Innovation in Continuing Education: The 60-Year Curriculum

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Michael Horn, joined by my colleague Jeff Salingo, and we're excited for our guest today. We've got Hunt Lambert, the dean of the Continuing Education Division school at Harvard University. Really thrilled to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Oh, it's great to be here. Thank you, Hunt.

A question we love to ask our guests when we get started is how did you get involved in higher education to begin with? And just sort of from a personal angle, why this crazy space?

So, like so many like me, it's a complete accident. I don't want to pretend it was intentional. I had a long industry career as a serial entrepreneur, creating companies all over the world in the Internet and wireless space. And I was done with that at 38 and bored. So I started to teach, built an entrepreneurship center for a Public University, became VP of Economic Development, launched 15 companies out of our labs, and then got really concerned during the big state budget cuts that we weren't serving the students we used to and proposed and got money to create a new public online university called Colorado State University Global Campus. And we grew that very efficiently. It's now 20,000 students from nothing. And then took ideas from that back to the research campus and launched degree programs from the faculty, and that was very successful. And then Harvard called and I said,

who the right reaction?

Yeah. I was like, you mean you do this too? And discovered Harvard had been doing this for more than 100 years and did it at a very affordable cost, which is highly unusual in the Harvard environment. And I said, wow, if they can do it, anybody can do it. And if I can go there and give that message, maybe it'll empower us to get the 30 million we don't serve.

But going to Harvard also is tradition and highly ranked place. They're kind of resistant to change once in a while. Did you find that in even in the continuing education world or did you feel like they were going to be willing to be more experimental?

So this was a surprise to me and probably is to listeners as well. Is on the edge of Harvard sat this division of Continuing Ed with an extension school that had been going for more than 100 years and had been building online courses since 1997. And I discovered they had this little entity that was their teaching and learning innovation group, and it had money to invest to innovate. Low tuition because the Harvard name makes it less expensive to acquire new students. If you don't mind using that term in higher ed and that money went back into innovation. And in fact, Harvard was way ahead. And so exactly the motivation I had to help start Colorado State's global campus. I said, wow, Harvard can serve tens of thousands of students around the world at a fraction of the Harvard campus price because you're not paying for campus. And we can extend these incredible programs all over the world with modern technology. And we do that this year. We have 600 online courses and 22,000 online students.

Wow. And so you're actually sitting in a continuing education school at a very interesting time in our human history, I would argue, because the imperative for what we've maybe cliche now, but lifelong learning has perhaps never been more important. Given the technological change in careers and workforce and just half life of knowledge decreasing and so forth. How do you frame that challenge and opportunity from a dean position?

So one of the things we've spent the last four years doing is dramatically bending the cost curve for delivering courses. And we've done that with technology and we've actually got it down. So we can deliver a live, small, intimate course anywhere in the world for about $4,000 a semester of total technology cost. That means we can do highly intimate Harvard type courses online. But it also means since all of this is public access tools, anybody can do it. And so we sit here in Harvard and say, now we can be Harvard and we can be Harvard affordable. And who is it we serve? And the key to who we serve is it's an adult part time learner in the extension school. And Harvard understands that there are a great number of very smart, very capable adult learners and we attract them. And I looked. I have a great story. I was at an alumni and student event in Miami a few weeks ago and I had learners standing in front of me aged 15 to 75. Wow. And it brought back to me is right now, perhaps by accident, through our summer school, our professional programs, our graduate certificates that stack into degrees, we're serving this community of learners across a 60 year learning life. And we as higher ed have been touting for a long time, they need to be lifelong learners. You need to be lifelong learners. And I said, what if we turned this around and said, wait, it's our responsibility as higher ed to help you across this. You're going to have 30 jobs in three careers over 60 years. If you're a recent college grad, what if we started repackaging our curriculum purposely and called it a 60 year curriculum? It's an idea that Gary Matkin started out of the University of California, Irvine. And we've assembled a global group that's going to get together in June to try to figure out what it is, because I think it is the future of divisions of continuing ed, meaning that

deans from a bunch of continuing ed schools will come together to start to define, standardize, figure out what is a 60 year curriculum, what are the key parts, how do you help students navigate what else is involved in that?

