're doing at WGU. Thank you. Welcome, Joanne. So I first, there's a poll that is not, there are three poll questions in the poll, and so if you want to download the, I think they call it the Hoover app, although spelled with a who, W-H-O, which we're really excited about because we of course are the night owls at WGU. So there are owl jokes, you know, throughout the organization because Sage the Night Owl is our mascot. And in the spirit of sports, I'll point out that because we have no sports teams, we are still undefeated, so in everything. So I want to start out with a poll that's not in the app and ask you just to kind of get a read of the room, how many of you feel that you're fairly familiar with WGU's competency-based model and faculty kind of set up? Okay, most of you, so I won't go into a lot of detail because that's not really what I'm here to talk about today, but I have had a couple of people say to me, so do you guys even do alternative credentials? And because we are competency-based, our students move at their own pace, our tuition is what is sort of, it's not my favorite term for it, but the all-you-can-eat subscription model where students can go as fast as they can, but they also have a disaggregated faculty model that allows them to slow down and work with mentors at the point that they most need it. And so alternative credentials isn't something that we're particularly well-known for, although we have built CompTIA certificates and other certifications into our IT program and our curriculum has been designed in teachers' college in ways that allow students to add in endorsements and we've sort of woven some of those things together. But the real answer to the question of do you do alternative credentials at WGU is isn't it obvious that we should? And so it's something that we've been working on and thinking about and it's something that I worked on and thought about in my prior position at University of Texas system. So that is what has had me thinking about these questions for the past four or five years, really. And so just to get a start, and in my poll questions I asked poll questions that I really just want to know the answer to. They're not setting up that much. I'm just really curious. So if you could grab your app and answer the first question which is it's kind of a yes, no, maybe question, the title of one or more of my degrees or credentials is similar to the title I have or the field in which I work. So if we could pull that up and see what people had to say about that, I'm just madly curious. So I'm going to have to walk over here and read it to you. Number one, yes, we had 11 votes that said yes. My degree and my current career are aligned pretty closely. Sort of. 10 votes. And then we had, not even close, I was going to go, girl, please, but then I decided that was appropriation and I should just say not even close, which is where I would have voted if I'd have voted. My degree, I have a degree in Russian and English and teaching English as a second language. I mean, I guess teaching is in there. And then the last one, seven votes for, it's complicated, which might be where I actually belonged. And we've had a few people add, it looks like we have kind of the same trajectory or the same basic split that it's about a third, a third and a third, and then a number of us for whom it's pretty complicated. So that's not a surprise, but it's interesting to see. So let's take a look at the current state of affairs and do you have to switch me back over to the other? There we go. That's the title slide. And higher education today is kind of like a box of chocolates. And that's because I think people appreciate their education. Most people enjoy the process of learning to a greater or lesser degree, but one of the things that happens is once you sign up for a course or a program or a course of study or a certification, lots of times you don't really know what's inside until you're too far in to get out. And so we have students who are getting marshmallow or peanut butter when they really needed Nougat or caramel. And so I think that there is a lot that we can do, and I'm of course here speaking to you today from the role of educator, but I'm going to, or provider, I'm going to try to look at it from a 360 point of view as we go through. So what do I need to point at? Oh, there we go. So what if the future were just as tasty as a box of chocolates, but we actually had a state of affairs where the value of a credential is clear. The cost in terms of time, money, effort, and achievement were evident to us at the outset. And the significance of whatever it is that we've achieved in terms of the impact that we could have, the potential passion and contribution that we can make as a result of that experience or that accomplishment were clear. What if the relevance of whatever learning we're doing or whatever experience we're having was evident not just for the present, but also into the future so that we could make predictions so that students and policy makers and employers and educators and even the inventors, the organizations that make the technology and that make the tools and make the experiences that we put together to help build this future. What if we could make predictions because we could actually see into the relevance of what it is that make up these learning experiences. And then what if the personalized pathways and progressions towards goals were also clear. And this is also important for remixing, which I'm going to talk about several times today, the idea of mixing old skills to make new skills. And just as a quick aside, while I was doing some research for this, I know very little about massive multiplayer online games, but I have some cousins who are really, really into it, like really into it. And so I started poking