 Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here today. You know, in higher education and community colleges, particularly, we are in a changed reality. We are in a changed reality. And that reality masquerades as issues such as transparency, or it masquerades as discussion about outcomes. It masquerades as formula-based funding for community colleges. It masquerades as new strategies for accreditation standards. It masquerades as increasing levels of employer concerns about what students know and what they don't know. There's a clear and clarion call for a new currency in higher education, one that ignores grade level, one that ignores grade awards, and instead is built around what a student knows, understanding that that is evolutionary. So once these skill sets, these skill sets, once they are known, it's not done. It's not a one-off when we move on, that they are, in fact, a requirement that we have an ongoing and continuous conversation with industry-led credentials of market value. And that is an important part of our work. We understand that this work is important, and it is urgent. And we have found that it is not necessarily new to us from the standpoint that we have been around this business for a while, particularly as it relates to secondary program accreditation groups, NLNAC, for example, in relation to nursing. We've been demonstrating this through clinicals, for example, about whether you know something or not. One of the challenges I think we face overall is how do we catalog this? What is the new credential of market value? It is standing registrars on their heads trying to figure out what this looked like. How does this fit in? How do these things transfer? What do the employers really want? Well, we know increasingly employers are concerned about what pieces of paper before them. In fact, I would say that the high school diploma is in question by employers, and actually, grades are in question by employers. Notions of grade, inflation, conversations such as that we've heard for a while. But we have an opportunity to create industry-led credentials that make sense to them in a language, in a parlance, which makes sense for them. They lead to stackable credentials of market value. Stackable credentials of market value, particularly as it relates for community colleges to those middle-skills jobs that are out there in such and high demand. I'm glad to see that Dr. Bumfuss is here from ACC. He has been leading a multi-year initiative relating to the 21st century report, which will be coming out next April, announced at the ACC annual convention, which will be announced here in DC. And I think you're going to see this work expressed in large measure in that work. Today, we have a number of folks with us to talk about how it's happening at the local level. And here with me today online is Jerry Lee Mozier from Ivy Tech Community College. We also have Linda Houdyshell from Broward College. So we're glad to have you here. And this was mentioned by me before. Mary Alice is here also. So thank you all for being here. I prepared a number of questions that I want them to react to. So as a way to give you a sense of how it's happening on the ground level, this evolution that is taking place. So as perhaps a way of introducing each of our panelists and I think maybe setting the context for the discussion, I'd like each of our panelists to talk about the current situation at their college. What is the current set of environs that have prompted themselves, the context, the organization, the leadership? What is happening that has created the context for a discussion around competency-based education to occur? And this is important because this seems so antithetical to the way that it's always been, the way we've always done things before. It creates interesting conversations with faculty when you say grades don't matter. Time doesn't matter anymore. We're talking about specific skill sets for individuals and demonstrable ability for that and how we quantify that. So it creates interesting conversations. So it's important to understand what happened on these individual campuses to allow and create the framing for this to happen. So maybe Linda will begin with you first and give us a little bit of context about what led up to the decision to move toward competency-based education. Thank you. At Broward College, we were looking at our IT program through our annual program review. And what we knew is that we had very few graduates in the BS program. And when asked, the instructors would say, well, they just come and take a class. And then they get what they want. Because of that, we were very excited to join a consortium and receive a labor grant to develop competency-based education for the IT program. We sold it not by talking about how different it was, but instead talking about, this is really what we've been doing. We've been assessing student learning outcomes. And this is just an extension of that. We knew that we could not move this from the top of the organization. We needed to have the AD or the middle administrator, associate dean in our language, actually buy in. And we were very fortunate to have a well-respected associate dean say, yes, I'd like to do this. I would say that he might be more authoritarian than we might want at times. But for this particular initiative, it worked. He asked for volunteers from his faculty. And all of it was volunteer work. He divided them into teams. And we began with wonderful training for all the faculty from Western