Visiting Western Governors University: Growing and Evolving Pathways for Educating Teachers

So, Michael, we're off to Disney for.

For the podcast.

Yeah, I know both of us have been there in the last year with our families. I don't know about you, but I. I know Disney has its fans and detractors, but I. I really love it. My kids are now teenagers, which allowed us to park, hop, and go on different rides. Tron, let me tell you one of my huge favorites. But. But we weren't there for future you to ride the rides.

No.

No. Although Tomorrowland might have been a great location for this episode, because the original concept of that land, of course, was to reimagine tomorrow. And that's what we did in this episode, recorded at the Western Governor's University School of Education Summit, a gathering of WGU's faculty and staff from around the country.

Yeah, and this was our second stop on the Future youe Campus tour, which is expanding a little bit beyond its definition of a campus. In this case, just like higher ed is more than just a physical space anymore, we record it live in front of more than a thousand people in the audience, which is certainly probably our largest studio audience to date. And the reference to Tomorrowland is not far off, Michael, because as you'll hear, much of what WGU is doing around education these days and in their other key markets, whether that's teachers or nurses or IT professionals, it's really rethinking this model for the future of higher education. We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed recording it.

Western Governors University believes higher education must be flexible, connected to workforce needs, and provide a return on investment that that pays lifelong dividends. Nonprofit WGU is delivering on the promise of higher education. Learn how@wgu.edu.

welcome, everyone. A huge thank you to Western Governors University for hosting us today. We have with us President Pulsifer Scott, if we may, since we have known each other for a while.

Yep, you certainly can.

A little known fact, Scott was actually on Future youe about 5 and a half years ago. So it's been a little while since your first appearance. So it's great to have you here and welcome back to Future You.

It's awesome to be with both of you again and grateful just for the podcast that you do. I think just a bit of a shout out to Future U, because for all of those who are also here, it is certainly we have here with us today two individuals who are paying attention to the innovation that is, in fact changing the shape of higher education and education more broadly. So many of the things that you bring awareness to and visibility to and insight into is certainly influencing how I and all of us here at WGU think about what we need to do for students as well. So, so it's been just a great opportunity for us to continue to learn about what's happening out there in the space and we're grateful for the opportunity to contribute to some of that. Thank you as well. And certainly Jeff and Michael, a lot has changed in the five and a half years since we were last together on your podcast, that is for sure.

We're going to get into all of that and it's going to be a really fun episode. I will say, Scott, for all of you out here in the audience, you all know this, but for our listeners, I want to give them just a quick history lesson because they may not be familiar with Western Governor's University. They should be and they will be. But it really you all grew out of the frustration with the status quo. In 1995, some 19 Western governors gathered for a meeting and ultimately agreed it was easier to form a new college rather than try to reform the existing ones. That happens to be music to my own ears or training. And the result was Western Governors University, which was established in 1997. You've now celebrated 25 years. You have a flexible online competency based model allowing students to demonstrate mastery as they move through programs at their own pace. And today you operate in all 50 states, serve more than 175,000 students at any given point in time and have more than 340,000 alumni. Now Scott, although WGU was originally designed with adult learners in mind, which you know, they were not being well served by traditional colleges and universities, we know that you've seen significant growth in traditional age learners in recent years. Give us a sense of what you've seen and what's behind the trend.

Yeah, we certainly have. I don't think we can underestimate how much the pandemic it's was a catalyst for how that shift started accelerating. But even during that time period, I think we at WGU also discovered we were inaccurately portraying our students as adult learners. It was probably better to think about the individuals that we are serving as working learners that if there was one common thing that all of them had is that they already had so many demands on their time. It was really hard for them to fit into their already busy lives of very traditional post secondary model college model. And so if you think of the barriers could include affordability, that's true, but usually it was time and place and meaning that if I already Had a family and children and a job, sometimes two jobs, that if I actually wanted to acquire the credentials I needed to advance my life, that classroom fixed time based on a campus like that presented so many barriers to serve them. Now when you think about working learners, guess what? Even at age 18, there are a very large percentage of that population who are these working Learners at age 25, at age 30, at age 35. And so we started to recognize is that, and this was even prompted, I remember, by higher learning advocates and third way also gave some visibility to this, that if you look at the profile of today's college student, it's not like what you see in Hollywood or on college game day for that matter. It's not the I'm living full time on a campus, you know, I'm not working while I'm going to school, et cetera. More of what you saw is that the majority of them, certainly more than 50% of them, are working at least part time, if not full time. I think even if I recall 25% of them had a child. Only 13% of freshmen live on a campus. You start to get a very different profile of those individuals that actually are pursuing post secondary education. They look more like the adults that we're serving than they do of those who are presented on a college game day like thing. And that's not to say that that's not a large percentage of the population, but I think even today we see that those that are in that over 24 population. But if you also say working learners, you're likely to talk about the majority of those enrolled in the 19 million today that are in post secondary. So what we've seen at wgu, specifically just to give you some quick facts, I think those that were under 24 pre pandemic was about 5% of our population. Today it's closer to 18% if I recall the most recent statistic. Now I think that's really important because if you consider 20, 19 or so, we were probably about 110, 120,000 full time students. At 5%, that's like 6,000. That's like a good size regional university. But now it's 18% of 175,000. You're talking more than 30,000 students that are of traditional age. That makes WGU, even among traditional age, one of the largest institutions serving a traditional age student. But the other thing that you'll notice is that they are coming to us with different levels of preparation from different backgrounds. They're certainly more diverse than they were before. And I think a lot of that has really helped us make sure that we're continuing to expand access to those who have been historically or traditionally underserved by traditional models. And it means that we have to address barriers of time and place and affordability. We certainly are trying to activate populations too, that are not well represented in post secondary enrollment and that has, the last five years have just accelerated that focus on serving those who are underserved.

