 Let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's host, I'm the creator, and I'm also the chief cat herder, and I'll be your guide to the next hour of conversation about the future of higher education. But before we meet our guest, let me introduce the program and explain what it is, where it came from, how it works, and what we hope to achieve. So the forum is now a little bit more than five years old. We've been doing this since 2016. What this is is a weekly conversation about the future of colleges and universities worldwide. We don't do presentations. What I'm doing now with a couple of slides for a moment is just the intro. The overall plan is to just have questions and answers, discussion back and forth. And with a really great range of people, we have folks from multiple countries, from multiple institutional types, and from all kinds of professions. We have university presidents, students, librarians, technologists, faculty members, as well as people from areas adjacent to higher education. Everything from education-related businesses to nonprofits to governments. And we have a pretty wide range of voices covering a wide range of opinions. So that is our goal. That is how we function. Now looking ahead a little bit, I just want to point you to the next few sessions coming up over the next month that we have sessions on how to support equity in higher education. We have today is the first of two sessions on reinventing universities. We have a session on the science of learning and how that impacts how we structure education. We have a session on an analytics project, which is very interesting, and another one on leadership. If you'd like to find out more, just head to our new site at forum.futureofeducation.us and you can learn more. Now, we can only do this work with the help of some generous sponsors and supporters, and I'd like to thank before we proceed. NYZR and that is one of them in New York State, where they help at states, colleges, and universities get online and do great work with broadband and professional development. We really improve their work and we're grateful for their support. We're also really grateful to Shindig because, as you can see here, they make available the technology we're using right now. So if you haven't used it before, if you haven't used it for a while, let me just walk you through the key parts to show you how to participate, most effectively. Where I am right now, and where the slide is, again, just for a minute, is called the stage. And we call that because everybody involved in this conversation, all 119 of you, 120 of you, can see and participate in and hear everything that goes on the stage. And if you look below me on your screen, the bottom half of it, you should see around up to 20 different icons swirling around you. And some of them are going to be individual silhouettes. Some of them will be video fades of people, sometimes two or more people sitting around the same camera. But that is your part of the participant swarm, what people sometimes call the audience. And if you look around, you can just mouse over individuals and you get a little bit more information about them. But if you want to have a private conversation with them, just double click on their icon. If they want to talk to you, your two icons will click together like Legos. You get your own private audio visual conversation. It's like being in an auditorium and leaning over to somebody and whispering to them. I mentioned this is about conversation. So let me show you the main ways that proceeds. If you look at the bottom of the screen beneath all those participants, you should see a white strip with a few different buttons on it. And the leftmost edge of it will have a button with a number. It's now 127. If you click that, up will pop two boxes. One is a kind of film strip view of everybody involved in this conversation. If you want to learn more about them, but in the right edge of it, you'll see a chat box. And that's just your basic chat box. You can type in comments, jokes, questions, thoughts, URLs, whatever you like. And we find that people tend to use that for informal conversation. People say where they're from. Nathan Kelbridge from Rosedale Park. Sure. I know it. I used to live in Ann Arbor and my wife's from South, South of Detroit. And my father lives in Pontiac right now. And so people often put question ideas there. And it's just a pretty easy, fluid way to do it. Donald, congratulations on getting your COVID vaccine. Now, on the white strip, there are two other buttons that are a bit more powerful. One of them is a question mark and one of them is a raised hand. If you'd like to type in a question or a comment, just press that little question mark button. Apple pop a box, type in your question or comment and then hit send and I get to see it. When the time is right, I flash it on the screen for everyone to see. And then I read out loud. So wherever I'm including our guest can hear it and respond to it. Now, if your camera is on and you feel like talking with all of us, well, press that raised hand button that tells us you want to join us up here on stage. And when the time is right, I press another button and pop. There you appear and you get to have a face to face conversation with myself and, more importantly, with our guest. In fact, we can have several different people up here at one time so we can create a kind of pop up panel. So those two buttons on the bottom are the main way people participate, either by taping and piping a question or raising their hand to join us in the video. Now, if any of you are on Twitter, just make sure that you tweet either at me, Brian Alexander, or better yet, use the hashtag FTTE. We find that people during the session will sometimes tweet out observations or events that happen they find interesting. And sometimes people who can't make it will tweet in a questionnaire conversation item for us to take a look at. Those are all the ways that you can participate. And that's how all of this can work. We're really grateful to Shending for making that available. I'd also like to really thank our supporters on Patreon. Patreon is a crowdfunding site that lets you collaboratively fund an ongoing project or an ongoing research effort. In this case, it's our look into the future of higher education. People contribute as little as a dollar a month just to keep the lights on. The machine's happy. And you can see here, people who contribute ten dollars or more a month. Wonderful people like Corey Snow, Eileen Frank, Chris Johnson, Jeannie Kim Han, Erwin DeVries. It's wonderful to have their support and we're grateful to them. You can join them. Just go to Brian Alexander. Excuse me. Go to patreon.com slash Brian Alexander. Now, all of that is an introduction to this week's fantastic guest. And I'm absolutely delighted to welcome President Paul LeBlanc. Paul is the president of Southern New Hampshire University, a university that has gone through some enormous and extensive changes under his leadership. It is now a leading university in what it does with online learning. It's also had a lot of interesting ideas, which has managed to deploy everything from its structure to how it handles competency based learning, how it reaches out to people around the world and how it scales up to absolutely enormous size. Some people call it a mega university. So with that, I'd like to just put these slides off the stage and bring President Paul LeBlanc up in their stead. Hi, Brian. Greetings, Paul. Very good to see you. It's nice to be with you as well, my old friend. I like my friend. I'm going to say old friend. Well, I appreciate both thoughts. Let me ask you the most important question. Someone can ask someone in Upper New England. How is the snow and the temperature there? It's a bright sunny day. The snow is sparkling and it's a little chilly, but I feel like the days are getting longer and spring is on the way. So good. Yeah, we're feeling good. Glad to hear it. I have so many, so many questions to ask. And my job is to