governors. They had a developed model. So we weren't starting with whole cloth. We weren't starting without a model. And so because of the training and because we had good leadership supported at the executive level, we've been able to move this ahead. Is that enough? Excellent, excellent. Great setup. Maybe we'll jump to the spaces over our head and the speakers here with Jerry Lee. Are you still online? Yes, I am. Thanks, Dan. All right, Jerry Lee, why don't you give us the same kind of contextual setup, if you would, for what's happening out at Ivy Tech, please? Certainly. Ivy Tech as a singly accredited community college embraced the Lumina Big Bowl several years ago. But in addition to that, Ivy Tech Northeast in working with our Economic Development Partners and the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership also was embracing the big goal of 60% of our citizenry holding an advanced degree certificate or industry certification by 2025. This particular embracing of this big goal really made us recognize that we needed to do things a little differently than the way we've been doing them. And so when we received a call from really Sally to work with WGU in the GAIS grant to identify one of our IT programs and working in competency-based education, it seemed as though that this would be a great start with working with some of our quality faculty and our administration to move us forward in doing things differently in order to address the big goal initiatives. So consequently, we are as the second largest region of Ivy Tech and working with the Lafayette region as two of the 14 regions in the statewide institution. We are the two that are working towards this end and identifying how we work as a region or as a statewide institution in adopting competency-based education in the certificate that we'll begin providing in January of 2014. Excellent. Excellent. So thank you. Thank you. And Mary Alice, I'm really glad you're here because you provide a unique perspective with your experience at the Department of Ed and now here at the New America Foundation, especially your work with regard to the TAC grants as Eric was alluding to earlier. So I think you have the ability to give us some unique insight into what you're seeing among the community colleges and the process that is currently ongoing and what their vision is for the future based on what you've seen, if you want to share those thoughts with us. Sure. I'd love to, Dan. I'd also like to address just a minute this question of what are the forces sort of leading to so much interest in competency-based models, but think of it more from a federal level. And then what are the hopes of getting that out of it? Because I can't speak quite as much from an institutional level. But having worked both in the Department of Labor and in the Department of Education, I do think that this overarching context of just awareness sort of beginning with the recession that has just become so clear of the need for post-secondary credentials on the part of all adults in order to be able to make a viable living and gain economic self-sufficiency was something that the Department of Labor and the Department of Education were both grappling with. The data was just so overwhelming on this point and also the reality that so many adults were pushed out of work during the recession and needed to find opportunities to rapidly recredential and reskill. So that the Department of Labor, we saw the department develop a high priority performance goal of increasing credential attainment by 10% of all of their participants and their programs, which was a real acknowledgement that there was a need to make people's skills visible and make people's competencies visible. And then the Department of Education, you had another goal set by the president, which was the 2020 goal of increasing the number of individuals holding post-secondary credentials. So you can see there's this overlapping need to make people's skills visible, what they can do. And that's why I think increasingly the departments found themselves talking about competencies and finding a shared language around competencies. And that really came together in the tact grants then. And so the tact grants were an opportunity to build the capacity of community colleges to deliver services to these adult learners who may already have a lot of work experience, but just simply lack credentials. So that's what we saw is in the applications coming in the first round, the second round, there was just so much emphasis on sort of on stackable credentials, on prior learning assessment, on helping people who already had skills to get credit for them, and helping people who already had a lot of knowledge and experience accelerate their path towards a degree. So there are a lot, I mean, I think the other folks have already talked about the institutions that are doing this well. And I think it sort of reflects this larger context that is hopefully supporting these developments at the local level. Excellent, great insight, thank you. Jeremy, maybe we'll start with you. I wish you could see this. We've got a chair for you, we've got a microphone, we've got a name tag for you, it's pretty cool. So you're here virtually. Let me move on to the next question. Some of the realities, as the session is called here, this portion on our agenda is talking about building these models on our campus. There are some practical realities that many of our colleagues need to get a handle on. And those realities relate to