Yeah, I like this idea of the framework of the working learner. You know, we've talked a lot on the podcast about education has always been education with a job on the side side. Now it may, it's transitioning into this idea of a job with education on the side and really kind of a different paradigm shift.

Well, I would even add to that further, which is I think we're lending a lot more acknowledgement and recognition that so much of the learning that you're doing at that age is actually happening on the job and we're just augmenting it with the classroom. Because even with the competency based model that both of you know that we have at wgu, it's about whether you're competent. It's not about how much time you spend developing competency. And guess what? If you gain all that competency in a particular subject matter on a particular course on the job, you can accelerate to that credit much more quickly in a model like wgu that they wouldn't afford that at a traditional university. The notion being that you could have been a software developer for 10 years, but if you want to go to get a bachelor's degree in computer science or traditional school, guess what, you're sitting in the class for three hours a week and supposed to study six hours, et cetera. Next thing you know, it takes me 15 weeks to prove that I already knew something that I earned while on the job.

So, Scott, we're going to dive deeper in the second half on education programs specifically. But you've seen tremendous growth both in your education and your nursing programs. What about the design of those programs in particular do you think are attractive to working learners? And I know you're not always trying to necessarily give ideas to other people, but I think that, I think, you know, one of your goals is to improve higher education across the country and across the world. So are there lessons to be learned for more traditional colleges and universities, particularly again, in these two programs where there's so much demand?

Yeah, you know, I think one of the, maybe even starting off that same notion of a working learner, I We should give a shout out to all of our school education, our curriculum faculty, our school leadership, et cetera. Because I just want to start with this one simple point is that so many of the individuals that they're actually. That we're teaching and helping learn or progress in the school of education, they often already find themselves in the classroom. They're paraprofessionals. They're working with students of various different ages across, you know, the K12 spectrum. And one of the things that I think they're always trying to do, this is why I want to give a shout out to all of them, is that the first thing they have to do is actually design curriculum that's relevant to the job that they're supposed to do. Earlier, Michael, you were talking to our group too. It's actually not the way they were doing it. It's actually the way they should be doing it. And so one of our differentiators is that we work closely, I think, with our school districts and the leaders in those respective un, you know, programs, whether it's in math education or whether it's in history or writing and English and curriculum like that. They're trying to say, it's like, well, how should we be teaching it? And then we try to design our courses and our curriculum to be very relevant to where it should be going. And that is, I think, really, that lends a lot of acknowledgement to the curriculum team and the faculty who's developing our programs to say, well, the first thing it has to be really relevant to the. The job to be that you're going to actually enter into. The second thing, I think, for us is that we obsess about making it possible or increasing the probability that every individual can actually learn. This means that we think differently about what the student journey is across that learning. The biggest threshold, I would say, is that we've invested in that's so different and atypical, and we love it, if more institutions actually adopted it, is that we took the role of a faculty member and split it into parts. We've talked about this before, but this is really important because it's basically like saying you have the combination of a subject matter expert, but it may be across 30 or 40 different courses, and that individual's helping you develop mastery and competency in that specific subject. You separately have a mentor who's helping you actually understand how those things thread together to create an overall competency across the specific program. But at the same time, they're helping you deal with disruptions to your learning progress. They're helping you actually understand what your life or role is going to be like when you enter the job. You know, they're actually helping you deal with the other challenges in terms of your instruction. So they're providing you augmented instruction and that model, Michael, you hinted at this too. It's like that is more of a team based approach to teaching, but that's not at all within the frame of a conventional model. It's like, it's so conventional. It's like this, oh no, this one person can do it all, can do it all. And the one thing they do really well is they're a domain expert. But guess what? That's not how all of learning occurs. And the worry of the domain expert means in the traditional model, if it's just a lecture, well, that's just content. And so if I'm learning in a post secondary level, it's like, why don't I just go out to YouTube or all the other platforms and say, actually I'm just going to get the best content, the best content from the best subject matter expert in this particular area and I'll consume that content rather than go sit in the lecture hall for three hours a week.