really get out of the way and let everybody else ask their better questions. But one I have to ask at the beginning is a kind of introduction question. I ask all the guests, what are you going to be working on for the next year? What are the big projects, the big ideas that are going to be taking up most of your time and most of your mind? Yeah, so it was interesting when you did the agenda and I thought those are each separate topics. They're all interrelated, right? We have to do all of those things together. So I think for us, what are the big rocks in front of us right now? Where am I spending my time? Probably spending more of my time thinking about how we reinvent leadership and how leadership happens at SNHU. So it's really about culture change. And we could spend the whole hour, spend a whole day on this one. But I have this sort of increasing conviction that in this VUCA world in which we live, where things happen very quickly and there's no better example of that than a pandemic that the sort of hierarchical, siloed, ultimately rigid and mostly top-down nature of universities makes them very vulnerable and less resilient. That so we've spent over three years now working with groups like the Institute for the Future and the Center for Leadership and others to think about how do we move away from a top-down command and control leadership culture to one of which leadership happens at every level and we're much more able to harness the smarts and creativity of people wherever they sit in the organization. And I can give you some examples. And B, how can we be much more shapeshifting and quickly adjust to both opportunity and threat? We don't sit in those silos. We don't sit within those hierarchies. It's really hard work and it feels to me like some months, some weeks, we get it right, more right than wrong. And then another place like, oh, yeah, yeah, why we revert it again. So it's a very uneven work in progress. And it starts because we've been top-down. And so it starts with me changing my own leadership practices and recognizing the shortcomings in that and then demanding that of the people on my team, but then also inviting people at every level to step up. So if you're if you're a new, you know, academic advisor who's working for us and you've been here three months and you have a student who's really struggling with something and you take care of that problem before you ask for without asking for permission, I would call that leadership. Like that's leadership courage in the moment. Right. So so again, I could we could talk about this, but that's that's the biggest one. You know, all the other things are the things everyone in this call is working on, right? Which is how do we think about creating a digital enterprise for the future? What does that actually mean in a higher ed context? We're spending a lot of time, excuse me, thinking about how do we optimize our product mix? So moving much more aggressively into non-degree micro credentials and which ones and how do you think about that? And so wherever you want to go, but those are the three big rocks, right, optimizing product and process, digital platform, and most importantly, changing our leadership culture. And those are the rocks that you may not be able to see. Well, there's a little bit of feedback or a little bit of echo here. I hope that's not me. Well, let's try this again. I was going to say, those are three huge rocks that you might not be able to see under all that snow, but those are very impressive. Friends, if you're new to President LeBlanc and his work, if you're new to Southern New Hampshire, that just gave you a quick intro, just a quick sketch of the kind of unusual thinking he's got. And before I can ask any more questions, folks have already come up with their own. And so let me just start the ball rolling with one from our neutral long-term friend, Phil Long, my colleague at Georgetown. And Phil asks, it appears from the pandemic experiments. There is a bipolar response. Any interest to return to the way it was ASAP and an interest in rethinking higher ed? Where is snow in this? How far does systematic change go? Yeah, God, Phil, I think you're so spot on. I see, you know, I've had the pleasure of this past year of chairing the ACE Board. So that's a pretty wide swath of American higher ed and just generally in these kinds of conversations. I have colleagues who like, let me ride this out, hunker down and as soon as this is done, screw this distance learning thing. I'm going back. I'm getting back to the way things used to be and I can't wait. And then I think there are other folks who are thinking, we're never going back. I was I'm wearing a tie today because I was part of a ministry of higher education function in the UK. Well, we're protecting the UK where they're talking about what are the things we don't want to let go of now? Like we just accelerated the adoption of online learning across the country. Big experiment, how much of that will we hold on to? We, you know, we have thousands of employees who are mostly an online enterprise, but most of them work in Manchester. We'll never go back to having as many people in a single building again. We are we have 67 percent of our people said they want to continue with remote work. And now we can start to rethink the organization. You know, as we want to be more diverse, if we're going to commit to remote work, we're going to hire it out of Detroit. We're going to hire out of the Southwest. We're going to get a much more diverse employee base and we can hire in the underserved communities where we want to educate people. Now we can do both. We can educate and we can hire from that talent pool. So I think it's exciting to think about what is now possible for us. Well, that's a question to ask about the pandemic ends or once the virus drops to a level of incidence. So it's below pandemic. What do you want to keep from this? I think, friends, that's a great question. You can take to all of your communities on this. We have more questions just piling in. And one has come from Lisa Severs at Harvard Extension. And Lisa asks, we'll put this on stage. What tangible changes are you making to stop being top down as an institution and yourself? So we all work and hire in an expert culture where status accrues to those who know a lot. In my experience, it usually means people don't often say, I don't know and people more often opine than ask questions. And I have with my team, you know, at the end of a two hour meeting, said, do you realize like no one used a question mark here today, including me? We also, you know, so we take turns and we don't. So how do you how do we think about that? So let me go back to sort of a concrete example. So after the George Floyd murder, we announced a five million dollar social justice fund and had sort of three three sort of areas of focus. One is emergency money, right? In the middle of the pandemic, we saw a lot of our students of color, especially struggling with access up in the middle of the night because that's the only quiet time they could get to study or get the one family computer. So what do we do for those students? And then the bigger question, longer term was, what does it mean to be? What does it mean to work at SNHU and to be a person of color in our context? And then how do we think about that in terms of students? So in our old practice, our top down practice, I would have pulled together all of our key folks that would have brought in our chief diversity officer. We might have hired a consultant. And then we would have figured out how to spend that five million and we would have announced something and everyone would have plotted us. So we said, God, this is great. We love the fact that leadership is responding to George Floyd. But we didn't this case instead is we said, we're going to create three communities of practice, 20 people each around each of these things. We're going to give them good facilitation and tools so that they know how to do community practice. And the way you get in is you have to