around some of the things that they do because every time I looked up skills, these would come up. And I was like, what is this all about? These things are built in the ways that I think we need to start thinking of skills because, for example, you can mix them and match them to make whole new skills. So if you have necromancy, which I had to look up and is the ability to speak to the dead, and you have water bearer, and you combine those, then you can actually save people who have drowned. And that is a little bit, I mean almost exactly, like combining communication skills and technical skills to become a social media manager and make sure that your conference is trending in your region. I mean, it's almost exactly the same. No? I think it's close. But I think it's interesting that once again, gaming has kind of found a way to take something that's very complicated in the real world, simplify it, and make it really, really relevant to a lot of people so that they will go after something that they need and build a whole professional, if you want to think about... I mean, my cousin has kind of turned this into a sidekick. And it is worth looking at, I think. I just discovered it three days ago, so I could be totally wrong. But I think that that idea of, like, remixing and putting together those pathways for ourselves is interesting, and once again, the gamers are ahead of us. And then finally, what if the future had an academic and skills-based transcript that could show us the present and the future? It could show us our certifications and our skills, or as one of my colleagues called it yesterday, belt and suspenders. So that's the future I think we're talking about. And just to pause for a second, is there anything about this future picture that's missing that was discussed yesterday or that you've had on your mind that we should also consider as we go forward here? You didn't know I was going to talk to you. That's fair enough. Fair enough. I might do that one or two more times. But for now, let's take a look at the credentialing economy. So in this ecosystem, people are already sending signals, right? Students are sending signals to employers. Employers are sending signals to the market. Education providers are talking to telling students what they can offer. They are trying to find out from employers what they need to offer. All of these things are happening. But it's kind of like the barter system, right? I kind of have my, like, basket of beads and somebody else has their basket of shells and I'm trying to make the connection and say, this is what I need and I know you need that. And we're kind of in the early stages of this economy. And when I showed these slides to one of my colleagues, they said, you know, those gears wouldn't turn if they were really gears. And my first thought was, why did I hire an engineer? And then my second thought was, actually, I kind of like that. All right, because they're not really turning as well as they could, right? That's one of the things we're all here to talk about today is to try and figure out how to make these gears turn a little bit better. Now, when I show you the slide again, they're still not going to turn, but I want you to imagine them turning. So, let's start out. We have another poll. And the question is, how do you define currency? So, if you haven't answered yet, please do. And if you have, we'll pull up those answers in a minute and I'm going to walk over here so I can read them, because... So, we have 21 votes for a medium of exchange and we have five votes for approved... 28 votes for a medium of exchange, approved and accepted, and then a couple of people helping me out with new or up-to-date and in-circulation and then we have 16 for all of these. And that's the notion of instrumentality. Instrumentality communicates or signals what can be purchased with that thing, what can be obtained through that thing. So, it's instrumental in obtaining something. So, for example, if I have a Groupon coupon, I can get something such maybe a kayak trip down the Shenandoah River and I can get that for a much lower rate. It's the instrumentality. It's not just the currency. It's not just the exchange. It's not the fact that it can exchange. It's what can you get in exchange for that thing. So, there's a dimension here that I think it may be looking at different quadrants. So, how friendly is it and how exchangeable is it? How mobile is it? And there's another aspect of this. It might be another vector which is saying, what is the thing that can be obtained by what is its instrumentality? What can it obtain because of that? Just a thought. And again, you know, one of the things I learned, a little garden path. I'll take you down a little garden path. One of the things I learned working with, we did, one of the things we did at the University of Texas system was a, we did all 120 units, including the general education courses through the lens of biomedical science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, traditional university students with, underserved in many ways. And that meant working with the faculty across eight or 10 different academic departments. And what I learned was that for those of us who came up through academia, our discipline is our identity and it is our lens through which we view the world. And so I walked up here looking at this as a linguist, not an economist. And so what you're going to see from me is a lot of talk about, you know, how I think that we may be, I do think currency is the right word, but I think there may be an even better word than we realized. And you've added a dimension to the concept of currency, which I suspect comes from economics. That's mostly what you're going to see here, but I think there are multiple dimensions to each of these definitions. And