the discussion. They relate to the conversation with faculty, with industry leaders, their conversations with our registrars, with our student services people, with our counselors and advisors and transfer organizations. In some ways this conversation is familiar, but for some, it is really adjunct and it is disruptive. Can you talk about how you've begun this conversation on your campus and how you've dealt with this? What kind of reactions have you had from these various groups? Certainly, really, I think as most leaders know, when you start innovation, and it's all usually innovation at the local, the selection of the right people that get started is a key critical factor. And so, in talking with WGU in the beginning of the grant, we identified, basically, one faculty member who was a program chair in our computer information system who had a wide history with the college, but also had a lot of respect by colleagues throughout the institution, the state and institution. So Dr. John Feese, in selecting and selecting, having her selected courses and certificates and working in collaboration with Paul Addison at Lafayette, they really drove the development of the coursework. But they needed administrative support and Dr. Kathy Maxwell, who is our Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, provided really administrative support and guidance regarding implementation of the person effectively within our structure. We really probably missed this step or two in the very beginning, creating style with all financial aid folks, with our registrar and working through some of the systemic issues of support around the certificate. So we did some really quick catch up now over the last couple of months in order to ensure that that certificate would be offered in January. So I would recommend to folks really understand the implications throughout this system, as Ted had indicated, with your student services personnel, with your accrediting body and having that communication with your sitting body really on this, you're working at changing some of the way you deliver the courses. It's not so much, it's not direct assessment at this point, but it is the way in which you're delivering and just communicating that fact to the accrediting body. I think there is some confusion, at least with a lot of institution about what exactly and how it's delivering. We've spent a pretty bit of time over the last month or so really communicating. And we could have done that earlier and it would have been much smoother as we look towards our implementation date. Great, great. Thank you, Jerly. How about you, Linda? What are your thoughts? Well, I think the easiest way to answer the question would be to list some of the places where we had to, well, we had resistance or difficulties. The first was with faculty who thought of this as a commercial model. Anything that would take away from the traditional college program, they thought of was perhaps cheapening or making it less than. So we had to make sure that they felt indeed that this was just a different form of education. It met different students' needs and it allowed for more diversity in our student body. The rigidity of our standard semesters in terms is a real problem. Everybody needs to start at the same time and they need to end at the same time. And so we needed to figure out a way, and currently it's a manual way, of allowing students to take more than one course in a term or a semester, being able to finish earlier and receive a grade. And in the 20 students we have enrolled since August, we have at least two students who have completed two courses already and we aren't even at the end of the full semester. So as I said, it's manual currently. To make this full-blown, we're going to have to have a different system for that. Grading in transcripts was a real concern. As Sally mentioned earlier, students need to be able to transfer. They need to have a transcript that indicates what they've actually learned. Broward, we've decided that AS, a satisfactory, is a B, 87%. And if they do not achieve that level, they do not pass or complete the competency. Again, this is a manual process. Accreditation was a concern. I know that in our accreditation area, Dr. Whelan is here and she's convened several, at least a couple meetings and committees to discuss competency-based education. And I know that we'll be able to work that through because of their emphasis on student learning outcomes. Financial aid, we were very fortunate to be able to work through the financial aid issues without as much difficulty as we thought because financial aid is always thrown up as the stop. Oh, can't do that, financial aid. Can't do that, financial aid. But we found that we were able to do that. And the final thing was suitability for the student body. This is not right for every student. There are students, perhaps the one straight out of high school, who need to have more structure, need to have face-to-face, need more of a cohort model. But it is a wonderful model for students who want to accelerate their learning, who have prior knowledge, who want to enter at any point in a term because adults don't know they need the education exactly on August 19th. They may get laid off in September and need to start a program in November. This allows that to happen. Those are great insights at my own institution. We're facing some very similar kinds of things. And in fact, one of the rallying cries among some of our faculties that I'm trying to remake our institution