It also doesn't scale very well either.

It doesn't scale very well either because you already have that limit. It's like, well, how much can one lecture teach in class? Like, well, if, I mean, I'm a fan of Scott Galloway even with as irreverent as he can be, but he tries to point this out, is like, well, if millions of people can consume really expert content in a particular field, like why wouldn't you want to enable that? And that's a much easier way to scale something. And then you focus on the individual instruction that has to happen. And so that's a different model. Like that delivery of content being the focus versus no, our focus is helping every individual learn. And that's true. The last thing I'll just say, this is a long answer to that short question, but the last thing I'll say and was highlighted earlier in our sessions here, is that we've gotten really, really good at the practicum portion of this learning. If you think about being the largest teachers college in the country, being the largest school of nursing college of nursing in the country, we operate that in 50 states. Most institutions never contemplate beyond their own state. And you're like, that regulatory and compliance is already enough for one state. We're like, oh yeah, the hell with it, we're gonna do it 50 and it was a little bit like that. You're like, I imagine what that was like. And you're like, our poor accreditation compliance team's out there going like, oh, yeah, I know. He's like, yeah, you say that, Scott, to hell with it. But he's like, you don't have to do it. But it went even beyond that, which is, how do you develop the relationships? Not just relationships, but the real partnerships with school districts and schools and even with those teacher supervisors in those schools, so that we can not only place thousands of individuals into the classrooms, but we also have experts who are observing the practical application, the knowledge they're gaining in their coursework. You're going to have to do that for thousands, tens of thousands of people every year. Like that is. We've built. I joked with Stacy Ludwig Johnson previously about this. I joked that it's like we built the Sabre system for, you know, travel, air travel. Like American Airlines realized, like, this was really complicated. We got to build this huge system to coordinate all these different airline routes and everything else. And it was so good, all the other airlines ended up adopting it. It became the platform for it. Well, we've built the same kind of thing for teacher placement, for nursing placement, for all of our FMPs. Everything else it says, guess what? Work based learning and the practicum that's associated with those particular areas and fields of study, it's vitally important to do it. And we have to do that at scale.

So you announced all recently that you had acquired craft education, which, for those that don't know, created a technology platform for really monitoring, reporting for apprenticeship based programs, allowing you to do it at greater scale over time. And for those who listen to our podcast, we had Reach University on a couple times and they of course were the platform for Reach. So Western Governors University wants to move into offering apprenticeship based degrees too. You've already done. You have several hundred already in them. What does that look like, though, for wgu and why do it, given that you are already so affordable? What's the value proposition for these learners for wgu? Because, you know, one of the things we often hear around apprenticeship based degrees is that it makes it more affordable. My sense is it's that plus other things.

Yeah, I think it actually attaches broadly to our mission and vision. And so maybe I'll start there, just pointing this out, which is our mission statement's really, really, I think, simple and straightforward to change lives for the better by creating pathways to opportunity. We certainly believe that those pathways that we're creating are primarily learning pathways how you're acquiring knowledge, skill and abilities so that you can actually change your life for the better by acquiring a new opportunity, new job, et cetera. And I'll start pretty broad on this point and you could tell me if it's too broad, but this is the way we thought about it. It's like there's only 20 million people enrolled in post secondary education or 19 million today post pandemic. That's nowhere near enough people, yo, that's producing what, roughly three and a half to 4 million new newly credentialed individuals every year. But then when you compare that to the stat around like 65 to 70% of the jobs of the future are going to require post secondary credentials. Like we need to be producing three or four times more individuals every year for solving the skills gap in the workforce. So then we kind of thought more broadly about like, well, okay, among those that are new rising high school graduates or those some college of no degree or others who are going to come back to traditional kind of academic pathway, it's probably about 1/5 if not even one tenth of those who are actually already learning. And guess where they're learning? They're learning on the job. But what none of those who are learning on the job are being afforded is a recognition of the knowledge, skill and ability that you've acquired. It's like we've only granted that to these 4,000 regionally accredited institutions. Like oh no, if it's not from there, then you're not worth anything. And it's absurd. Right? And so we also thought more broadly around the fact that like all right, a third of the workforce in the US has a post secondary credential, but two thirds don't. You're like, well that's like 100 million people who are all working and who are all learning while working. And we just thought like, well, with a competency based approach and a skills foundation, that if we work closely with all those roles and the tasks and activities associated with them, we can map those to skills the same way we mapped all of our learning outcomes of courses to skills. And when you do that, the next thing you know is like, well, we can build a work based pathway. And so what craft education and the joining craft education with wg, what it allows us to do is two things. One is that we can accelerate our own development and launch and scaling of work based pathways and work based learning, even in the academic pathways we have. That's important to distinction because a work based pathway, fully half if not More of the credit you're earning may be done entirely on a job. But work based learning means even a good portion of the course that you may be taking may be project based or some other practicum related thing. Or you may have 12 or 18 credits like we do today. Like a point of note is the School of Health we convened last week. Last year alone we had 26,000 placements into practical or into clinical. This year that number will be well over 35,000. You're like, oh yeah, we're already doing a ton of work based learning at scale and now we're just like, how do you create that more as an accessible pathway? And we anticipate that just at WGU, it's very likely that in 10 years from now we may be serving as many individuals through work based programs as we are through academic based programs.

