The Hybrid University

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I'm Michael Horn.

And I'm Jeff Salingo. And our guest today is Marnie Bakerstein, who's had an illustrious career career in higher education with a focus on teaching, learning and innovation. She's currently the Provost and Chief Academic Officer at Western Governor's University and before that was the Chief Innovation Officer at the University of Texas System. So welcome to the show, Marnie.

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

So. So we've had the president of Western Governors University, Scott Pulsiver, on the show before, and many of our listeners are likely familiar with Western Governors and its exclusively online competency based learning model, its track record of growth, of course, well over 100,000 students and its outcomes, particularly among alumni, that has been featured by Gallup. But what's interesting to us, I think, in this time of COVID is not just the attention on online learning, but also the skepticism that serving students online can really allow an institution to fully wrap its arms around its students and support them in all its needs. That idea that I think we think of higher education kind of in silos, right? There's the academic side, there's the student affairs side, there's all these different silos in higher education. And yet I think that's exactly what WGU works to do in terms of breaking down those silos. Marnie, you call it a community of care, so let's start there. What exactly do you mean by the phrase this 360 degree view, this community of care? And how did you develop your philosophy of an institution's community care for its students?

A community care is essentially a unified team of service providers with the single shared aim of reducing friction for students as they progress to credential attainment, a degree or certificate or whatever journey they're on. This team at WGU includes the faculty, our course instructors, the program mentor for every student who's with them for the duration of their path to degree, the financial aid team, our career services team, any special wellness or academic service providers that are associated with particular programs. And this team has a 360 degree view of each learner's profile. We call it the persistent progressive profile and their progress. And they have a collective and collaborative commitment to each learner's success and for solving for that success. Holistically, I've been Talking about the 360 degree community of care for years. Because I truly believe that the opportunity and the solution for higher education is to become as student centered as possible in getting our students to go. And in getting our students to go, we get our institutions to go, we get our society to go. And that that cannot be done. Silos, these students are complicated enough in their lives and in their ambitions that they really do need a holistic team to support them as they move along the way to their goals and to attainment of degree or attainment of whatever they're after and chasing.

Yeah, that's helpful, Marnie. And I suspect for our listeners, a lot of them sit there and think, well, a traditional institution where the students are there, that might be easier in certain respects to really wrap your hands around that student. What's the difference between how WGU approaches student services in this community of care versus the way a more traditional institution approaches it?

So at wgu, the community of care is formally structured so that each supporting role, whether it is a career advising role or a mentor role or a faculty role, knows their accountability to the student and to each other as they support the students and the learners and the team on each step of the student lifecycle journey. And this really, this takes align leadership across the traditional student affairs as well as the faculty functions and services. It takes clear structural accountability for each of those roles. It takes a culture of interprofessional respect, and it takes the technology infrastructure and the communication infrastructure to support a team effort in collectively managing student cases. Most traditional higher education institutions do not have this structure, do not have this leadership accountability, and do not have this communication infrastructure for case management. That's not how traditional institutions are managed or governed. And roles like individual faculty roles and student affairs roles and career services roles do not have a shared view of the student. They do not have an accountability to case management together for that student, and they do not have the structure and culture of leadership that would, that would make that happen. Because it takes a lot of institutional will to move this approach forward.

So if I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like it's a few elements. It's accountability, it's that culture. And then the third piece that you mentioned is you really have an integrated approach to this versus a siloed approach, if I'm understanding it correctly. Why is that? You know, that integrated versus siloed approach, why does the integrated one work so much better from what you've seen?

Well, it works better because, you know, eight times out of 10, to get real technical and specific, when students are Having experiencing friction on their way to degree, it is not academic friction. They may be having an issue in a particular class and certainly faculty that are there to help them with that issue. But by and large their issues are are related to life and the balance that they are managing as they are going to school. And this is particularly true as the majority of students are working while they're going to school, no matter what their age. Certainly in that 18 to 24 year old age, that's becoming true. But learners across the life cycle are balancing work, they're balancing childcare, they're balancing their school coming back to school. They have issues with confidence, they have issues with transportation logistics. And this is the kind of friction that often keeps them from completing. And by taking a holistic community of care based approach to solving for that student along the way to degree, we can make sure that we're really solving the problems that they are facing every day in ways that are really powerful for their journeys.