So I think there's three parts to it. And yes, I've got a group of 29 of us that have gotten together as deans of big CE units at big research universities and it's a global group, but we've also brought in industry and nonprofits because we think it's bigger than us when you talk about this big a part of our economy and our workforce. And we're not pretending we know what it is and we're not pretending the answer is the same for every school. And so the three parts we're doing at Harvard is one, we've invested heavily in what we call learning engineering. Can you engineer predictable learning outcomes through the design and delivery of courses and measure it in real time and continuously improve? That's our 10 year learning engineering strategy to create a new engineering field. We have a 60 year curriculum strategy where we say over the next decade we are going to figure out what this is and how to purposely serve a student across this wide range. But then is the key part that's probably the hardest, honestly, and that's to build the strategic information systems that lets us do it. And we are in the process of building that, of saying what if all this learning engineering information about every course, every student, every path to success was integrated with your entire catalog from age 15 to 75. And you could build an Amazon type recommendation engine based on students profiles of what they've done with you, what's on LinkedIn, and actually be a part of their lifelong learning.

So hun, you said an interesting thing there called a pathway or path, right? Typical undergraduates, typical graduate students have that pathway. They kind of know when they apply and come in, you know what they need to do to get to that credential. The issue that or the thing that we've talked about a lot on this podcast is, you know, a lot of this quote unquote lifelong learning, which maybe we could come up with a better term for that is I kind of

like 60 year curriculum. 60 year curriculum, I think that may

be the way to go, is self directed, right? So do you imagine having a bunch of Pathways so that people who are not great at self directing their own careers or their own learning after somebody has done it for them for most of their life. Could you imagine structured pathways that would lead them to where they need to be?

I actually might not use the word structured pathways. And the reason for that is I think at least half of the jobs that will exist in 10 years don't exist today. So it's presumptuous to pretend you know what a structured pathway. The way I describe it inside Harvard, what we have all done historically, two four and seven year curriculum are necessary and they used to be sufficient. They're not sufficient anymore. What is sufficient is that somebody hold a learner's hands. There are 6,500 universities and tens of thousands of private education providers just in the United States. And I might use Amazon, I mean an Amazon recommendation engine. They know you, they have some sense of what you need next. I think that concept could be applied in higher ed with an information system. And in a time when trust is falling everywhere, I think the great research universities and perhaps the university where you did your undergraduate is somebody you can trust to give you advice. So more than pathway, I'm thinking of hand holding

something. We've speculated about that. Right now you have financial advisors. Why not learning advisors that sit alongside you? How do you pay for that? Because that's a much longer relationship potentially that you're talking about.

There's two ways to pay for it. First, you need a really sophisticated CRM, the type of thing people are building in Salesforce. But I look to Paul LeBlanc and what he's done at Southern New Hampshire as a lead indicator. He's built a system much like that at a very affordable tuition price, meaning college for America. College for America. But also the Southern New Hampshire offerings where you do have an advisor over a very long period of time. Now theirs is structured within degrees because the regulatory structure is still locked in the credit hour.

Well, they have exemption for cfa, but they're still in the financial aid system

and we all are. But if you look at who comes back to me and my peers and our schools, they are almost all self pay. Many of them get some support from tuition reimbursement from their companies. But our student is characterized by being 34 years old, working full time and often with a family. And the reason they're such good students is when they decide to come back, they're paying their own money and their own time that they're taking from work and family and they need help. They don't have time to figure out what's the next.

Right.

And of course right now they can self pay.

Right.

Because maybe they're taking a course here, a course there, but in the 60 year curriculum you're going to be going to school probably more and over a longer period of time, which is going to likely be more expensive. Do you think there needs to be other. Some other sort of funding mechanism or do you think the cost could be low enough over that 60 year curriculum or you could pay a subscription fee for something like that that allows you to kind of spread that cost over

time From a public policy perspective, I argue in Washington often the Title four needs to be broken apart and it needs to apply. And equip was an attempt to do that, but they made it so complex, honestly, that it can't work.

Yep.

And so I do think Title IV should be taken apart and allowed to support. But I also think there's a requirement for the provider to lower the price. And one of the things we've done at the extension school is you can do a whole undergraduate degree for about 50,000 and a whole graduate degree for about 30,000 from Harvard with no support from our endowment. And we make a surplus to reinvest in technology.

Wow.

Right. But hun, as you know, many of your counterparts, they're really seen as kind of a real revenue generator. Right. So cost is sometimes higher or the price is sometimes higher because they need to generate enough of a margin to deliver back to the residential campus or the main campus. So that might be possible at Harvard. Do you think it's possible at universities across the country?

Yes, I absolutely do. And I think the technology that we've implemented and others have implemented have lowered the unit cost and so.

Right. But I guess what I'm saying is that you could lower the unit cost, but there's still gonna be this pressure on these divisions to produce a certain amount of revenue from the. From the main campus. From the main.