So Scott, if that happens, then what is the future of the degree? Right? If skills are going to be the core of the realm, are degrees still going to be necessary someday? Like, what is the future of the degree in that world?

For sure they are. And I'll emphasize that. I just want to make one other point because the other thing that with craft education that's doing is that we know that not every individual that needs post secondary education is going to enroll at wgu. But craft education actually allows us to have that transformative effect that we can also invest in creating a work based platform to enable work based learning across the whole talent economy, if you will, that not just WGU will be leveraging its capability and technology and reporting and data, but so will employers and so will other institutions, et cetera. To say we're investing in creating a platform for a work based learning ecosystem. That's a new kind of endeavor for wgu. Now to this point of your question is a skills architect, it doesn't diminish the value of a degree, it actually increases the value value of the degree. And this is why, because think of a degree today, it actually mostly signals that you survive something, you know, you made it through, you made it through. But it probably is the, it's, it's a value signal in the sense that you've demonstrated capacity for learning. But for the employer, hiring someone with a degree is like, I still don't really know whether you possess the skills for the job I'm hiring you for,

which is why we go to the name brand then, which is why you

go to a brand. And I'm not even certain there's great study that show even the brand on the degree shows that that's where the value is. The degree itself. There's no doubt that there are misguided institutions out there who default to like, well, I only recruit from this institution because I know this. And that's my joke. Going back to our shared alma mater, Michael at hbs, I was like, having recruited there for a prior employer, I'm like, I don't even know why I bother interviewing. Harvard's already done all the hard work. I should just give you a blanket offer and you know, those of you accept it, please come and we'll figure out the culture fit later, you know, but, but Harvard's already said, oh, we think these are the individuals who are going to be awesome anyway, and we admit them. That's to me, like the delusion of meritocracy. Skills based says, hey, we understand. What is it that you need to demonstrate to be successful in this particular role, as well as how the career develops as you develop new skills. And the reason degree increases in value because now with the skills architecture, the degree itself signals specifically that which you are prepared in, that which you're proficient in. And so now I can do much more targeted recruitment of even those holding degrees that I don't do. A blanket, like, hey, if you have a degree in economics and finance and accounting, whatever, then maybe you're a candidate for investment banking. Or hey, if you have a degree in computer science or software development or information systems or math, you may be a candidate for a software developer, software development engineer here. Like, actually, why don't you articulate the skills that you need in those jobs? And then if someone's holding a skills based transcript, you've now dramatically expanded the pool of talent that you can draw from, including those who hold a degree. But now it starts to put a degree on equal footing with those who are acquiring the skill through other learning pathways.

But you, of course, are doing that work of translating and building that architecture. Last question. As we wrap up this first half of the episode with you, let's talk about the ever present topic of AI. How do you see that changing the skills in the job market? What role does it play in remaking education at wgu?