the more I worked on this, the more I thought, well, it is the perfect word. It's not just a good word. It is the perfect word for the problems that we're trying to solve here. So the first one we'll look at is the most obvious one, which is this idea of a medium of exchange, the official currency of a country. And there are some signals that it sends, and there are some... This is the problem with note cards. They don't keep up. There is this idea of aligning supply and demand. There is also this idea of value and fluctuating value, right? One of the garden paths I will not take you down that I went down was this whole idea of barriers to entry and trade barriers and currency valuation. And I think all of those things are true about any kind of credential. There are credentials that gain and lose value over time. What we really need to do is we need to remove some of those barriers and find ways to efficiently allow that sort of trade to happen. So I think that is one of the reasons that we've started to talk about credentials as currency. But another reason why I think it's really important to look at all of the meetings of currency is another one is the currency of the information. It means up to date. It means new. It means fresh. And I think that that is one of the things one of the messages that credentials send is this idea that somebody who has one is always learning. They are always developing. They have not sort of completed the old model where I'm done with education and now I am fully formed. I was talking to a former partner, I guess. We worked together on a number of projects. He's at AT&T now. And we were having a conversation about this about six months ago. And he said, I'm surprised to learn that I find myself much more interested in people's micro-credentials than their degrees. And he says, you know, I kind of look at the degree and I'm like, good, they have that. But it's really the micro-credentials that he finds himself kind of gravitating to. And I thought that was interesting. Now he's looking at, I asked him where he's seeing them. And he said, usually it's just the traditional resume or sometimes it's in a portfolio. But what that signals to him is that this is someone who's out there kind of staying up to date and staying current. So I think that's another reason why thinking of credentials as currency or the currency of our credentials is an important thing to consider. So this next one is a bit of a stretch. Bear with me. But currency comes from the word current, which can, you can use current to talk about electricity. You can talk about water. You can talk about air movement. You can talk about movement and flow. And so there is an inherent idea in currency of that kind of flow and what's not happening with my picture of the gears, according to Rob. So I think the signal that is being sent here is the idea of progression. And what I think is really important to consider when talking about progression is this idea that we can see where someone has come from but we can kind of also see where they're headed. And that is something that I think more and more it would be wonderful to signal to employers to say this is what I've done so far and here are my plans. But I think it's also important, it's especially important for us as educators to be able to surface pathways to students and perhaps illuminate pathways of which they were unaware and help them see that there are other options out there. And I think that, so, you know, what the student is sort of saying, I know what I can do. I know what the possibilities are and I know how to do them most efficiently. What the employer sees in this idea of circulation or path or flow is I can see what potential student journeys will intersect with my needs so that I know where to use the concept of mining that we heard about yesterday. What do they say fish where the fish are? And I don't know about the rest of you but sometimes when I'm hiring I'm not sure where the fish are. And I think these pathways can help us to coalesce a little bit more about where to mine to find the talent and where to find talent that is currently hidden from us and it's very clear that there's a lot of that. And then for providers, for people who make learning or who offer learning experiences, we know how to make those most valuable because the days of offering learning and expecting people to show up just because but I have the degree and I'm worth listening to if they aren't over they will be shortly. So the last one is this idea of approved or acceptance. That idea has gained currency or that trend, that habit has gained currency. People are doing it, it's happening all the time. And I think that when I made the slides I said that it's signaled official but I've decided that what it signals is authenticity. So I would like you mentally to cross that line out and delete it and replace it with authenticity. I think it's the validation, it's the communication, it's the transcripting piece. There's a complexity to this because we change over time and that first polling question kind of proved it, right? We start out on a path and then we encounter things, we meet people, we have opportunities and we change our direction. Society changes, it has different needs, we fill them and that can mean that if we are actually officially transcripting many experiences that in the past were just resume food it can become a kind of cluttered set of data or information that we need to curate about ourselves. And my favorite example of this is I worked with someone who was a highly competent information technology professional and he happened to also be a highly competent and he told me I am supposed to say it this way classically trained percussionist. But what he really was was a drummer in a rock band and he wanted to