into a Western Governor's University. I thought, well, what's wrong with that? Truly, I think what the elk hitting aside, I think that the biggest issue is that the speed at which change is occurring is really troublesome for people who have had stability. Higher education abhors change. Only wet babies like change. Everybody else, not so much. And so from our perspective, I think it is absolutely important, and I think what we're hearing among our colleagues here is that we have to recognize the fact that these are real fears that our faculty and staff have. And they present themselves as stress. They present themselves in lots of physiological ways, but they can also present themselves as potential barriers, financial aid, accreditation, things that are put up to stop the process. What is clear in what I'm hearing from Jerry Lee and Linda and my own recognition, our institution, is that these fears are real and they must be addressed. And so to that degree, we must, at the front end, involve not only industry leaders, but we also must engage as partners, our faculty, into the creation of this work. And that may take some time, and that's not a commodity that we have a whole lot of. So we need to get about this business, I think, pretty quickly, but also realizing that we need their input and understanding and support, and we need to hear their objection and concerns and try to allay those. I think also at risk, and I think that WGU has been a phenomenal leader in this regard, is that the notion of what is a faculty member is changing by itself with WGU. There are actually a disaggregation, if you will, of what have been traditional responsibilities of faculty and having that notion of discussion and what constitutes a faculty load and how am I going to get paid. It is interesting that the Carnegie unit is up for debate right now. If you look back to the true origins of it, it was how faculty were going to get paid. And it is interesting that we've kind of come full circle on that discussion about what are the responsibilities of faculty and perhaps we think about that differently. So we're all trying to move through this space together. And I guess I'm interested in hearing from all of our speakers, maybe Mary Alice will start off with you in recognizing that there are challenges plenty out there as we move to fundamentally disrupt and create this innovation across our institutions. I'm wondering what advice you talked about grappling earlier. What advice would you give our colleagues in dealing with these challenges? What suggestions would you offer them on a go forward basis? Well, there's a couple of things come to mind. I think the first is one that Linda already mentioned, which is competency-based education isn't necessarily for everyone. So I think there's some, sometimes you hear fear that the entire institution is then going to adopt one model and one approach to doing education and that it's not going, it's going to take over, it's going to replace everything that's there. And instead of thinking about having multiple modalities on campus, multiple models that meet the needs of different students, and that that's a way then to make again the institution a place of just a lot of creativity and experimentation. And so I do think thinking about competency-based and being able to engage faculty and engage administrators in the degree to which it creates opportunity to better meet the needs of just an incredibly and growingly diverse group of students is a way to do it. And I would add to that, that I do think that the department's recent letter on direct assessment that outlines, that clarifies how institutions can gain that authority and how they might work with their accreditors to do that is still something that there's a lot of experimentation to be done in that area. I think the opportunities to work with employers in a much more engaged fashion and to develop models in which assessment is taking place at the workplace and informal learning is being credentialed, opens up whole new opportunities. So I do think that to the degree that institutions can see this as an opportunity to not to replace their current model but to build and expand on it and provide more opportunities and more modalities that work for more students, hopefully the more we can sort of engage the entire community. The other thing I would say too is that one of the pieces of feedback I think is coming from the tax grants and that I always hear whenever I talk to institutions doing competency-based education is the importance of the role of mentors and coaches. And again, I think this is a new and exciting way that we're learning about how to help people learn isn't necessarily what we always thought it was and that there may be even more, thanks to technology and the ability to reach many students, there may be ways to really effectively coach and mentor students in a cost-effective way that again, works for everyone, the institution, the students, et cetera. Excellent, thank you. Linda, your thoughts? One of the things that we grapple with is, and it's been, you mentioned it also, is we're a unionized college. And certainly adhering to the union contract and their definitions of load and how people are paid and how much they can work and all of those things has been a major issue for us. Fortunately, because of the grant, we've not had too much problems. But without that incentive, I think we would have had difficulty with that. Jairley, how about you? Your thoughts on grappling with