The AI does feel a little bit like, if I knew the answer to that, it'd be like that scene from Back to the Future 2 where like you could go place all the bets that you already like, hey, I already knew the outcome and I got to make all the bets so that you make tons of money. Like, I, to be fair, I was like, I think I'm a little bit of a skeptic. Meaning I think everyone who's prognosticating right now is just making stuff up. Like I just don't think we know yet. So I think we're in the process. Like since we don't know, let's just try everything. And so what that means is like maybe two things just to highlight is one is we certainly know the skills are going to be required in the future work are going to be influenced by AI. And that means that even as fast as we're developing our curriculum at WGU versus conventional models like today, it's already a whole program. We'll have a wholesale kind of redo every three years or so. Because all of the learning outcomes and all the courses and the scaffold of that, it's changing so quickly even at WGU today. But that three years may become one year because you start to see the like AIs changing the nature of work so quickly that you're going to start iterating really really quickly on designing the curriculum. But for us, the second big thing is we are certainly figuring out how. How the use of our gen. How. How the use of artificial general intelligence that becomes really interesting because it basically says instead of just a large language model and generative AI that can improve the quality of content and the quality of the instruction, etc. What does artificial general intelligence do if it actually starts to have reasoning and adaptive ability to be much more effective in providing an individual student a very personalized experience. The reason I bring this up is sitting with Sal Khan at something some time ago. We both referenced the same thing, which is you probably both heard of it Benjamin Bloom study from four years ago and you talked about mastery education too. It's a combination of conventional content delivery, that's the lecture model mastery instruction, which is corrective instruction. You get feedback and corrective instruction. But the third one was tutor. And he saw when he combined mastering and tutoring relative to conventional instruction, the average student was two standard deviations more proficient than any subject matter than the student in a conventional model. What AI I think is going to do for learning is it will democratize learning, meaning it will so personalize it that every individual is likely to have that kind of personal tutoring with corrective instruction in a way that you'll have 90 plus percent of anyone of everyone will actually be demonstrating proficiency any subject matter versus the 20 to 40% that we have today. It's like that to us is miraculous in terms of what it can do. And so we hope at WGU that we'll be part of shaping what that looks like. We certainly reinvented higher ed for the last 25 years and now it's like we're trying to figure out how to reinvent wgu.

Yeah.

Scott, as I was sitting here, I thought about, you know, almost 30 years ago covering WGU in the very early days as a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education. And the growth that you've experienced in that time is just tremendous.

I'm hoping you didn't think we're nuts like the rest of.

Well, I did a little bit, I must admit. I'm like, where is this thing going? And I cannot believe we're sitting here with all of these people today at this point. So thank you so much for joining us on Future youe and and we'll be right back.

Thank you.

What is the future of higher education at nonprofit Western Governors University? It's low cost, flat rate tuition that allows students to graduate faster with less debt. Its courses built around workforce needs so students can get hired for the job they want and apply what they've learned immediately. It's tech enabled learning that allows instructors and mentors to quickly identify students who need help and keep them on track. It's online education that ensures a degree is attainable, affordable and adapts to students lifestyles at wgu. The future is here. Learn more at wgu. Edu

welcome back to the second half of our Future U Campus Tour which is being recorded before an audience of faculty, staff and the leadership team here at Western Governors University's School of Education event, their summit here in Orlando, Florida. As a reminder, this stop on the Future U Campus tour is also brought to you by Western Governors University. And we're really pleased. Michael and I are really pleased to now welcome to the stage Courtney Hills McBeth who's chief academic officer and provost at Western Governor's University, Stacey Ludwig Johnson. Stacy Ludwig Johnson, who's senior vice president and dean of the School of Education here at wgu. And we're thrilled to welcome Madeline Hurst who will graduate at commencement here in Orlando with a teaching degree and currently a fourth grade language art teacher here in the state of Florida. Welcome.

So I want to start with the student on the panel, Madeline, who as you heard is also a teacher. We're now a few years post Covid. You teach in Florida, which of course had fewer schooling interruptions than other places around the country. But nonetheless you're teaching a group of fourth graders whose preschooling experiences were interrupted fall of 2020 when they were in kindergarten was certainly uneven for those, as individuals, you have colleagues, family connections who teach all across the country. I'd love you just to give us a picture, a sense of what does the post Covid classroom look like on the ground? Has there been any rebound?

So what I was thinking about when we were talking about this session, and I realized that we have 50 different options of what each post Covid classroom looks like. So every state dealt with it differently. For example, my brother, who lives in Oregon, didn't return to school until his junior year of high school, and he started when he was a freshman when Covid started. But then here in Florida was only a couple months, and they were back in the classroom. So, like, okay, how can I make this relatable for each educator in each state? And what that looks like is educational and digital literacy. So the post Covid classroom, we were forced to use technology as our number one resource when students were. We were put into lockdown. And what that looked like is we were kind of slowly inching in technology into our classrooms, but then it became the only option. We had to use it immediately. Some of our students are whizzing way past us when it comes to this technology literacy. I had students last week who were playing five nights at Freddy's on their laptops, and I was like, how does this get past the school firewall? Like, what? Apparently, people are, like, taking replicas of the game and putting them on Google sites. Like, there's things that these kids know that we don't. And so this technology, this technological literacy, is so important for educators to understand and use. As we shift into this era where we're using our laptops, we're using iPads, everything we're doing is almost online, which is incredible. But it's also so difficult because if you look at the age range of educators across the United States, it's all over the map. So to have them understand how to do that at such a fast pace and keep up with the way that kids learn with that technology is quite a feat in itself.