I agree with that, but I'm also from my entrepreneurial background, you can go for margin on low quantities or you can go for quantity. The unserved market in this country is between 30 and 60 million. And if you could get your price. I'll give you an example. We lowered the price of poetry in America from Lisa Nu this semester from its normal 1500 $2700 to $200. We wanted to do an experiment for a course that people didn't pay for particularly. We got 11 students a semester and we wanted to make it available for their teachers to take and teach to their high school students. So we jumped enrollment in one course where we ran this experiment from 11 to 360 in one semester. At 360 or $200 a course, the course pays for itself. So I'd argue if you're going to penetrate the underserved market, you have to lower price and be prepared to manage volume.

Yeah, and I love the way as a disruptive innovation acolyte, I love the way you said unserved also because that 30 to 60 million is often an overlooked opportunity. Switching gears a little bit just with the time we have remaining. I suspect some of our listeners aren't familiar with how a continuing ed program that sits within a university of the signaling power that a Harvard degree has, how that would work for graduates of the continuing ed program. They get a credential. How does that seen in the marketplace? How is that? How does Harvard see it? Just reflecting on that signaling power that Harvard has?

No, it's a really good question. I get it a lot from students and alumni. Harvard has 12 degree granting entities and each of those schools you have that name on your credential. Ours is the Harvard Extension School. The world mostly knows that means I put out the energy to go back to school part time while working full time and earn a Harvard degree. Most people who know our students and our alumni know that they did the same courses that are just as hard as Harvard courses. They just can't take the time or don't have the money to enjoy a full time residential experience. And so the credential is not the same as Harvard College or Harvard Law School or Harvard Business School, but it is Harvard Hunt.

Really appreciate all that you're doing that you're innovating for those 30 to 60 million and redefining what continuing ed and education in general looks like. Thanks for joining us in Future U.

Thank you for having me.

We'll be back right after this

this episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. For more information and to apply to our next cohort, go to Georgetown asu. Edu. This episode was also made possible with support from the Entangled Group, where innovation meets operations. Entangled is a venture studio focused on helping the education ecosystem transition to support the knowledge economy. We build companies and nonprofits that support higher education institutions as they innovate to carry out their critical missions for society in the 21st century.

And welcome back to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo here along with my colleague Michael Horne. And we just finished up that great conversation with Hunt Lambert from Harvard. These continuing education programs have always interested me because I think at many institutions, and no offense to these colleges, they see them as cash cows, especially with these name brand institutions, a place like Harvard. But it seems like Hunt, because their cost of acquisition for getting students, because their name is so low, they're able to reinvest that in some of the technology and other work that they're doing there.

Yeah, and we had the opportunity after the, I would say cameras, but microphones stopped rolling just to talk to them about some of the technology stack that they've developed and so forth. And it's fascinating over at the Harvard Business School they've been doing this experiment really for the last five years called HBX and HBX Live. And HBX Live is basically a way to recreate the Harvard Business School 90 person classroom, but all online with it's sort of like espn. I've taught a class in it before and it's a wild experience with cameras running around and big faces in front of you and you can call on them and so forth. But Hun said, we basically looked at that and said okay, there's actually 16 really important principles that you can derive around learning and creating a great experience from that. And then we've worked with Zoom to the company that is widely available so you don't have to have the HBX however live, however much that costs platform, but just Zoom to embed those principles. And then we are able to do classes, synchronous classes with both face to face and online students using the Zoom platform to create a very seamless learning experience for 60 students. And then you can even tape some of that and add asynchronous students on top of that and things like that and just driving costs down to serve many, many more students on an existing course base. The innovation from a learning perspective is interesting. The innovation on a technology perspective is interesting. The innovation on a cost perspective is interesting.

So you know, he's also talked a lot about what he terms the 60 year curriculum. We were recently on a panel at ASU GSV Michael, where with Strada, they're launch, launching a new institute on the future of work. And we were talking about a new term for lifelong education that they're going to be trying to define in the next couple of months and maybe 60 year curriculum might be one of the possibilities for that.

I quite like it. Ryan Craig, our friend from University Ventures Fund suggested pathways and I think you sort of floated that to Hunter.

Yeah, he didn't like that.

He didn't like that.

Well, I think I added the word structure and I think that's.

It's an important point.

It's an important point. Right. We didn't get to talk about the, the demographics and the backgrounds of students who go to Harvard Extension School. I'm sure they're not as highly in terms of academics of the other graduate schools or the.

Yeah, I mean it looks different from living up there. It definitely looks different.

But this idea that he talked about this four year, seven year, five year curriculum, that they do have structure for undergraduates and graduate students. One thing that still makes me nervous about this conversation about lifelong education is that the people who have an education, I think are much better at structuring that over the course of their lifetimes. Just because, by the way, you have a college degree doesn't necessarily mean you can structure. I mean, as we know, a lot of students have trouble getting through an undergraduate or graduate program because they can't self direct their own learning. And so now we have this belief that suddenly, okay, if we call it lifelong learning, 60 year curriculum, whatever it is, it's going to be continual, that suddenly people are going to be able to figure out like what they need to do and when they need to do it. And so I think there's going to need to be some structure to it. I understand his point about the future of work and jobs are changing so quickly that you don't want something too structured. But if you kind of leave it open ended, I think that the people who already take advantage of lifelong education are going to be the same people are going to take advantage of it in the future.