demonstrate credibility on these questions and you have to demonstrate passion. Everyone has to know that you know stuff about this and everyone has to know that you care deeply. And you didn't get into a positional power. You get chosen because of those two things. So that's messy. And they went through this period of storming, norming, conformance, starting the work. But those three groups, they're deciding how to spend the five million dollars, not me, not my team, not leadership. We're not signing off on this. They get the authority and they're empowered to do that. That's an example where I think we get it right because now the organization feels like they own this. And you get people, right? People are serving on those capacities, again, not through positions of power, our authority, but those other criteria and they're equal members of that community and that conversation. So that's an example where I think we get it right. And I have examples, by the way, where we get it wrong as well. What's interesting, as I would observe, is that I think at the highest level of leadership, it's sinking in. I mean, it better be after all this work and we keep pounding on ourselves to get better at this. It's now actually what one trustee called the frozen middle that's kind of trying to figure this out because there are those folks who have sort of moved up the organization. They now have positions of some authority. They're kind of mid-level management, if I can use that phrase. And what got them there in our culture was you're really good at your job. And we had an individual hero culture. Hey, Brian really killed it. Like, you know, he's getting a bonus this year. We're going to shine a light on that good work. And now we're saying to them, it's really not about you, Brian. It's about you have to demonstrate to us how you took the 10 people in your team and how you made them better. How do you make them leaders? So this idea of leaders creating leaders, I know it can sound very jargony like stuff you put on conference room poster, but it really makes a difference to our people. Well, that's fantastic to hear. At least it's culture change. Culture change is hard. It is. Lisa, thank you for the excellent direct question. And thank you, Paul, for the for the very, very practical answer. We have questions about SNU and certification degrees. Keel Doomsch, longtime participant in the forum, asks straight up, I love the competency based model, but I'm afraid the degree from SNHU won't ever be esteemed in the way as an Ivy or other prestige degree. What is Dr. LeBlanc doing to address this? Well, two things. One is the prestige in our current model in which quality is so ill defined or a whole bunch of inputs and prescriptions and status markers that don't actually have a clear tie to demonstrable student learning and achievement. So what I really love about a competency model, but it only works if you have a rigorous assessment and we can talk about what that means. But in a competency model, you don't get to be able to hide behind the bush of status marker. In other words, when Clay Christensen talks about status reach across our industry, he's talking about everyone trying to work towards some ideal and that ideal is often Harvard. Like, you know, that's kind of that's blue chip or Princeton, if you wish, or Yale or Stanford. How do we look more like that? So so again, you've got a whole accreditation has been largely not entirely now with some focus on outcomes, but largely based on processes and inputs. And if you take a look at what counts for quality, take a look at the rankings, how much endowment do you have? Why do schools trying to move up the status ladder, mount up division one athletic programs? Because they think in the minds of the market, you must be more legitimate or better school if you have division one football, for example. In a competency based model, you have to do something very different. You have to stand behind the claims for your learning. You have to be crystal clear about them and why they're the right claims. But then more importantly, you have to show with great rigor that is reliability, validity, right? You've showed a great rigor that students actually have demonstrated mastery of those competencies. I think over time, employers are going to be the people who vote on this question. And when they can say from a community college, I'm getting kick-ass programmers. And like if there is some evidence, for example, the computer programmers out of, I forget which community colleges in Florida were outperforming their counterparts at Stanford, right? And this is startling to everybody. Well, how could that be? You know, Avivian Ming has did this research and it was really interesting, right? So what we know is that in a lot of elite schools, you've got students who are unbelievably good test takers and they have good general work habits, right? That's how they get in. But is it the same as being able to demonstrate genuine mastery and proficiency in the kinds of skills that employers want? So we're not, on some level, we'll never supplant the IB League in terms of status because it's about a whole bunch of other things, right? If I use Clay Christiansen's jobs to be done theory, if you come to SNHU, you come to get a job done, which is typically for our adult learners, I need a credential that unlocks an opportunity. I'm stuck, I need a better job, I need to move up. They're not thinking about status. Our employee, excuse me, our students, I always say we educate the 45% of Americans who would struggle to come up with four and two bucks for an unexpected car repair. That's who we serve. It's not Harvard or SNHU. And I think when we look at those students, that's a job they want done. For the students that come to our campus for a non-selective residential traditional campus, they want two things done. They want a credential that will give them a good career, but they also want a coming of age experience. And what we saw in the pandemic is when we separated those two things, it really shone a light on what people value or don't value. They'll say, wait a minute, I'm not paying full tuition if I don't get the coming of age experience, what are you talking about? Right, so we saw that play out in the pandemic. But I think Harvard or the Ivy League gives you a third job to be done, which is a value-added network that's incredibly powerful and it starts on the day you get your acceptance letter. Yes, that's the- And we can't match that. We had Brian Kaplan as a guest a few years ago. And he made this case as perhaps one of the most important things you get from higher education. Hey, Kyle, I would say, I got a response to Kyle in the chat and he says, but we can't have a system where S&HU grads are stuck at the bottom. They're not stuck at the bottom. If we take a look at the way they move in their life, what we see, and it's hard to get good income data and earnings data, as you know, because of arcane rules that don't allow the department of any IRS to link their databases. But we can do this with some states. It's that students have a demonstrably improved life, right? They're paying off their student loans, they're making more money. And some of our programs in inner city, it's not gonna sound like a lot to you at the moment, but to go from $14,000 a year of income to $37,000, that's a game changer, and it gets them on a path. Now, if you're saying that we don't have a selection system, this is already in place. Like, everyone knows that graduates, you know, some people have argued higher ed is itself a selection system. And of course, if you're in the Ivy League, you've been selected into the top tier. You're in the club. Well, thank you for addressing that, and thank you for the really, really solid question. We had a couple of other questions that followed up on that line. I wanna make sure that we get a chance to talk to them. Andrea Oren, who's associate dean at the Whittier College, asked about the competency model. Can you talk about the process of moving