Universities Wade Into Bootcamp Territory

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo and it's great to be joined by my co host, Michael Horn today. With us we have Dan Sommers, who is CEO of Trilogy, which is a which develops partnerships with universities much in the way companies like 2U and Pearson and Learning House have contracted with institutions to help them design and market their online courses and degrees. But in Trilogy's case, it is really focused on coding boot camps and it works primarily with college's continuing education divisions. So, Dan, it's great to have you with us today. So tell us first a question we like to ask all of our guests. How did you get into the world of education?

Thank you both for having me onto your show today. So, yes, taking a step back, I grew up in a household with a father who was a State University of New York trustee. I grew up in Binghamton, New York, and often around the dinner table, the conversation really led to discussion around challenges in higher ed. I remember heated discussions around tuition increases that were being discussed amongst the trustees at the time. And we also often talked about the relevance of higher education to the workforce. So I guess you could say I came by a passion for education honestly. But it wasn't until about 2001 when things really started to click for me. And ultimately, I believe the experience I had in 2001 helped to shape both my career as well as my desire to ultimately build trilogy. So 2001, as you recall, there was a bad economy. The economy was challenged, it was the dot com crash. And I built a business out in California and ultimately ended up leaving California to come back to New York right around January 2001. And at the time, my future father in law, who's my father in law today, married 16 years, November, gave me sage advice. He said to me, in a bad economy, if you're a specialist, you will always be able to stand the test of time. If you can develop a skill and a specialty, regardless of the economy, you'll be safe and secure. And that concept really resonated with me deeply. In fact, so much so that I ended up going to a school of continuing education at NYU to become a specialist in digital marketing. And that specialty through that economic downturn and the one in 2008 really helped me to develop my career. I started by building a marketing agency which was truly focused on the higher education sector. And ultimately I ended up selling that agency to a larger company. From there, I went on to become CEO and chairman of a global OPM provider, an online program manager that was owned by Global University Systems. And that's where I really learned about deep integration between private enterprises and universities and how that partnership model could work when done effectively.

Did that give you then the idea for Trilogy, given that you kind of have an OPM model?

Correct? That's exactly right. That was absolutely one of the key touch points. But the third one was that I ended up investing in a small coding school. Then I started to Connect the dots. And I saw in 2014, 2015 that there was a tremendous gap and the number of technical jobs open and the number of computer science grads, of which there are about 50,000 coming out of universities every single year. And in connecting the dots, I thought, what if instead of having students go to standalone schools, what if they could go to universities really throughout the world to learn skills based education? And so I came up with the idea of this vertically focused OPM model and I brought it to Rutgers University and I said, we can work together to develop a web development boot camp. And the rest is history, as they say. Since signing in July 2015 with Rutgers, we've now partnered with 41 universities globally.

So 41 universities in three years, I guess.

I'm curious, it makes a lot of sense to me, from your perspective sitting there, that you'd say, rather than do standalone boot camps or create a chain of boot camps that try to scale internationally, why not take advantage of really well established and trusted brands and universities and do this? But flipping the script from the university's perspective, as they sought to work with you in this space, what was in it for them and why was it important for them to get into these programs?

Yeah, so I hear a very consistent theme as I speak with deans both in the United States and beyond. And there's really three things that matter most in our conversations which really lead them, I believe, to partnering with Trilogy. The first is that many of them see the opportunity to make programs industry relevant, to really incorporate feedback from the industry. And that's a key driver in terms of their desire to partner. The second item that we always hear from our university partners is that they want to provide access, accessibility to more non traditional students that are not the traditionally matriculated students at the university. And then the third, with all the pressures that exist out there in terms of enrollment growth, the idea that they can also develop alternative credential programs to generate income for the institution as well is, I would say, a distant third priority for the types of institutions that we've Partnered with, and those are three drivers of creating a partnership, then I'd say that what we do at Trilogy is to provide a number of areas of technology, of data, of learning analytics and other types of systems to build a very productive, deeply integrated partnership with our university.

SU Dan, I'm curious. I was going to totally go a different direction, but something you just said sparked this for me, which is in terms of curriculum building, are you all largely building that curriculum and delivering it? Are they building the curriculum and you're delivering like what's the relationship there and how does that play with their accreditation and so forth?

Absolutely. So I'll start with how we develop the curriculum, which gives you a good sense. And I'll also talk a little bit about the model itself. So what we've done is we've centralized the core curriculum. We've built a curriculum on GitHub, which is a code repository. And what that allows us to do is centrally manage a curriculum. We get input from industry, we get input from instructors and TAs from across the country, of which we have over 900. We get input from faculty members at universities. We get input from the learner analytics that we get on student progression throughout the classroom. So what we've been able to do is build a curriculum that's dynamic and changing. We've made over 10,000 changes to the curriculum over the last three years to really reflect industry input. So the role of the university versus the role of Trilogy. TRILOGY provides this market driven curriculum. The university provides feedback, faculty review of the curriculum. TRILOGY provides recruiting services to bring in terrific instructors and TAs. The university has to vet and approve all those instructors and TAs.