Yeah. And that's why I suspect we'll see evolution in this. But you asked the question about, are you thinking about subscription models and things that we've speculated on this podcast in the past and, and it seemed, at least at this point, the answer is no. But I think that has to change because you're going to have to create a relationship with a learning advisor or some sort of intelligent tool that isn't just sitting with you while you're learning, but actually is looking at your progression in careers, the changes in your industry and so forth to be able to adjust to you. And the other thing that made Me a little nervous. Just, you know, the Amazon analogy. Amazon gets recommendations wrong so often that I'm not quite sure that's the mental model. I take the point. I think it's useful to think about how it could improve these recommendations and help you chart a course. I'm just not quite convinced that's the right mental model for what we ultimately want.

Yeah, and you've mentioned that before, so I'd love to know what's in your Amazon or Netflix.

Q.

That keeps getting wrong.

But.

But maybe that's a discussion for a future episode of Future you. I mean, the other thing you need for those models to work. Right. You know, a lot of people are experimenting with those at the undergraduate level, of course, around advising is that you need a lot of data. And the question that I have is for again, adult students, continuing education, are you going to have enough data to make those recommendations? You know, he talked about you're going to have to pull in stuff from LinkedIn and other venues and a. Are you going to be able to do that? I think increasingly because of what's happening with Facebook, you're going to see a lot of these platforms, more forms, more walls on stuff like that. And then of course, it requires you to continually update those things. And again, at the undergraduate level, because the student is in your ecosystem, you have a lot more control over the data you have on them and how you use it. Once they get outside that ecosystem, even if they're alumni, you have a lot of. Less control over that.

Yeah. You know, Tom Van der Ark, writer in the Future of Education and Thinker and former head of the Gates foundation on Education, has often written about this notion of a learner portfolio or this personal report card is the wrong word, but that almost follows the learner and the learner owns and can bring its interoperable with learning systems to almost insert into the learning program that you're entering. And then it can read that and start to understand you and make recommendations. I don't know what this looks like. I think he calls it a learner backpack. But I think there's going to have to be some innovation and evolution on this question. To your point, the other thing you need, and he talked about this, was the learning engineering that they're doing. You need to be able to improve that learner experience such that you both create more motivating and efficacious courses and also courses that are able to capture the data from your clickstream from different actions you're taking, not just formal assessments to be able to sharpen those predictions based on what you actually know and can do. And that learning engineering, you know, Brewer Saxberg at Chan Zuckerberg writes about this all the time. That is a difficult skill in science, if you will. And it's going to, I don't know how many institutions will be able to invest in that to keep that outgoing.

I'm also kind of glad he brought up a point about Title 4. This idea of breaking up Title 4, perhaps using some of those funds for this for lifelong education. I mean, it's clear to me, and this is not going to happen in this version of the Higher Education act, but maybe it happens in the next version, which probably won't be until 2030. My kids will be in college by

then,

is that perhaps by then we will have a better clarity on what's happening with this lifelong education market. And at that point maybe people will, will start talking about, you know, we should start focusing these Title IV funds on, on a broader range of students and a broader range of needs of the economy. You know, the Higher Education act in my mind has always lagged, you know, far behind kind of trends in the, in the marketplace. So I don't think we're going to see that anytime soon. But you know, he's the first one of the, you know, there's not a lot of people within traditional higher education who are talking about that because they don't want to lose those funds on the other side of the ledger, especially with traditional undergraduates.

Yeah. And I would say data always lags, policy always lags. But what did not lag from my perspective was the questions that Hunt was asking and the capacity to think about what could this future look like and this pedestal that you have in Harvard. Deeply encouraging that they were thinking about those questions.

Yeah.

And it was great that he was talking about his background at CSU Global. And it was great that Harvard, which tends, I don't think, to necessarily be at the front forefront of a lot of things because of its history and its prestige, it tends to be a little bit risk averse. But I think that they went out and got somebody from CSU Global and was able to do that. Well, it was great to have HUN on today and it's great to be with you again, Michael, and all of our audience out there. So whatever platform you're listening to us on, please subscribe and rate us and please send feedback, whether in the comments or email us to tell us about guests and others. That's how we ended up connecting with Hunt. So it's always good to give us some suggestions. Until the next time. Until next week's episode. Thank you for joining Future You.