toward it? What did you do first, and who needs to be at the table? Sure, Andrea, we, so as we move to this model, you know, it's, is this a process question, or I guess it's a sort of how did we get there? For us to get there, we had to sort of create a group and separate it from the core organization. Because again, I'm gonna, you know, Clay was a huge influence on my life. He passed away last year, Clay Christensen, but he was on my board for nine years and was a trustee emeritus. We used his playbook, and the playbook said, if you can do something that's genuinely disruptive as competency-based education, if you try to do it from within the organization, the mothership will try to incorporate it or spit it out as foreign tissue. I'm mixing my metaphors. It's like the body treats foreign tissue, either incorporate or you spit it out. So my job was to create a group, stand up a team, separate them and buffer them from the core organization, which was looking over the wall saying, why can't we do that or let us get involved? What the hell's going on over there? We don't trust it. It's like just let them do their work. And then of course, it was really understanding what the model required. And it does require a different kind of thinking about how you, you ask different questions about how you develop programs. And it starts with the end, right? It starts with what are the things we want students to know and be able to do with that knowledge? How do we know those are the right things? What are those tied to? How do we validate those claims? How do we know those claims are the right ones? And then you sort of work backwards from that to say, what are the assessments that reveal that? And if you're saying what can they do with what they know, you're inherently talking about performance-based assessments, higher ed's not very good at that. We actually only do performance-based assessments, generally speaking, where our lives depend on it. Nurses, doctors, pilots, right? Hey, it's great that you got a 4.0, we don't care. You're going to take exams or you're going to take boards and you're going to put a ton of hours in in clinicals under the watchful eye of expert who are going to test to your ability. But we don't do that with most of what we teach. But so you build performance-based assessments and then you work backwards into content. Then you work backwards into learning modalities. And I think one of the things that people often, at least my own faculty, with something to say is you're trying to dictate the way I teach. And I was saying it's just the opposite. Because when you can be clear about the claims for the end of the process, for what happens at the end of it, and we can know that with confidence, i.e. good assessment, you can get students there any old way you like. I don't care. If traditional methods get you there, go for it. If all workplace-based methods get you there, go for it. Like it doesn't matter. And in fact, a book I'm just sending out is a Harvard Education Press on Monday. So right at the end here on proofreading, it includes a whole chapter on designing within competency-based and uses case studies. So if you take a look at what WGU does, looks very different than our delivery model. If you take a look at what Lipscomb does, looks very different than our delivery model. There's a wonderful School of Theology in South Dakota that's adopted competency-based learning. For those of you who think it can only be for vocational skills, wonderful, wonderful work. Well, thank you. That's another great question. We also have, I think, a clarification, or a really precise question, speaking of degrees from Tim Leubert, who asks about education degrees. You offer several master's degrees education, but no bachelor's degrees in education. Can you explain why? We do have bachelor's degrees in education, but they're at the, they're on the campus. They're in the traditional modality. And the reason we don't do it online is 50 different state compliance regimes. So it's a bear. And you come up against the same issue if you do clinical health programs as well. So it's a big, it's a big lift to get approval with each one different from the other. And we did launch, we've launched our first clinical program and we're learning how we have to move through compliance in order to do that. So this is a master's in counseling, which has a clinical component. But it is, it is a heavy lift. Thank you for answering that so directly. And Tim, thank you for the great question. The other thing I would add to that and it's one we wrestle with a lot is mapping to someone's earlier question about how, you know, the students get stuck at the bottom or et cetera, as Kyle mentioned. But I think it's, we also worry about earnings to debt in education. So we've started to map those ratios out across everything we offer to try to track that and maybe cut programs where we feel like we can't ethically ask students to borrow for a program in which their debt will be greater than their first year salary. As you know, Lupina has a calculation around this. I think the US Department of Ed recommends that a student will not spend more than 20% of their gross earnings on their loan repayment. So if you start to think about hard about that, it's not a pretty picture for a lot of the institutions including my own on this call. That's a very, that's a really keen analytical tool. Tim, thank you for the question. He's from the American Association for Employment and Education. We have another association later with the question. This is our friend Joy Connolly at the ACLS. And she asked a faculty question. Do you see a snooze faculty reward structure as similar to those or different from those in other universities and what change in faculty reward structure do you most like to see? Yeah, hi Joy. So on our traditional campus, it would look absolutely familiar full-time faculty with all of the classics that are moving up through. We don't have tenure, but we have rolling contracts where the only way you don't get renewed would be for the same reasons you wouldn't get renewed for tenure. That is moral turpitude or just cause or a program cut has to be cut across genuinely. So it would look very, very familiar. With our online programs, we use many more adjunct faculty. So the answer would be no. And they teach in a very, very different model. So we don't ask of them a lot of what we would ask for. Even an adjunct faculty member in a traditional modality. That is all of the courses have been designed in a model that goes all the way back to the 60s in the open university with design teams that include subject matter experts and instructional designers, assessment experts, content experts. So those teams create courses. So it's the only way we can do scale with some level of uniform quality assurance that is in a given semester, we might have 600 sections of intro to psych. So how do we reassure ourselves that that course is happening in a good way? Because we're asynchronous, the faculty are not meeting students in a class. They don't have that kind of schedule. And of course they're not doing committees and everything else. So we ask a full-time faculty member on our campus. So it's a very different model. Doesn't have the rewards that you would associate with traditional faculty roles. Great question. And hello, Joy. Hello, good to see you. And great answer, of course. Friends, I see you have absolutely no difficulty at all in entering questions into the Q&A box. If you would like to join us on the stage, just press the raise hand button and I'll beam you up to join us as well. We have questions from another academic adjacent association. We have Corey Snow from Salesforce. And Corey asks, noting the announced convergence of your neighbors in the New Hampshire state system. What is your view on mergers acquisitions and partnerships across the broader EDU ecosystem? Well, the ecosystem is changing before our eyes. And that's gonna include, so I think we're all meeting the same press, right? So we're seeing