So if you have that unevenness on the technology side, I imagine you also have the unevenness on the education side. Talk about that. And then how does it affect you and your colleagues as teachers? Like, the human side of it for you? We read about burnout and the stresses on teachers, but give us a sense of the human toll and. And what that educational picture looks like.

Education is going through a huge shift right now. We're coming out of a time where we were not able to be in the classroom for a while. And everyone is transitioning into this new era of education. So as we are shifting, our students are shifting. That makes it more difficult for our kids because we are feeling a little bit like, how do I utilize still this pen and paper? But we're also trying to put things on a digital classroom. So as we are trying to learn how to do this, we're trying to teach our kids at the same time. And I think the burnout will lessen as we settle into a new chapter of education, because we're kind of in this middle zone right now where we're trying to figure out how to be competent so that our students can be competent in it and control it all at the same time.

So, Stacey, I want to bring you in the conversation because given what Madeline just described, and this is a period that may be around for quite some time, we just don't know how long. How is it changing how you're preparing students to teach in K through 12 schools? How is it changing that?

So when you think about it, I love the way that you explained what that experience is like in the classroom, because as we're going into classrooms now, we're watching the role of the teacher fundamentally change, where it's more like a facilitator. Right. So you've. With the pandemic, technology just swooped in. The schools were buying different platforms, They've moved things onto the platforms. And so now when you're in a classroom, it might be sort of introducing the topic and then directing the kids to go into their Google classroom or whatever the platform may be to actually work on a problem set while the teacher's now able to sort of walk through the class and personalize the learning? It's actually a really interesting sort of push towards innovation, which is really what we've needed in P12 schools anyway. So how do we take advantage of that? One thing that we've been really thinking about at WGU is really two different ways. One is because you've also talked about burnout, and there was interesting data that teachers are like twice the rate of burnout as even first responders. Like during the pandemic. It was crazy. We are actually integrating into our curriculum what we call healthy learning. So how can we, as educators, as a school of ed, equip our future teachers and leaders with the skills so that they can have a greater sense of belonging, so that they can personalize that education for students? And then how do they thrive in those classrooms so that they actually retain longer it's also forced us, honestly, in a really great way, to completely rethink our curriculum. So the schools are really focused on learning science, and we have had to adjust our curriculum in, again, a really great way so that we're equipping teachers and leaders with those skills so that they're ready to teach the kids the future.

When you think of rethinking a curriculum, I think in traditional higher ed, how long that takes to happen, like, it's studies, it's moving through the faculty senate, it's like years later, and especially in education, you could have an entire generation almost go through middle school and high school and never be impacted by that. How are you able to do that so quickly?

Well, we have what's called a master curriculum. So whereas at a residential campus, it's these changes might be done in pockets. You know, so they are adjusting individual courses, et cetera. We have the ability to actually turn over the entire curriculum, and that's what we've done. And so it's really. We're a very regulated profession. And so it's aligning to different standards, but then building a curriculum that we know at the end of the day, we'll be able to recommend for licensure across 50 states, but we can redesign, redevelop that entire curriculum. It's a holistic approach versus something in pockets.

Courtney, I want to talk about the long view of this because I think in Michael and I on Future youe, we've talked a lot about student success, right, in these first couple of years after the pandemic. And I think most college officials that we talk to think, oh, you know, we'll get past this in a couple of years and things will go back to being normal. You know, I have a seventh and a ninth grader at home who were in elementary school when the pandemic hit. I'm not quite sure that that will ever be quite the same as it used to be for them. Right. And for a whole generation of students. So as you think about WGU long term, how you prepare, how students come to you, how they're prepared, how they're ready to be ready for education, how are you thinking about this in terms of who you serve and how you serve them?

So I think if we step back and think about the larger higher ed landscape, a lot of institutions we're competing against nothing, actually. So many of the students in the K12 system are leaving high school and they're opting out completely of additional education. This, I think, fundamentally shifts the paradigm of how we think of traditional age students and then working learners and is really helping us think about what is the change in our model and how do we continue to evolve our competency based model given that the students who are coming to WGU are coming out of classrooms like Madeline talked about, where they're more engaged in digital learning and iPads and various technologies. The students coming to us are younger with less credits, more are single, coming from very diverse backgrounds, geographically dispersed. So it requires us to take a model that we built at the dawn of Internet and now think about how do we evolve our digital learning, our community, what is that curricular experience, what does the faculty support look like into the future to make sure we can really meet the moment of the changing needs of these students coming out of the K12 system.

So if that's the impact of our recent past and frankly current K through 12 students on higher ed, I'm curious about causality in the reverse direction. As listeners know. One of my hypotheses and passions has been that it's often hard for teachers to change how they teach unless they've in fact learned differently themselves. And I'm a big fan, it turns out, of the competency based learning model.