So Marnie, this is somewhat of a mindset issue in traditional higher ed, but it's also a technology issue, right? Because what seems to have happened is we've been talking about these silos. Each of the silos have kind of built their own kind of technology stacks on top of those silos. And it makes it hard for the institution to kind of speak across divisions. For example, can you talk a little bit about how those two things interplay? That is both a mindset, but it's also kind of a hardware software issue as well. It's a technology issue as well, correct?

Oh, it is absolutely a technology issue as well. Most universities cannot see a persistent progressive learner profile across the lifecycle. That is, they cannot see an individual learner and every interaction that that learner is having with the institution, not only their academic progress, but their financial aid, their access of different university services, they cannot see the goals that the students have set for themselves. And so without being able to see that persistent progressive learner profile, it is really difficult to do who holistic case management. Most universities have very complicated, I call them Frankenstex or Franken Ecosystems of Technologies. They'll have multiple CRMs, multiple LMSs, multiple technology pieces that are holding this student data. And because of that, they literally cannot see cases and they do not have the communication capabilities to manage those cases as a team. Certainly the technology infrastructure for a community of care is not in place in most universities. What I find very interesting in our age of COVID as traditional universities are solving for online or hybrid modalities in their institutions. They are totally ignoring the Community of Care infrastructure and over indexing on how are we going to make this LMS work for individual faculty. Well, that LMS is a big piece of it. Certainly that instructional experience is a big piece of it, but it's only a piece of it. And not having the rest of that sort of student lifecycle infrastructure to support the everyday experience of students outside the classroom, it's going to be difficult to have a high quality, high impact experience online.

Makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned Covid and I'm curious how you all have adapted this approach during the pandemic and maybe more importantly, how the student body has responded to given this holistic approach that's in place at wgu.

Certainly Covid put this community of Care approach to the test. We have students in all 50 states. And so as Covid rolled starting in March and as it continues to roll today, we had students and faculty across the country who were experiencing 100 different Covid motivated problems that needed to be solved in order for them to to make progress and to thrive. And so we have an environmental barriers team that actually every day, whether it's Covid or a fire or a tornado or an earthquake, are on call 247 to assist to identify students impacted in those events and to assist them in any way they can. With COVID it was literally like tornadoes everywhere, all at once. And so the community of Care was activated to assist our environmental barriers team in identifying the reasons that students were being impacted. So we had a set of reason codes that all of the Community of CARE members were trained on and as they were speaking with students, they would document those codes. And then we had a stand up meeting every day with those teams to solve for student problems which could include anything from policy changes that we needed to make to allow students to slow down, to support wellness support or other types of support for students as they're trying to continue their studies, to microlending support to help them get to their next rent payment or electricity bill, et cetera.

So Marnie, as we get ready to wrap up here, what about colleges that don't figure out how to serve students who aren't on campus? Right. How do you see that playing out this year? We've seen in the last couple of weeks a number of colleges that had hoped to get back to to in person learning or even a hybrid mix. Now I've moved more fully online or all online. How do you see it playing out if they don't figure out how to serve those students? The way you're talking about here this coming year.

Well, I think they need to figure this out, not just because of the coming year or because of COVID but because the future of our learner population is a working learner population, whether that's 17 to 24 year olds or students across the life cycle. Traditional higher education is not organized in a flexible way to serve these students and get them to go. What I think is going to happen is there will be certain traditional universities who will get it, who will make the effort to digitally transform their business model and will end up being the servants of these students into the future. And that's what we need. We need more institutions to organize around the learner of the future. For those who don't, I don't think the future is very bright because not only are they not going to be able to deal with COVID but they're not going to be able to deal with the reality of the future of education and the learners that are a part of it.

Yeah. And I think just the fact that you're using this language around learners. Right. And not students, which I think that most college and university officials will use. Right. And they think of students as 18 to 22 year olds and that's about it. And maybe some graduate students. Beyond that, I think it's critically important to think that way. So, Marnie, thank you so much for joining us today on Future youe. And we'll be right back.