mergers within state systems as they deal with already. Big cuts and probably pretty long-lived cuts because the state's gonna get wracked by the impact of the pandemic and the recession. We see non-selective privates really struggling and I think we'll see mergers and acquisitions in that category. We see new partnerships and this is the sort of part of the ecosystem change that I think is getting less comprehensive attention if I can put it that way or coherence around the whole of it. You think about the Kaplan produce where you see the for-profits now kind of merging in with institutions or other examples of those as well. This week you saw the announcement of 2U, an OPM, that's bringing pretty high-branded institutions into online, now partnering with Guild which now draws the link over to large-scale employers like Walmart and Disney and Discover and others. So now all of a sudden, we've long talked about the break between higher ed and the workforce. Those two intermediaries together are now drawing a bridge or a link between them and that's a new interesting play. You've got, it used to be if you went to ASU GSB Summit probably four or five years ago, the narrative was new ed tech providers are gonna blow up the dinosaurs that are incumbent higher ed. That narrative has given a way to new ed tech providers are not gonna partner with higher ed to help higher ed do that with which it struggles. So you have other kinds of partnerships like Trilogy. We're gonna come onto your campus and we're gonna add that coding bootcamp that gets your English major with just three or six more months, more job offers and a better job. And we know right from Strata that first jobs matter. We know that if you are in a so a sub-degree or mal-employed position out of college, five years later, 50% of those people will still be underemployed. And 10 years later, 75% of that group will still be underemployed. So first jobs matter a lot. So I do think that ecosystem is changing dramatically and mergers and acquisitions and disappearances is one part, but it's only one part of a much bigger change. It's as if what's happening to higher ed is like climate change and all of the various components of the forest some are gonna be okay and thrive, some are gonna die off, some are gonna have to sort of evolve very, very quickly. And we're watching that happen right now. In real time. Yeah. Well, thank you. That was really, really good question, Cory. And thank you for that really rich response. We do have a video question and I wanna bring up a mutual friend and a near neighbor of yours. This is President Bernard Bull and a former guest on the Future Trends Forum. Let's see. Hello Bernard. Hi Paul, thanks for being here. I look forward to your book, checking it out. In some ways I'm coming from sort of the exact contrast to SNHU in terms of size at Goddard College having just sort of navigated a very challenging time. And I'm really interested though in your conversation about leadership culture. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about this because I think many of us we think of SNHU as having embraced a lot of sort of centralized control and standardization and standard practices and processes. So how does that align or clash with this collaborative leadership vision that you shared a bit earlier? Yeah, so very much again, Bernard, a work in progress, nice to see you. I would say that if you think about, we have not, actually we've moved, it's not simply more centralization, it's actually more of a matrix organization. I don't mean to sort of steep us in business speak, but the idea is we have now when we think about our business lines, and then we think, so think across the top, you've got campus, you've got online, you've got gem, which is our refugee serving program. You have community partners, which is CB programs with inner city schools. So you've got all of these lines of business. In our old model, online would have its own marketing, campus had its own marketing, everyone had their own marketing, everyone had their own, right? So now it's a matrix organization where if you can picture the graph down the left side, we've got marketing, we've got admissions, we've got IT, we've got HR, all of those cut across, so that if I lead a line of business, like if I lead online, which is our biggest, I am getting served by the centralized functions, but actually the lines of business are not centralized. They're allowed to kind of live and flourish in the way that they have to, because the needs of serving refugee learners in a camp in Kenya look dramatically different than they serving our online students here in the United States will look different again than serving homeless kids in LA County. We do have a program that does that as well. So each is allowed to kind of pull what they need, but also be different in their own way to serve particularly well the students they have. Even all of that's Evernard. I think when we talk about how do you have a learning organization, how do you sort of empower people in any of those silos, we want the newest member of the marketing team straight out of college to be in a meeting and be able to push back on the CMO and say, I don't know, like I'm just out of college. Last month I was using this platform and I look at what we're using today and I think it's really out of date. Like I need that fresh young voice to be fully in that conversation. So among the things we've been doing is training what we're calling meeting ninjas. So meeting ninjas are facilitators that anybody can call in anywhere in the organization, but their training is to make sure that every voice is heard in a meeting and to move away from kind of very traditional. The boss speaks, everyone listens and nods and there's kind of a hierarchy of input. So, and again, I do not want to overstate our progress on this, this is very much a messy work in progress. It's going to continue to take some time but we're getting there. Are there some exceptions to it? Like what are the items that you would say need to be centralized even amid this kind of work that you're doing? Well, you know, I think that's very different from organization to organization. I'm saying an obvious thing, but the way we organize today and the way we operate today looks very different than it did five years ago. It looks very different than it did five years before that. So when we were in an extremely high growth rate of that phase of our life, I mean, we were run one right now, but back in 2010, we were hiring 30 to 40 new full-time people every week, just chaos. And in that mode, we just wanted to grow and every business line had complete authority. Go off and do it. Like you didn't have to, if you don't like what you're getting from marketing, go hire your own marketing. If you don't like what you're getting from IT, go have your own IT. And of course, we got to a certain size and scale where that was just chaos, right? You got X number of LMS is going on. The SIS is breaking down because people are not putting records in the same way. You have duplication and we're not smart because we're not learning from each other. So that moved us towards when we launched the kind of one university initiative, but that had a lot to do with scale and complexity. When we were little, we could figure that out. We were small enough for me to walk down the hall and go, hey, Brian, what are you doing? Like, you're about to buy a new LMS. Though you know that Bernard just sort of did it over here last week. Have you talked to him? No, I didn't talk to him. I'm so busy, I'm going too fast. Okay, time out. We couldn't do that anymore when we were too big. So it's a really interesting dance that you do as you look at organizational growth and complexity and try to figure out how do you move this? Like I would say that we're really struggling with internal communications now because of where we've gotten. Not just because we're remote, but even before that, again, when I could walk down the hall and I knew everyone's name, even when we