I mean, if you listen to Future youe, that's all you'll hear from Michael. It's all about mastery and competency based.

So I'm a bit of a one note pony, you could say. But I think K12 frankly should operate the way you all do as well. Competency, mastery based, more personalized that designs for success of each student rather than designing for failure as we currently do. And I'm just curious Stacy, for you, do you have a sense of that if you're preparing teachers like Madeline in a competency based model, are they more likely then to go out into the K12 schools and get away from this antiquated factory based model and evolve that as well?

I think, Michael, that's at the heart of it, right? They're going to teach, this is our hypothesis. They're going to teach in the way in which they've been trained. So they are traversing a competency based model at WGU that has disaggregated the faculty model. So our roles, our faculty roles. So if you flip that and this is your teaching role, right, in the school are very specialized. So we have mentors who are like advisors along the way. They have course instructors who are content experts. They have evaluators who are experts at providing substantive feedback. We have program developers who are experts at building curriculum and assessments and, and we have success teams that are expert at filling in all of the gaps along the way.

Right.

So as a future teacher, as you are experiencing that model, then our hope is that they then take those learnings, they take that experience, they take all the things that they've gained and take that into their classroom. So I think that's, that's the core of what we do and why we're so, so committed to this approach.

So, Madeline, then if that's the theory, I want to know what the practice is like, if you will, and bring you in here. I'm just curious, you know, is like how you've learned at WGU impacting your own practice? Or frankly, maybe, you know, you're among the thousands who are already converted to this idea, but it's not going to ripple out. Obviously there's a ton of things in the external environment you don't have control over. But I'm just curious, in your classroom, does it change how you actually approach teaching and learning with your kids?

So with my school district, Osceola county, we actually have. It's kind of similar to competency based learning, but it is standards based learning. So when we are grading them, when we develop, when they're developing our curriculum, when I'm developing my lesson plans, they are all encompassed around a single proficiency that they need to show us. It is one sentence, like I can interpret figurative language in a text. That's it. That's what it translates to. So what I'm hoping in the future is like as gradebooks develop, for example, for my students is that I'm going to be grading them. Not on. Did you turn in your homework about prefixes? It's going to be this learning standard that correlates directly to prefixes. For example, is what is going to go in the gradebook. So I'm going to be grading this standard and not your prefix's homework. That was one of the reasons I picked wgu. Actually, like the number one reason is that all I want to do is show you what I know. That's all I want to do. I do not want to waste time writing random essays or filler as I've seen some of my students partake in. No, I want to show you what I know and move into what prefer to do with my time. For example, I want to instill my kids in moving forward into what they are passionate about and not randomly learning about birds and grading them about birds when probably 95% of my students probably don't care about birds. So it's important for me to instill that because that's what I received and that's what I went after.

So let's stay with that for a little moment, Stacy, because traditional colleges and universities, particularly those that have historically educated most school teachers in this country. So I'm thinking of the normal schools that became teachers, colleges that became regional publics. Many of them are shrinking incredibly fast. Some of them are even shutting down a lot of their teacher education programs. Meanwhile, you're growing tremendously. Could you give us a sense of that growth and are you on a trajectory to educate just the largest proportion of teachers going forward?

Yes, I'll just put it that way.

So when you look at, over the past decade, more residential campuses, their School of Ed programs have been shrinking by 20%. Some statistics are even higher. We ended our last fiscal year with about 12% growth, and we're actually seeing greater growth this year as we move forward. I think the core behind that is what you said, which is, hey, coming out of the pandemic, there are greater gaps in equity and achievement than there have ever been. And this personalized competency based approach is the way for us to close those gaps. And we've got to, or our future, our economy, everything is going to be really challenged if we don't actually fundamentally close the gaps. So again, that's, I think, the core reason, the competency based approach, I think because of our model, because it's accessible, it is less expensive than any other sort of broadly national institution, we'll continue to drive enrollment, but primarily around sort of the personalized ability to accelerate, which I can hang my hat on that every day because I know regardless of how quickly someone moves through our program or if they need more time, at the end of the day, day, we're going to validate those competencies with our assessments. So I'm worried. I don't worry. I don't worry about how long it takes. I worry about whether or not at the end of the day they've demonstrated the competencies. And that's what our teachers need. We need to know that when they're going into classrooms, they are quality teachers. And that's what the CBE program absolutely stands on.

So, Courtney, Michael mentioned earlier when we were with Scott, the acquisition of craft education, and we had the founder of Reach University on the podcast last year. And it's just a fascinating model to me. Right. I've said this on the podcast. My mother was a teacher's aide. She didn't go to college. What Reach education does and the idea of an apprentice based, apprenticeship based degree for paraprofessionals like my mother would have been perfect for her. Of course it didn't exist.

Right.