this? Certainly, I couldn't agree more that it's not a one-size-fits-all. You know, it really is just one methodology in order to address student learning and to address the relief and needs that our employers are telling us that they require regarding the future workforce. And that engagement of the employers is absolutely critical in helping to define what those competencies may be. And whether it's competency-based education or whether it is in other programs that we're going to be offering, that engagement of our employers is going to help us validate what we're teaching our students as they perceive throughout their educational career. And so whether we do it in competency-based education, which I think is a very valid delivery model that really validates what the students are learning, or whether we work in another delivery model, it's how we can really fluctuate and adapt more quickly to what those demands might be. And sometimes large institutions and the regulations that surround those, the processes, makes it more difficult for us to adapt. And so we've just got to be cognizant of that fact and make sure that everyone recognizes that that's our role and function. Nicely said. Thank you. Maybe a final question for all of our panelists prior to the question and answer section. And I think, Mary Alice, you've got a unique position for this, and that is your thoughts, general final comments you want to make, but even more particularly, where do you think this is going? I mean, we're kind of on the leading edge. Some would say bleeding edge of this work. Where do you think we're going from here? Well, gosh, I wish I had a crystal wall. So that's a, yeah, trying to avoid predictions at all costs. But no, but I would say I think we're moving in exciting directions and a direction that I'm particularly excited about just because of my interest in sort of better connecting post-secondary education, higher education with what's happening in the labor market is that competency-based education is a space where employers and institutions of higher education can meet, where the public workforce system, it can also be a partner. It's a space that I think speaks to a wider variety of partners. So I think what we can hope to see, in particular is competency-based education being a strategy to help rationalize our credentialing systems so that people who learn things at work, and we all learn lots of things at work, can use those things to leverage their movement toward an academic degree and that they can move seamlessly in between work and school and work and school and make their skills constantly visible. Right now, these two credentialing systems, certifications and industry-based certificates live in one world while academic degrees live in an end, certificates live in another world. Increasingly competency-based education is a place where the institutions of higher education become open to new kinds of partnerships and can work with different credentialing systems to create currencies that move back and forth. Great. Linda, let me maybe direct a little bit more for you and ask you, as you offer your final comments, if you would also maybe react to the notion that this is just a pendulum swing. It's shoving everything into competency-based education and we're focused on business and industry and certainly higher education has to be bigger than that. Are you concerned about that on a go-forward basis? No, I'm not concerned about that. I have heard that argument. In fact, I often think about the leaders in this movement as needing to be change whispers. What I found is that when we announced that it's a big change and we're going to do competency-based instruction, people go, oh, no, no, no. But when you talk about working with employers, when you talk about defining skills, making sure that across the continuum of faculty, all students have the same level of support and have the same assessments, they're very supportive. It's when we talk about it as a big change, they get really scared because they worry about their jobs and what they've been doing for their entire careers. Jerry Lee, in offering your final thoughts, I thought maybe you would address this question as well and that is competency-based education works really well for these kinds of mechanical processes. The arts and the humanities, they don't lend themselves to this very, very well. It's kind of like defining love. You know it when you see it, when you feel it. So what thoughts do you have on a go-forward basis about arts and humanities, the higher things that we look to? How do we codify those and put those into tidy little boxes on credentials and transcripts? You know, Dan, I wish I could answer that. I'm not sure because I'm not a subject matter expert in one of those areas, but I do think that the faculty who work in arts and humanities could, coming together, define ways and competencies that they believe that those students should have upon completion of coursework because they do that now with their learning objectives of what they want students to know. So it can define and measure and assess that within a competency-based model. I think that it is possible, but I would leave that up to the faculty who are working in the area in order to drive that particular initiative. Very good. Well, thank you, Julie. I know we've got a few moments here to offer. I know we're standing between this panel and a coffee break, so maybe that will expedite questions. We'll offer, we'll receive any questions you have. Yes, please. And