Now more than ever, we're seeing the rise of a digital imperative in higher education and a new age of continuous connections across the entire learner life cycle. Check out a new Salesforce.org whitepaper series addressing these themes and more at SFDC. Co TheNewYou

welcome back to Future youe. Coming off a really interesting conversation with Marnie of wgu and Jeff, you know, she talked a lot about how colleges, how imperative it is right now, right. For them to rethink their support systems for students. And we delved a lot into getting beyond the traditional silos that have actually kept a lot of these systems from talking to each other. You just wrote a paper on this topic, really interesting paper from my perspective, because it got into the nitty gritty of how a lot of these departments are siloed, but the IT systems themselves don't talk to each other. So what happens in a class is totally separated from the information in a student information system. And there's no way to sort of get a full view, right, Jeff, of how a student is doing and the support that they Might need. What is your take about around, I guess, the likelihood that traditional institutions are going to be able to adapt to this need and break down the silos and what's it going to take to get us there?

Right. So let's think about where we were before this pandemic, right? You know, think about like admissions records, for example, not linking up with a registrar, which is kind of crazy, right? When you think about a student who's enrolled and really neither connected to the learning management systems in the classroom.

Classroom.

And so really what happened was, you know, very few institutions had a complete picture of how their students maneuver their way through college and most important, where they might be getting stuck or frustrated. And for their part, students would have to go to multiple offices on campuses to ask for help. And they kind of had to repeat their story over and over again. It's kind of like when we call customer service these days, right? We expect them to know everything about us, right. We don't expect to have to enter all that information again or tell that same story again to the third person. Right. That should all be in our customer record. And this is just not happening on most college campuses. But yet at the same time, Michael, we are, I believe, and the research for this paper showed much of which I did before COVID we were kind of on a seismic, seismic shift, I think, in how students, faculty and staff interacted with each other and with their institutions. Right. We're starting to see in a way now kind of these really digital savvy institutions start to begin to connect all these dots and, and I think if anything, Covid will accelerate that because there's so much remote work happening that people can't go and literally and talk to somebody down the hall the way they, they used to. And I think what's important to our listeners to understand about this is that we, we tend to talk about this as a technology solution, right? And really what's innovative here is not the, the technology, but the ways that colleges are following kind of the retail and service sectors and deploying that technology to make the student and alumni experience seamless. Right. As I talk about in the paper, think about the underlying technologies in Amazon One click or the Spotify recommendations or Apple watches, health tracking, all being used in higher education. And that's the difference here. In other words, higher ed actually has the technology. It's that they just haven't been able to deploy it as well as I think companies have been, because higher education itself is siloed, right? Different departments, different vice presidents don't always talk to each other. And again, I think what this. The pandemic is going to do is force institutions to think differently about this. I think that they're going to have to get on the same page around the data that they have, how they're sharing it. I think some of the imperative here is going to be about keeping students, like, improving retention and graduation rates through the pandemic, because I think we all worry about that, about retention dropping, graduation rates dropping as students can't afford to stay in college. Mental health issues and academic issues that I think are going to come out of this platform that connects all these offices together, I think is going to be even more important coming out of this pandemic. And so I think institutions are important in one of two places right now. They have that digital backbone that. And all they really now need to do is connect it. It's kind of like bringing the Internet to your front door and now actually connecting it. But then I think there's a number of other institutions, and it's going to be very interesting, I think this fall, for example, when boards of trustees come back together and someone's going to start to ask, well, why couldn't we do X, Y or Z in the last six months? And I think you're going to start to hear people like, well, we don't have the same systems in place. And that's where I think you're going to start to see these bigger investments in technology. So you either have it and you just need to connect it, or you don't have it and you need to buy it and then connect it.