30, 40, 50 years ago. So could you tell us. It seems like education's about to change again. Right. And teacher education's about to change again through this idea of the apprenticeship. Can you give us a window into what we might be seeing and what you're projecting?

Sure.

We are really excited about the acquisition of craft and to have Mallory and her team join us here at WGU so that we can build the best scaled work based learning and pathway platform for WGU and also for the larger higher ed and talent economy. Really, that's what we're endeavoring to do and you know it. I want to note there's a strong operational muscle that WGU is building on here. So Stacy talked about how we've reimagined this master curriculum. While we did that, we also reimagined what that teacher clinical placement experience looks like. Instead of just having it at the end of the experience, it's having earlier in classroom teaching experiences and weaving that throughout the experience. So with our traditional students that are coming through the teacher prep program, they will have earlier and more often clinical placement experiences. And launching our teacher apprenticeship program really just tightly couples that working and learning experience. So truly we're excited about this evolution of the competency based model to become a work based model so that those amazing paraprofessionals in the classroom, they can continue to get paid, they can work and learn and they can move through our curriculum and take our assessments and validate the skills and the competencies they have at their own pace and not skip a beat. They can do it in their time, in their place and at their pace.

Michael,

I'm just blown away frankly as I listen to this about the teachers that are going to be entering our classrooms already are there but now sky skilled in a way that's just going to be phenomenal for the K12 students. Jeff, let's wrap up just with a couple closing thoughts. I'm going to take the liberty and go first. It's going to put the pressure on you, but the just. Just a couple thoughts out of these two conversations we've now had. Scott and with all of you. Number one, I'm just struck by how much you all are not resting on your laurels. As I think about Western Governors University. You all have created structures to refresh and frankly disrupt yourselves. I hear what's working with the apprenticeship based degrees. I Hear with AI like this is a constantly innovating engine. It is impressive that I hope is something higher ed can replicate because that refreshing is incredibly important as what we need in the classroom, as what we need in hospitals is what we need in it continually changes. We need to continually be refreshing. And so that is something that I hope we take away from it. The second one I'll say is Scott mentioned that we should be giving a seal of approval for skills wherever they are learned. And you think about how you flip the practicum to being embedded and not at the end of an experience and taking credit for something you've been teaching in a fourth grade classroom and being able to actually credential that. And it just reminds me Jeff, of a well known education foundation that works in higher ed that years ago was trying to figure out what should their goal be for the percent of students that had post secondary credentials. And I said 100% and they looked at me like I was from Mars or something, which many people do. But the and my answer was like they all have skills, let's credential them for what they in fact know and can do. Western Governors University is doing that.

Jeff, two thoughts. First of all you've been applauding everybody up on stage. I want to applaud all of you. As I mentioned, my mother was a teacher's aide, my father was a high school music teacher for 30 plus years. My father in law was a high school social studies teacher. What everyone in the education world does, Both at the K12 level and the higher ed level is just tremendous and so important to what we're doing. So let me first of all applaud you. Applaud yourselves. Two quick thoughts. First from Scott's conversation was about skills based learning and this idea that it won't do away with the degree, in fact it will strengthen the degree. And his, you know, putting out those stats that he put out that you know, 19, 20 million people in higher ed, even though we have tens of millions of jobs that are going to need to have a further education, you know, the solution so far has been to reduce the degree requirements rather than try to skill up to the degree requirements. So I'm really impressed with the growth here at WGU because I think we need, you know, 10, 12 more institutions like it in order to fulfill the needs of the workforce in the in the future. And then the second piece is around this idea, Stacy, as you said about the number of teachers that you're educating and the result as Madeline said, that that's going to have in the classroom. I think that for teacher education programs to change, frankly, for traditional colleges and universities to change, they need some competition and some real competition to say, hey, there's a better way of doing this. And when I think maybe after they listen to this episode, when college presidents and trustees at these other places start to see and listen to what you're doing, somebody might raise their hand and say, well, why aren't we doing that right in our programs at our schools? It's the question that I always wonder about. Right when there is so much competition in higher ed and people look down the street and they want to be like another institution. I always say, well, look at what WGU is doing. Why don't you do what they're doing instead of trying to copy a model that was created, you know, 100 plus years ago. So again, thank you for, for being with us today. And and, And we're going to leave it there. Thank you again for being with us today. Thank you. Please join us in thanking this great panel. As well as President Scott Pulsifer earlier. And again, thank you all for what you do for WGU and being part of WGU. As a reminder, you can follow both Michael on MichaelBhorn on social media J. Salingo on On Social media. We will have the video from today at Future youe Podcast, where you can also listen to past episodes and subscribe there. The video will be up in a couple of weeks. And again, thank you for being with us today on Future.

You. Sam.