Sorry Dan, just want to just jump in for one second and make sure I understand one thing, which is

this

arrangement, it sounds like is possible because it's non degreed programs that you're typically offering, whereas the university might want more control over shaping it if it were a degree program. Is that an accurate read or am I missing something?

I think universities see that in developing a truly market driven curriculum with so many dynamic changes that there has to be some flexibility in terms of engaging with industry. And because these are non credit programs where students at the end of the day receive a certificate from the university for taking on these immersive programs. That's exactly correct.

Dan, what stops though? Is this a truly disruptive force that you think is going to transform all of higher ed? Or what stops universities from kind of developing this expertise in house and doing it themselves and kind of putting people like you out of business eventually.

Absolutely. So talk a little bit about kind of the nature of the partnerships and what we provide. So we start off and we provide a technology platform for managing these programs and these classes. To put it in context, we've run over 900 classes really across the globe, where we're constantly getting information and learning that helps to update the curriculum. We've developed a curriculum of over a million lines of code, which is deployed and regionalized to meet the local needs of employers. And that curriculum has changed over 10,000 times over the last three years. But I think one of the key areas that really makes us effective is how we use data. And I'll give you one example. So now in aggregate, We've collected over 2 million data points from students across the country. We ask students every week in a class about pace and self mastery and academic support and their feedback on instructor clarity, engagement, knowledge. And we use all of that data to provide additional support and tutoring to students that need it to refine the curriculum, to give universities visibility into classroom performance and student progression, really across the entire network. And every week when we meet with our universities, they can actually see how individual classes and students are performing relative to national averages and relative to multiple classes within the particular institution. So what that allows us to do is give really great guardrails and checks and balances across the entire process. And that's something that's hard to truly replicate.

Sorry, I was going to say the economies of scale there actually, and the insights that you're able to derive because of that scale seem pretty enticing from a university. I guess switching tracks a little bit with the last question. In the time we have remaining, if you were to forecast out the rise of these short term programs, call them last mile training programs, call them boot camps, call them workforce accelerators, what have you is super interesting in the landscape. Do you think this is gonna be the dominant mode of how students consume post secondary education in the future? Or do you think will degree programs and longer term programs sort of have durability and they'll coexist?

So I believe in the concept of, of the 60 year curriculum very, very, very deeply. And in discussions with Hunt Lambert and Gary Matkin and other deans across the country, the idea that whether you're 17 or you're 77, there's an opportunity for ongoing and lifelong learning where some individuals are going to go and get a college degree and others are going to get a certificate in a school of continuing education and others still are going to attend boot camps or go and get Micromasters. And it's really all about this need for lifelong learning, and particularly in tech, where the half life of a skill can be two or three years. There's going to be an ongoing need and degrees will play a role and master's programs will play a role and boot camps will play a role across that spectrum. And I don't see that changing.

Well, Dan, we've run out of time unfortunately, but again, thanks for joining us by Skype today and we look forward to watching the continuing evolution of entities like Trilogy. So good luck with everything and we'll talk soon.

Thank you very much. You too.

And we'll be back on Future youe.

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. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

Welcome back to Future youe. I Jeff Salingo and we just wrapped up with Dan Sommer who is CEO of Trilogy, Michael and an interesting kind of tweak on the OPM model there. Obviously unlike other OPMs that are dealing with credit based, mostly graduate programs, he's dealing in the non credit space and I think most faculty probably pay very little attention to that non credit space, although it creates incredible enrollments and money for institutions. How do you think that impacts kind of the growth of Trilogy, which is a very hot company right now compared to other OPMs.

Yeah, I mean it seems like it gives them a lot more freedom and white space to grow in many ways because at least as I understood it coming out of that conversation, a lot of higher ed institutions are saying hey, you want to come in and help us make a little bit more incremental money and you're going to provide the curriculum and accreditors aren't going to mind because it's non credit bearing, non degreed based programs.

Sure.

Love it. And it seems like, and I'm curious your take on this, Jeff. Faculty are largely saying sure, go ahead. Whereas in a traditional OPM business, and we've obviously had Chip palsik on from 2U. That's not the reaction at all you get from faculty. They're very involved in these OPM selection processes, very intimately involved in thinking about who will manage curriculum, how will that be done, how do I safeguard the quality and the reputation of the institution? That doesn't seem to be the case here at all. And obviously accreditation is different because accreditation requires in a traditional OPM that, that the university retain control over that academic content and creation. But this is different here.