were pretty big, I could do that. So if Brian said, hey, just heard about this thing that we're launching, but I have no idea what that is and what the hell is it and how does it fit to mine? He could just find me and say, Paul, what's up with this thing? Today, that's not going to happen so easily. So now we're trying to figure out how do we get better at internal comms? Because I think our people are really clear about their job and their mission and where they fit, but they're definitely not clear about how well the pieces fit together. And we have a lot of plates spinning. So that's a long answer for a question. Yeah, wonderful. The more complex I regret it, it depends. Great question. Can I answer Robbins, my neighbor at Clement State University in the chat. So I think quite often the sense that CBE is very much focused on content, which is actually not focused on content, it's actually focused on competencies, what you can do with content, what you've learned. But that somehow, that's very skills are vocationally based and I would argue, and I was just having this conversation with a friend who heads up a really high, well-regarded engineering university who said, I've got this problem. My engineers' skills are gonna time out so fast now. Like they're timing out, they used to time out in five to 10 years. They're timing out in three years. And I have to make sure that we're producing graduates who have learned to learn, who can sort of have higher order thinking skills. What's got Pulse for WGU we call enduring skills. They're somehow called soft skills for some reason. They're actually harder to teach. You can teach those skills, right? You can build in learning to learn. You can build in collaboration. We do competencies around working in teams. We have competencies around giving, taking feedback constructively. We have competencies on ethical thinking and reasoning. In fact, these are some of the favorite competencies among our students because they are higher order and they serve them well in that larger way. I think that's a binary that doesn't actually hold. And the fact that you can have competence-based programs in theology. I mean, interesting, right? Of course, yeah. Yeah, I think, I mean, I've fallen prey to this where in the past there were times when I've made this distinction between sort of knowing and doing. And in fact, you can't do well if you don't know. And your knowledge without the ability to do is less useful and less deep, right? I mean, I don't want my pilot to tell me how planes land. I really would like him to stick the landing every single time I'm on a plane. I do. Someone asked, I couldn't see the question. This came from our wonderful friend and previous guest and just an overall genius, Robin DeRosa. We say that it seems like CBE is so content-focused. I wonder how students fare when the shelf life of the content gets out of date. Are we abandoning inquiry, learning how to learn, collaboration, network learning? We only focus on content. So that's when I was just trying to answer, Brian, that's really both. You have to do both. And honestly, we got to focused in our first iteration, what I call CB1.0. Some people know it as College for America. When we do not spend enough time on the knowledge part, the frameworks part. In our second iteration, CB2.0, we actually tried to address that and start to build in what are the ways we can make sure that students are demonstrating knowledge frameworks that go beyond the simple ability to do. Because as Robin is rightly pointing out, skills time out so fast now. Thank you. That's a very, very rich answer. I really appreciate it. And Robin has always asked deep, deep questions that make us rethink a lot. Tom, I can't tell you the engineering school was set in confidence. I'm not sure this person would want me talking about. Well, yeah. We have another question from my new friend, Matthew Alex, who's at Beyond Academics. And what's your question, sir? Dr. LeBlanc, it's good to see you. You have a quote that I always use. It's, time is the enemy of the poor. And it really hits home because everything we are trying to do to change higher ed is around the constraints that higher ed has put on itself, the time frame. So I would love the perspective for this audience to hear it in terms of what does time frames do for the folks that maybe are less fortunate in the ecosystem that we live in the way we serve. So I appreciate that. I love the quote. I use it all the time. And I think it's impactful for this audience. Yeah, probably most people in this call have sort of arrived at that conclusion before I did, but it's really been in the last couple of years where I've had this deepened conviction. It's at the heart of the book that I mentioned. I'm really not shilling my book. It doesn't have a title. I couldn't tell you how to order it today. But the conviction is around the degree to which, so I'll say the obvious, which is that everything takes longer if you're poor. If you don't have a washer dryer in your apartment, it takes longer to have clean clothes. If you don't have a car, at least in America, it usually takes longer to get food in your refrigerator. And you can just sort of go on and on, but also the inflexibility of time that poor people struggle with. So if I work in a fast food job, we know this is a problem, right? I can't have a reliable schedule. Well, how do I commit to a community college schedule that requires me to be at a certain place at a certain time? So it's both time and place. So, and I'll give you an example in one of our non-time-based programs, our CB program that we use with a partner named Duet and Boston, a wonderful partner. So young woman, I'm gonna call her Mary, I might think I'd call her Mary in the book, not her real name. So single mom from the poorest neighborhood of Boston, low income has a 10-year-old daughter with chronic respiratory illness. When we looked at her transcripts from Roxbury Community College and Bunker Hill Community College, probably find community colleges, but they were littered with Ws and Fs. So Mary, what's going on here? Every time a little girl gets sick, she'd miss a week of school, with the assignments, missing exams, never catching up. If it was in time, she would withdraw. If it was too late, she took the F. And you would look at her on paper and say, I'm not ready for college. I'm not in a place where she could go to college. When we put her on our program, she flew. She got her associates degree in under two years. And she said to me, line, I still remember so distinctly, we were sitting talking about her background. She said, every time a little girl gets sick, now I hit the pause button because we weren't crime-based. And she said, I make the schedule. I make the schedule. And we talk a lot about personalized learning. We could start with the simplest thing possible, which is let people learn when they can. Now, look at, there is a trade-off here. There's a con, which is we've also learned the hard way that you have to keep people on some pace. Don't have to be the same pace. You and Brian can go at a different pace, depending on your life. And you can hit the pause button, but you can't hit the pause button for long because the data is clear about this, the chances that you will not return when there's so many polls on your life really expand. But we've had enormous luck with the most marginalized learners in the world. Like we work in refugee camps in Kenya and Malawi, we're in Lebanon, we're in Cape Town, South Africa with urban refugee populations. They have no time. I mean, they line up for, it can take four hours in a day to get food and water. But by letting them learn when they can, and by giving them just the right supports in those moments, they are flourishing. They have the highest success rates of any student body we have because of that. So time is really, so think about it. Time is how we think about financial aid. It's very hard to detach from time because you have things like satisfactory academic progress. What's the, we