Yeah, it's interesting to hear you say that, Jeff. I came in here fully prepared to say, not a chance that they can break down those silos. But I think you're right about COVID providing an opportunity for it. The way I think about it, just to geek out for a moment, I think of being able to describe any organization in terms of four boxes. So the first one is the value proposition. What are they offering? And how does it help someone, you know, do something better? And then to us, to deliver on that value proposition, you got resources, and this is where your technology and your people, right, all come into play to deliver. And then you've got processes as the third box, like how do the resources interact with each other in repeatable ways over and over and over again to deliver on the value proposition. Then your final box is the revenue formula to. To. To sustain it all. What's so interesting about organizations that have been operating in A very steady state for a very long time is those processes in particular, they become like grooved pathways in the floor. Like you. You literally can't walk out of it. And so, you know, when you have these IT systems, you can implement them in one of two ways, right? You can implement them to mirror the processes you already have, which is a heck of a lot easier for an institution. It doesn't require all this change management and. And retrofitting who talks to who, when and how things work together. Or you can try to painstakingly, right. Change your processes to match the needs of the technology. And that in practice is just very, very hard to do unless you really, in a very concerted way, build dedicated teams, right. Who are. Whose sole job is to change the way you interact with each other. And so I was going to say good luck breaking out of the silos, essentially. But what you just can't.

Michael, I think ye. Go ahead. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I think that's the key here. And really one thing that I discovered in writing the paper and one of the things we did in the paper was add like a little glossary because I think in higher ed in particular, that there's a lot of discussion about the digital campus and digital transformation. And I think actually leaders are using those terms incorrectly, right? And so we put this glossary in the paper, right? This idea of. Of digitization, right? The conversion of analog to digital digitalization, right. The use of digital technologies to change how work gets done. And then this is the key as you're talking about the digital transformation. And that's how students and institutions engage and interact to create successful pathways through higher education. It's that transformation piece. It's not just overlaying, as you said, that technology over existing structures and ways of doing business. Business, but actually changing the ways of doing business because of that digital technology. And that's the part that I'm not quite sure that univers. And that's the part that I say about plugging things together now that I think that universities are going to, in order to survive and thrive in this environment, are going to have to do well.

And what I would say that you just pushed me on and changed my view a little bit on is the COVID piece, right? Because all of a sudden the processes and ways that you got things done like those aren't there anymore. You. You actually have to reinvent and it forces you to ask some questions to get visibility right into what's happening to students across the country who are at home or what's happening to delivery of a certain academic program or how are we delivering devices so that people can get online? How are we coping with our international students who, thanks to a raft of crazy policy decisions. Right. Are in total limbo constantly. And all of a sudden those questions that people are asking hopefully start to necessitate some big changes. And to your point, the board of trustees hopefully, you know, I don't know that it happens this way everywhere, but they ask the question, why can't we figure out X or don't we know Y? And hopefully then people can take that and say, okay, we've got to make a larger investment in not just the it that, yeah, that's important, but it's not just the it alone. It's, it's how they interact to each other. And that's ultimately what's going to create this level of insight. And your paper, which we'll provide a link in the show notes I thought it was a terrific look, Jeff, not just at recategorizing the language around how we think about, you know, digitalization to the digital transformation at the other end of the spectrum, but also really being very clear about what are the systems and how do they not talk to each other.

Right. Well, and I think that the knowledge and as I say in the conclusion, right. The knowledge gained through the connected campus, this can lead institutions to really boost efficiencies, cut costs, and most of all, really offer services and products we can't even imagine today because it's also going to, it's going to spit out data that is going to be really useful and we're going to say, wow, we didn't know that. And now, and now we do, and that enables us to create these new products. But just going back to again, this transformation piece, I think that the inability for people to work together on campuses the way they used to because of COVID now is forcing so many people to the for the first time to question why did we do it that way again? And that is, I think, at the end of the day, really what is going to change, I at least hope is going to change kind of the transformation and really transform institutions. So. So, Michael, it's great to be with you again and thank you to our audience for listening. We would love to hear from our listeners. So please send us your questions, your comments, even your complaints. And we love suggestions once in a while for topics or guests to include and send those to futureyou podcastmail.com or send us a message on Facebook or Twitter. It's great to have you with us again, and we'll see you soon.

Hey, folks, Michael Horn here. Hope you enjoyed the latest episode of Future youe. And just a reminder to please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. And if you like the podcast, rate us so that others can find us and find out about the good conversations that we're having here. As always, thanks so much for listening.