that is for many of us in community colleges. The place that we have addressed some of these challenges already is remediation because that's where we have put in accelerated learning programs and we've had to address the time issue, the registration issue, the financial aid issue. So we can actually show faculty in some of these areas, look, we did it. It was hard. It was very challenging, but it's there and it's on our campuses already and it's working and students are successful at it. So that's one way to, we've already done the whispering. Now we can do the shouting and the hurrays. Excellent, thank you. Yes. Hi, I'm Dorothy Wax. I'm with Cale. And I have a question about how, you've talked a lot about the faculty and some of the administration, but how has competency-based education changed the advising process at your colleges? Linda, do you wanna try that one? Well, we have moved the advisors for this program into the program so that if a student wants to go into this particular program, which is computer systems technician and analyst, their advisor is right in the program. And faculty have also picked up the role of advisors. We're not saying, well, your faculty and this is an advisor, they do both of those things. Jerry, any other thoughts on your end? No, we are just beginning with the advising component of students. And so obviously we've informed them about some of the basic requirements we have for students, but we can be able to tell you more information after we move through this next semester. Yes, go right ahead. One other comment about the advising. Every student that we've admitted into this program meets with an advisor who discusses everything about the program prior to being admitted. So it's not just, I can sign up for it. Next question, yes, in the back. Thank you, Fred Winter, with the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. Thank you, Dan Phelan, for the wonderful analogy about the diaper. I will trade with one of my old former provost that in dealing with faculty engagement and preparation, there is no dead wood, there's only kindling. And in that context, my question for the panel, are you adopting or funding a need for different strategies in faculty preparation and engagement when working with contingent and adjunct faculty as opposed to full-time faculty? Jerry Lee, do you wanna try that one? Well, I know we've done some training. Joan Heise, again, as program chair, has done a lot of information to the adjunct faculty working with her program and has worked with Paul Addison at Lafayette. So all of that is in the works, but since we are not beginning this particular our program until January, we're anticipating that Joan and Paul will be the initial faculty members as full-time faculty members. And as what they learn, we'll then be transmitted through adjunct professional development opportunities through this next semester. Ours is the same way that we're using full-time faculty on overload. That's how they're doing the teaching. And they have been in all the trainings that Western governors have provided. I was recently out at Western governors learning about their program and their unbundled faculty model and found it very interesting that there is a course faculty member and a student faculty mentor, a course mentor and a student mentor. So this unbundled model does seem to require a very different approach to training faculty and what their specific capabilities and qualifications are. And I think it's a great question. Clearly a higher attention to professional development is absolutely essential being on the front end of this. Absolutely. There was a question here, yes? I'm Kate Giltcher with the Department of Education. My question has to do with the learning resources. What are you using as learning resources? Are you indeed using those that are not external to your institution and what percentages of them are you incorporating? Our faculty have developed 11 courses and they've looked at external resources, but they've also developed on their own and are developing actual labs for students to work through, simulate the kind of work that they're doing in being a computer tech or a systems analyst. So my answer would be, we're using everything that we can find and we're developing what isn't there. I would echo what Linda is saying as well. Our experience is pretty much the same. In many cases, we're actually plowing this ground afresh by virtue of working with industry professionals and defining what those are. In some cases, we have post-secondary accreditors out there with a clearly defined set of competencies that they must have in order to sit for state boards, for example. So we're able to catalyze those as well as conversations from our employing community about specifically what they're looking for. And some of this work we're developing on the front end. Jerry Lee, did you have thoughts about your experience there, about resources? No, I would also echo that we're using everything available and developing those items that people need to best do to students and the competencies that have been identified. So they've done a Yeoman's job of really developing a whole cluster of resources that students can call upon. Very good. Well, I know we're out of time to keep us on schedule. I want to extend my thanks to our panelists here today and also to ACE and Western Governors and the ACC and the New America Foundation here for making this possible to begin the conversation. Thank you so very much. Thank you.