be sure that both of those identities could be curated separately and communicated separately because the people that he wanted to think of him as a classically trained percussionist were not necessarily the same people that he wanted to consider him for CIO positions and he didn't necessarily want to broadcast both identities all the time. So I think there is an interesting element there of determining what is in currency with particular audiences as well as this idea of authenticity. So those are the four ideas that as you consider this idea of currency that I think it would be interesting to include in the conversation and I know we'll be continuing conversations about this today so that I would just throw these four ideas out here and maybe that would enrich the conversations we'll be having through the rest of the day. To conclude a little bit here, let's take a look back at our ecosystem. The gears still don't turn. Let's imagine that they do. What I have added here are some ideas that it's not just the three senders and the three types of signals. There are a number of problems that we need to solve here. And I realize if you're in the back, I couldn't read this if I were in the back so I'm just going to read it to you. The learners and employers, the learners need to be able to show their pathways towards goals and they need to be able to curate those. The employers need to better communicate the desired knowledge, skills, and abilities and right now this is a place we're really not super good at, right? We go out and we ask, we might put together a panel of 12 or a panel of 30 or a panel of 40 but we're still trying to put our finger on a moving target. We have data that we can kind of look at the past but it draws on imperfect job descriptions and I think this is an area that we all know there's a lot of growth that could happen in but this may be the first time in history that we've been able to actually believe that we can do this. And then, well, maybe since the guilds when pretty much jobs were go make this and go learn how to make this from this guy. You know, we may kind of be getting back to that space only the scope of what we're making is so much broader than just the leather guy, the metal guy, the house guy, you know. Well and the jam woman and the bread woman and the, let's not leave them out. They were part of their own guilds in a way. Credential definition and verification. This is another area that we need to continue to work on but there has been a lot of work in this area and a lot of really great starts so that we can start to use common languages around these things. What I think is on us and by us I mean those of us who are on the learning experience provider side of the equation is modular, updatable, remixable curriculum. I've been talking to the folks at Skills Engine and some other places that study skills and are really trying to get to skills and they say, you know what? There aren't that many new skills. Yes, I mean you can get super granular and say well, nobody knew Ruby on Rails 15 years ago but 15 years ago people did know programming and maybe you can say well nobody knew a certain type of technique but it's really based on the technique that came before it. What is really different, really different is the new remixing of those skills. The ability to take technical skills and human skills and analysis skills to turn that into a certain kind of decision making. And I certainly feel that that even in my sort of mid-career state has changed significantly in the past five to eight years. Things that I felt like I was born to do now require me to put on new glasses, new lenses and look at things in new ways and tap new individuals that I would not necessarily have had to partner with before. So I think that that idea of making the curriculum modular and remixable so that people can add in what they think they need kind of in real time. I think that that's what's really squarely on us. And then assessment and evaluation because we do want that authenticity piece and we do want our learners to be able with confidence to say this work that I have done has value and we want our employers and our hiring managers to say these people that you have sent us are exactly who you've told us they would be and they have exactly what you have said that you have assessed. So I do think that this ability to assess and evaluate is on us as well but it's also important as much as our learners may hate it it is the important thing that we offer them. And then the personal progressive profile. This actually drives so much of it because right now, let's do something interesting. How many people in the room have one transcript or more, one or more transcripts? Two, put your hand down if you've only got one. Three, four, five, six. I have seven. Eight. Anybody, anyone higher than eight? Did I hear a nine? I thought I heard a nine. And I'm old, that's just me. That doesn't even count my Udacity, it wasn't Udacity, it was Coursera. That doesn't count anything except for I picked up, I took Japanese when I was at Ohio University and I did something else over here. So for today, the effort that it would take to document someone's learning experience under the old system not to mention the number of $25 fees that go along with that, it's a little staggering and so that ability to have a profile that I can keep and that I can curate and share the elements that are most important to whatever story I need to tell about myself I think is an important element to make sure that our learners can not only chart their course but tell their story. Because that's ultimately what I think we want to do about ourselves and about our professional lives. So, all we have to do is identify all of the pathways towards possible goals. We have to identify knowledge, skills