know we define term length. Time is this weird thing we do tied to grades, which is at the 15 week mark, we decide how good you are at something. When all the research shows that in some cases, if I give Brian two more weeks, he's gonna get same grade as you. Does it matter that he took two more weeks or does it matter more that he's mastered the material in the learning that we are asking to do? Todd Rhodes has a beautiful chapter on this in his book, The End of Average. And we also know, by the way, grades are just a mess, right? Grade inflation over the last four decades. It's why employers don't trust transcripts. So I think time is just an insidious, deeply flawed way that we think about learning in America and we've built our whole system on it. It's the basic building block of it. It's how we apportion time. It's how we unitize knowledge. It's how we determine faculty workloads. It's how we place, it's how we think about student progress. It posits an average student. There's no such thing, right? It's deeply flawed and it's a terrible measure of how much, of student learning, what somebody actually knows. Sorry, that's very romantic and ranting, but it drives me crazy because it's so inequitable. And I'll be honest, in my discussions, I always use that quote because we're trying to get universities and colleges to rethink how they serve in this timeframe that we're. So, and then the question that I think we always get, or at least the roadblock is, well, accreditors are asking us to be this way or government, our subsidies are given this way. How does universities and colleges get around that? It seems like you've been able to do that a little bit. Or is this a time for accreditors to revisit the timeframe concept? The fact the financial aid is tied to it. And that, I'll leave it as that, but I appreciate it. So, accreditors can't do much about the financial aid piece. Financial aid piece is set by the federal government. It's built into federal financial aid rules. There is the provision for direct assessment, but the problem with direct assessment and form of competency based education that isn't tied to time is that none of the underlying administrative rules changed. So even though they talk a good game at the legislative level, there's a word in policymaking. It's sort of like the administrative rules did not breathe life into the body of the legislation, right? So it's been a bear for us to do this. It's not easy. And one of the things that we among others are trying to do is urge both demonstration projects and experimental sites at the federal level to allow non-time based dispersal of financial aid. So an easy way to think about this is that if you look at Pell grants, there's a lifetime limit on Pell rather than saying you can take that all up the front end and then we'll refund this R2T4 process. I see one of my financial aid people on. So I'm pretty good, I think on this, he'll correct me. What if we did X percentage? So if it's 120 competencies to get a bachelor's degree, your financial aid is given on that basis. So 120th of your total eligible amount goes to this competency. If you're doing five of them, then five times that amount, 50% at the front end when you start, 50% at the back end when you complete. So we start paying for performance for the institution too. So we get all our money. All these institutions on this call, we get all our money on the front end. Whether that student is successful or not, no matter how uneven they're learning. If they drop out in time soon, we will refund some of it. But it's really, it's a terrible system. It's a terrible system. And it fails. I mean, the reality is that 45% of students will not graduate within six years. And we see $1.6 trillion of debt and 50% of the default rate are with students with loans of $8,000 or less. Which is about that. 50% of the default rate are for poor students with less than 10. I think it's less than 10 now. Yeah. It needs to be eight. Matthew, thank you. Thank you for your question. And speaking of time, we are running low on time. And I wanna make sure that we get as many of our great questions in as we possibly can. And Paul, you are great. You're yourself. You're just giving us a fountain of information. I wanna go local and bring up a colleague of mine, Molly Chek at Georgetown University Center for New Designs and Learning and Scholarship. Molly says as a big fan, what role do you see of Chek playing in the lives of students? How can they make integrity as a competency? And Chek seems to complicate that issue. Yeah. I saw a photo of the scholar, I'm on the board of Chek and it's been getting slam lately around academic integrity and cheating. So cheating is at historically high levels. As you know, a lot of people are linking that to the pandemic and this enormous pressures, pressures that students are under. When I talked to the folks who head up academic integrity for most of us, most of my institution, which is mostly online, they would say they don't have a problem because we use a lot of authentic assessments, performance-based assessments. We don't do a lot of exams in multiple choice and the kinds of sort of test banks that a lot of faculty still use. When you look at our traditional campus, much more of a problem because our full-time faculty are more typically using kind of traditional exams and they're doing these as take-homes, necessarily because of the pandemic. So cheating has always happened, but in an age of ubiquitous content and fingertips search at your fingertips, students are gonna use all of those tools if the thing that matters is getting a grade and not learning. Like the system and our assessments are not built about learning. They're actually built about getting a grade and as students have always done, they're gonna make sure if my sort of, if my success is based on the grade and not my learning, I have a deep incentive to cheat. If I'm already working too many hours, my mental health is at absolutely no new low. I was just at an AC board meeting. 20% of our students have had suicide ideation in the last nine months. I mean, historic highs, historic highs. The impulse to cheat is so high and if Chegg didn't exist, they'd find some other way to cheat. Now the difference and I will say this and I think this is where I'm now putting my board hat on for a moment. If the problem is students using something like Chegg for cheating during exams, they've got new tools for that. And they're free, they're easy to use. This is not a pitch, but you have to sort of say to be fair to them, they're building the tools for any of your faculty who are worried about using Chegg during exam. They can go on, use this tool and will black their students out of the platform before and after the exam and it will pull before any of the material that can be shared. They're also adding staff, et cetera. But the problem in the end, I wrote a piece in Forbes about this recently. It's actually about the way we think about assessment. We have to rethink assessment. And if we're thinking about multiple choice exams and the kinds of things that people are being asked to do, these are not really good assessment practices. And we have to really rethink that. But that's a whole conversation in and of itself. It is. Thank you for mentioning your relationship and thank you, Molly for the question. I haven't seen Molly for a year because of the pandemic and I'm feeling left out. But we have another video question and then I think I will take the last question myself. And this is the video question comes from our friend, Kelly Walsh, who has been a previous guest in the program because Kelly is, among other things, an incredible expert on blended learning. Kelly, hello. Your audio is off. Kelly, you might have to do charades. Do your question. Actually, you asked it, your question is a text question. I could just ask it for you if you like. Okay, we'll do that. Thanks and stay warm in our state. Kelly's, my God, there are a lot of questions today. Kelly's question has to do with employers. Any