Yeah, and I'm not quite sure how much control colleges and universities really had in these School of Continuing Studies anyway. Most of the faculty in these schools were adjuncts, you know, professionals who were teaching in the evenings and on weekends and at nights. So there was not much central faculty control except in the design of the overall programs. I also think that faculty kind of on the main campus in many of these cases, sometimes these professional development programs are off campus or on the edge of campus. I don't think they really paid much attention to them, which is unfortunate because I think for the most part they did provide a subsidy back to the main campus, especially at many of the more selective universities that operate huge continuing education programs. We had Hunt Lambert from Harvard extension

on here, 20,000 students, which is equal to the overall population, graduate and undergraduate, of Harvard, of Harvard.

And I bet you that if you talk to most faculty members at Harvard, they don't know that. They probably know this exists. But for the most part, most faculty, I think, haven't paid much attention to this. And the thing is that I think in the future this is going to be a big part of higher education in terms of its ability to kind of connect on to traditional degrees. This idea of lifelong education, this idea even at the undergraduate level, that students, particularly for example, coming out of the liberal arts are going to need some specific skill based courses. Well, where are you going to get those courses from? You're going to want them to come from your own university to kind of connect into your undergraduate curriculum. And the easiest way is to go to your School of Continuing Studies, which is already doing this, even through things like a trilogy. And then at the lifelong education where students are going to be kind of coming in and out of traditional higher education. Again, it's these schools of continuing studies that I think have the flexibility to provide that. So faculty, I think have to figure out like how does that fit in with our traditional majors, our traditional degree programs? And perhaps that brings these op, you know, an OPM Leica trilogy. And it brings these School of Continuing Studies back Into the main core. Yeah, I was going to say that could be.

And do you think if that. I never thought about this.

Right.

Because I totally agree with you. The schools of continuing education are where those entrepreneurial pathways that will ultimately come back to a degree at some point will originate. Will that make faculty a little bit more concerned, accreditors a little bit more concerned, and maybe quash that growth opportunity at some point? Or there might be a backlash. Do you think, at Trilogy or continuing education schools say, we'll just create this ourselves.

Right. I mean, one thing that could happen on the faculty level is that faculty could get interested in this and want to create these within their own units. So it could create a little war within universities to say, well, who really owns this content? Who should develop it? Again, right now it's being developed in the School of Continuing Studies, maybe with some faculty input, but not much from the experiences that I've had, but the faculty might get much more interested in this if this is going to not only drive enrollments, but in some cases be integrated into the traditional undergraduate or master's programs.

Yeah, it'd be fascinating. And schools of continuing education, in my experience, are really the entrepreneurial aspects of these universities. They're the classic Clayton Christensen autonomous division, if you will, with the freedom to rethink a lot of. But they also, in my experience, want to do it all. They don't like outsourcing, which is why I find Trilogy so interesting and different from anything else I've seen where they're really quite willing to. It seems. I mean, the fact that Trilogy has a centralized curriculum that all the universities are largely using, and then that creates great economies of scale in terms of improving that curriculum. I totally buy that argument from Dan. I just find it so unusual and anomalous in higher ed.

Well, I think right now that because they're experimenting with this, schools are saying, sure, come on in and do all this. I guess the other question I have for you, Michael, is that will Trilogy see a lot more competitors, or will traditional OPMs move much more into this market as they see the growth of trilogy OPMs, we're seeing some consolidation in OPMs now. We're seeing some OPMs even struggle to keep up with that growth. They're going to look for new markets. Is this a new market for. For whether it's traditional OPMs or other entrants?

It's a really good question. From my outside perspective on this, it just seems like the schools of continuing education have been averse to working with those outside OPM partners because they said, oh, you want to put an online program together? We do that, we'll do it ourselves. I mean, Harvard has even built its own platform, right? And yet they'll work with Trilogy. So for some reason this boot camp model that I don't know that the OPMs have experience in running because it's a very different design, it's much shorter sprints, it's, you have to get cohorts in a much different rhythm from, from your classic OPM program. You're moderating a, an in person experience on these different campuses. It's a different skill set. So I don't know if the OPMs will be able to very naturally go there. And so it seems like Trilogy, you would think that there'd be a lot of fast followers right now because what they're up to over 40 universities within a couple years of opening, so very hot company. But we're just not seeing that sort of that market produce something competing back with them, which has been very surprising and interesting.

And so it will be interesting to see if other colleges and universities follow this model, whether they hire people like Trilogy or whether they try to do it them themselves. So great to have all of you listening again on this episode of Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo along with Michael Horn, and please continue to listen, rate us and follow us and subscribe to us on whatever podcast platform you use. Follow us on social media for the latest updates, not only on this podcast, but our other work. And until next time, thank you and enjoy.