and abilities in ways that are easily communicated between multiple sectors and multiple contexts. We need to create modular, remixable, updatable curricula. We need valid accepted assessments that are race and class neutral and that signal true knowledge, skills and abilities. And all of this needs to both point to and draw from a personal progressive profile. And we have to do it at scale. That's it. But, you know, at WGU, I think if we haven't surpassed 100,000 students we have definitely surpassed it but it kind of goes up and down because we keep graduating them, which is awesome. But, you know, there are laboratories out there where we can work on this and there are smart, connected thinking people who are making these connections and there are plenty of students whose future depends on it and who are going to demand it. And if we've learned anything in the past 20 years it's that when the market demands it, someone somehow figures out how to deliver. So I have very little doubt that the next time we're talking or one of the next times we're talking the gears are going to turn. We have one more poll. And again, I'm just madly curious. I have a list of things on the poll. There's six or eight of them. What do you think will most need to change to bring about the credentialing revolution? And so, like I said, there's a whole list. So job descriptions. Will job descriptions need to change? It looks like we have... I've gone suddenly blind. Nine votes for job descriptions. Five votes for technology tools and options. Two votes for definition of competency or mastery. Nine votes for verification and trust tools. Twenty-one votes for concepts of ownership. Oh, I'm backwards. So it's nine votes for credential classification and definition. Six votes for job descriptions. This makes a lot more sense. Two votes for technology tools and options. Eleven votes for definitions of competency or mastery. Twenty-five votes for verification and trust tools. I differ a little bit with you on that one. Two votes for concepts of ownership. Three votes for concepts of ownership. Five votes for other. Maybe we can... I don't know how much time we have left. We've got ten minutes, which is perfect. Okay. Well, that's right on schedule, right? All right. And then one vote for nothing is just going to happen. Hey, a lot of things have just happened. I didn't put that on there by accident, because I think it's a possibility. And then seven votes for bring about the revolution. The revolution is here. So, yeah, that's all I have to share today. I'll leave this slide. I have a beautiful question slide, but we'll go back to this one. What would you like to talk about? And as a former English teacher, I have, like, an endless wait time. So, yes, sir. I was a teacher. Oh, thank you. I was a teacher in my hometown of Winnipeg, Canada, and I moved down here to do grad work state. But I also became a teacher in Hampton, Virginia. To teach in Hampton, Virginia, and I don't think it's changed much now, I had to hire a company in Boston, Massachusetts to go through my transcript and map every course from the University of Manitoba down to what the standards were acceptable in the U.S., knowing that the systems are almost identical. But for most of us, we think, well, you got a bachelor of education, you're good to go. Unless you're not from the United States. So I only bring that up as an example saying, again, when we're talking some technology competence, that's one thing we can put in a box. But we also have to think it on the larger level. But what does it mean for these other occupations that are, dare I say, a much larger thing that still do have the competencies in it? They have to be broken apart. We're just going to have to consider that. So I don't have to pay companies in Boston to look at my transcripts. Well, at WGU, we prepare teachers across the United States, all 50 states and several territories. And my team spends an extraordinary amount of time just making sure that we hit all those requirements. Now, there are ways around a lot of it, but there are, at the end of the day, the states must be honored, right? And so there are multiple sides to that coin. Because on one hand, it's true. Populations differ. Community involvement in education matters, and communities want certain things. What's trending in Nevada in communication right now is family collaboration. So I have to make sure that that's in there. Now, I don't mind having family collaboration in education of teachers, but what's trending in Missouri is different. And you need to sort of honor all of those things if you're going to do things at scale. So when it comes to the complexity of teacher education and medical education, because we have many medical professionals in the United States who cannot practice and yet who might be very competent because of that process of bringing the international credentials over, what did they call it yesterday, a cartel? Anyway, so I think it's a good point. The liquidity of the currency is we're in a pretty non-liquid state once we get past the critical mass. I think we had a pretty compelling argument from people who either were employers or were working with employers that the verification of the actual competencies is the thing they are so desperate to do that they're either doing it themselves as with Michael Saylor or inventing companies and getting business to show how it can be done. So I was interested that you didn't emphasize the importance of new forms of verification that are transparent, that are where we can all see what's in the box and we know what the basis is of the claim. I guess it depends on how you define verification. I've had a lot of conversations with people outside of this area of interest. Whenever we come together, it's a big topic of