suggestions about how higher education can help employers come to understand and apply competency-based learning and learning outcomes? So I think the first issue we've had is competencies as a sort of term of art within our industry that the world doesn't really sort of use very much. That is, if you think about it, if befuddled students when we talked about competency-based education models, like, oh, we have a competency-based program. Like, what is that? Like they think about classes. So let's rethink about how we frame. And so if you say to them, well, look at, you have, and even put it in the wrapper of a course, but make it a competency-based class in which we say, no, it's project-based. You can go as fast or as slow as you need. Like there are ways you can make this comprehensible to a student market. But for employers, they're closer because they understand competency is kind of what people can do, but they prefer skills. So there's a, as you know, a lot of emphasis right now on skills-based hiring. And we, I don't know if we will get to a point where we use skills and competencies interchangeably. A lot of people are starting to do that. So you may know that WGU and we're one of the charter members of this work that started an open skills initiative. You've got a lot of work by Lumina and around digital credentials, credential engine, excuse me. So I think employee, this is going to give us a common language with employers that I think has long been needed. And I would argue that while we get maligned, higher ed gets maligned for, you know, we're not in tune enough with what employers need. I would argue that employers are not that great about articulating what they need. We have this conversation a lot. So the hot place right now, the hot place right now is in that border land between higher ed and employment. And that's where all the action is. It's where all the sort of new tech work is going. It's why the guild and two U announcement this week was a big deal. That's all in that border land space. I don't know if I answered Kelly's question, but I think we're, I don't think this is a particularly formidable challenge. I think employers and institutions who are interested in talking about competencies and or skills will actually find common ground pretty readily. They may disagree on which is the right ones. There are a whole bunch of other things. It's not clear that employers, they talk a good game are really good at skills-based hiring yet, but some are trying. You know, we were on the phone yesterday with IBM. And IBM has been kind of a vocal proponent on this. On degree skills-based hiring, but it's probably going to happen in the tech sector far faster and more expansively than in place like healthcare. Degrees are going to matter in healthcare for a long time. Even though they're not clear-skilled. And by the way, Brian, I will say in healthcare's defense, you've done your clinicals. If I'm hiring you as a nurse, I want a degree, but I also know you did your clinicals. I also know that, you know, you were on like, there's strong assessment attached to healthcare. Now I think it's out of date assessment in many occasions because it's still clock hour driven. Right. It's not truly competency-based, which would be free from time, but at least it's there. I was going to ask you about that new feature in the chat, if you can see this link. Paul shared a link to an article he just published in Forbes. And let me know if you can see that. Just put a hello in the chat if you can make that out. Good, very good. Then I will seize the moderator's privilege and ask the last question of the day. And Paul, looking ahead a bit, I'm just curious, how are you thinking about the downstream impacts of climate change on Southern New Hampshire University? What kind of planning, what kind of envisioning are you doing now? So we, you know, we have a traditional campus and we have an ambitious sustainability program, which was to get us to net neutral by 2030. I've asked the team to move that up to 2025. It's a terribly heavy lift. It's a complicated thing to go to genuine net neutral. We have been long ahead in terms of our purchasing of alternative energy and have won EPA awards for having enormous purchasing of wind power out of upstate New York that offset our carbon uses, which is not the same as net neutral, but it sort of makes us sleep a little bit better. I do think that with the violent weather events that we will, that have already become increasingly common, one of the mega trends we will see will be more online everything, right? So that's not great if the power gets knocked out, is it? But as we saw in Texas recently, but I think we'll, you know, the notion of traveling to a physical place, I think a little bit more duffel, a little bit more problematic. So we do think that's something we wanna think about. We are actually doing some learning around delivering in places where power is not reliable. So our refugee camp work, we have now redesigned how content gets delivered when students upload, download, how it's packaged in waves and speeds up so that that doesn't cost them a fortune. So we do have some learning that's going on there as well, but it really needs to, for us, the conversation is, how do we sort of work through this at every level? So the big, big plan, the big sustainability plan, but if you drill down through that, it's what are we doing in curriculum? How are we helping our students go out into a world with a different set of questions, values, consciousness about the challenges? What programs are we now offering? Program and construction management, it has to rethink its curriculum. So it cuts across everything, Brian, as you know, there's nothing that is not touched by this existential threat, might be hardly an original thing to observe. Well, it really is. I don't want to get such a dire note. I want to say that I admire that you're thinking this carefully about it. And I think it's especially important that you've upped the deadline from 2030 to 2025, which is, that's a lot of work to be done in a short period of time. Speaking of a short period of time, President LeBronk, you've been a fantastic guest. You've just been a fountain of information and thoughts. You've been incredibly candid and direct. I just want to thank you so much. You have been a terrific, terrific guest. Thank you, Brian. You're very kind to say so. It's just great. There are a lot of old friends on this call, so it's nice to be with you and be with a lot of other folks I recognize and meet some new friends. Thank you. I'm Siglietta here. Now, please take care and let me know when your book has a title so we can share it with you. Okay. That's three meters now. Thank you. My wife, my two daughter. Now don't go, friends. I just want to let you know where we're headed for the next few weeks. And let me, again, thank you all for this fantastic amount of questions. Tonight I'm going to try to do a blog post where I gather up as many of your questions as possible, anonymize the questionnaires and post that to my blog along with the recording. Looking ahead after tonight, we have more sessions coming up on a wide range of topics. If you'd like to learn more about them, just head to forum.futureofeducation.us. If you'd like to keep talking about these issues, everything from companies to competency-based education to how to incentivize faculty to how to respond to climate change, we have all these venues on social media from Twitter to LinkedIn, Slack and Facebook. If you'd like to dive back into the past and meet some of our previous guests, everyone from Kelly Walsh to Robin DeRosa, just head to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive where we have five years worth of wonderful conversations. Now, I have to let you all go because we all have lives to go back to, but I wanted to thank you all again for a fantastic conversation. You all make this work and I'm just delighted to think together with you. Until next time, please stay safe and we'll see you online. Bye-bye.