conversation. But then as soon as you start talking to people who are not... It's entirely possible that they are just not woke yet. They just don't realize how important this is. But when you get outside of the people who are sort of into and excited about the technological possibilities of this, I get a lot of, you know, kind of the... Really? I'm actually... It's good. I mean, I do want to know... I want people to have those credentials and be able to communicate them. But whether or not it's got a stamp of it came from this source and it's unaltered and it's written on the blockchain and all of those sorts of things, that sort of thing they're less concerned about. Now, look into the box and know, am I getting marshmallow or peanut butter? That people are definitely interested in. And the quality of the marshmallow and the peanut butter. I mean, you spoke as an employer a few minutes ago and I was a hiring employer too. The fact of the matter is there's a whole lot of people coming out with credentials without competency. I guess I would argue that that is one of the strongest things. For this revolution to make a meaningful difference, to talent, to opportunity to the future of our society, I think we have to do a whole lot more about making new forms of assessment and making them transparent. And I am absolutely there with you on assessment. I think maybe what's interesting is we could do another study like I just did on currency of the meaning of verification, right? Because there are people who have gold stamps on their certificate and then they get to their workplace and the workplace retrains them. And, you know, that... It's verified. It's authentic. It's verified, but it might not be authentic, right? So I think that's an interesting problem we still need to solve. Yes, sir. I want to follow up on Carol Snyder's good points just made. I think the word currency is a little problematic. You know, it has... It's out there. It's current. It's in currency. It's trending, but I think that, you know, currency, one, it should be good in any shop and they really don't have a right to refuse it, right? And you can sort of tell two nickels equal a dime and so on. There's a metric. There's a pretty common metric throughout that currency. But we take our credentials and they mean different things because they are black boxes because each university has its degree in criminal justice or this or that, and what's inside that box can be very different from one to another. And so we have huge variations within the same so-called credential. And what we need is some sort of verification and you have your wheels up there for the different gears and if you look at where you have assessment and evaluation, to me, that's part of the verification. That's part of the credential. The credential is an attestation. It's not a currency. It's a claim. It's an attestation that says the holder of this credential has these knowledge, skills and abilities and they have been assessed by so-and-so. Maybe there's a third party validation or approval. Maybe it's an accreditation. Think about certifications. There are credit certifications. 90% are not accredited. So just to push back a little bit on the way we use currency, which is a pretty standardized unit of exchange versus credentials as signals that are pretty unreliable right now as to what a person knows and can do. So that's speaking about currency from the perspective of, you know, here it's true, currency is all of those things. My first experience abroad was in the crumbling Soviet Union where the currency did not have those things. It was not hard currency. It could not be traded outside of certain environments. Sometimes you couldn't get Russians to take it for certain transactions. And it had things stamped on it, but they were constantly in fluctuation and that got worse from the time I was there in 1990 until 1995. Over a period of five years, every time I went back, there were more or fewer zeros and I could not figure out whether what I was buying was of solid value. And so I kind of agree with you. It's an academic game to talk about, like, is it the right word? Is it the perfect word? I think there's a reason why it's trending, but I do think that if you've had experiences of emerging economies, which is kind of what we're talking about, it feels a little bit the same. Just having kind of navigated that, fortunately, as a relatively young woman who was kind of like, I don't really understand it anyway, so... What you just described feels very much like what that was like. And if there are people here who've been through areas of inflation and deflation and kind of the lopping off of zeros on currency, you can tell me whether it felt the same way to you or not. But it might be more of a parallel than we realized. We're just in a different place in the economy. And I'm not arguing for that. I'm just throwing it out there. Well, we've got a... Why don't you pick? I don't want to be the one who picks, so... Okay. I just wanted to say that I think that many of these things that we're talking about, verification, understanding what you're getting in the black box, transparency, I just wanted to give a shout out to all the people who are doing really important standards work so that we have a common vocabulary for at least trying to define the currency, the credential transparency description language, the interoperability of being able to understand what's happening in the credential registry, the standards work on comprehensive learner records from IMS Global and, of course, open badges. So if we can at least all get a cursory understanding of what those standards are and why they're important and help other people understand why a community of people adopting those makes a difference. A perfect ending. Thank you.